Article 28

Knowledge Versus Belief In Anthropogenic Global Warming.

My previous articles have sought to show that political debate is purely a matter of opinion/counter-opinion which is merely the debate of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/or news/false-news in the absence of any debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that press-comment from even the most trenchant critics merely continues this debate of opinion/counter-opinion, again without reference to the absence of debate-terminating conclusive knowledge, as exemplified by the belief/counter-belief press-comments on Brexit and Covid-19 which I have previously cited to expose their lack of any such knowledge or of any recognition of the need to acquire it. Having thus exemplified these deficiencies, my subsequent Articles will now demonstrate the extent to which politicians, bureaucrats, pressure groups, think-tanks, government agencies, and the public itself, are content to debate belief/counter-belief in ignorance of the counter-knowledge which is already available with respect to all political issues in addition to those of Brexit and Covid-19. I start by showing here that the belief in anthropogenic global warming ignores all knowledge counter to it.

This belief is that humanity has been warming the planet since the start of the industrial revolution by  increasing its release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from its ever increasing combustion of fossil fuels, while existing counter-knowledge is ignored by such believers and is unrecognised and unused even by its non-believers. However, this issue has already gone beyond the stage of belief/counter-belief debate to the implementation of belief-only responses by governments and industrial companies at the prompting of belief-only agitators, despite existing geological and archaeological counter-knowledge as to causes which long pre-date anthropogenic causes whether industrial or pre-industrial.  

As to the prehistoric period, a recent article in The Daily Telegraph reported the finding of Dinosaur remains on the island of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides; referred to an earlier and similar finding on the Isle of Skye; and commented that when these animals were extant, these islands were joined to the Scottish mainland, but it did not identify the process by which they came to be separated from the mainland and from each other.  Indeed, the author of the article gave no thought to whether these separations might be indicative of global warming, ice melt and sea level rise, long before the industrial revolution. On the other hand, perhaps that thought had occurred to the reporter, and had been suppressed out of deference to the belief in global warming being anthropogenic.  Again, another recent Telegraph article reported the finding of a hand-carving on the Island of Guernsey dated to a time when the Island was attached to France, but again no mention was made of the process which caused their earlier separation.

However, as a schoolboy I had already known of the coastal trading city on the Nile delta, the ruins and artefacts of which are now under the Mediterranean Sea and of the two cities formerly at the mouth of the Indus which are now under the coastal waters of the adjacent Ocean, presumable because of  global warming, associated ice-melt and sea-level rise, long before our anthropogenic industrial revolution. Yet again, as a schoolboy, I had already known that the earliest settlers of what is now the British Isles had arrived here by walking dry-shod across the bed of what is now the English Channel; that ancient tree trunks have been dredged from the bed of the North Sea; and that there was human settlement on what is now the submerged Dogger Bank.  Further more, I read in The Telegraph that worked planks were recently recovered from the bed of the Solent suggesting to me that these had been produced by humans when what is now the Isle of Wight was attached to the English mainland. Furthermore, as a schoolboy I had already known that the Scottish landscape and sea lochs had been produced by the movement of glaciers; that the sills towards the mouths of these lochs were deposits of glacial debris where the glaciers had been melting in contact with seawater; and that the now raised beaches and associated inland sea cliffs parallel to the present shores which characterise the eastern coast of the Clyde Estuary had not been produced by a drop in sea level, but by a rising of the land caused by the reduction of the weight upon it when the earlier ice melted; and that this rise enabled physical geologists to estimate the viscosity of the underlying molten magma of our planet.   

Thus, we may conclude that our planet has been warming since the lowest temperatures of the last Ice Age; that this warming clearly predates our industrial revolution; and that if the current warming is influenced by our anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide, these can make but a small contribution compared with the warming and associated rise in sea level which have occurred since the earlier global ice-cover began to melt without any assistance from us. Article 29 will consider whether or not anthropogenic belief should be influencing the global economy to the extent it now does.         30/10/20.