How about global freezing?

Lately I have been reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything," a breezy pop summary of scientific knowledge from the big bang down to us, by Bill Bryson. Published in 2003 by Broadway books, it rapidly became a best seller, and I can see why. However well-educated you may consider yourself, it will tell you far more than you ever knew about the origins of the cosmos, the Earth, life and mankind.

For example, you may think that the ice ages that have afflicted the Earth arrived and departed gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years. But ice cores from Greenland tell a very different, very turbulent story. According to Bryson, "for most of its recent history Earth has been nothing like the stable and tranquil place that civilization has known, but rather has lurched violently between periods of warmth and brutal chill.

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"Toward the end of the last big glaciation, some 12,000 years ago, Earth began to warm, and quite rapidly, but then abruptly plunged back into bitter cold for a thousand years or so. ... At the end of this thousand-year onslaught, average temperatures leapt again, by as much as seven degrees in 20 years, which doesn't sound terribly dramatic, but is equivalent to changing the climate of Scandinavia for that of the Mediterranean in just two decades."

What most alarmed Bryson is that, with all of the current available data, ongoing research and modern technology, scientists have absolutely no idea what natural events could have rattled the planet's "thermometer" so violently.

Contrast this description of the recent history of the Earth's climate with the antics of the global-warming hysterics. They have gone into near-catatonic fits because their dubious computer models predict that the temperature of the Earth's surface will rise between 1 and 3 degrees centigrade over the next century. They are so horrified at that possibility, and at the further possibility that a fraction of that increase may be caused by human beings (notably through large discharges of carbon dioxide), that they want whole sectors of the global economy cut back to prevent this "global warming."

Bryson has no special ax to grind in the global-warming controversy, but he does quote Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in The New Yorker magazine, as pointing out that "when you are confronting a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, 'the last thing you'd want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it.'"

People who are determined to worry about the near future of the Earth's climate would do better to concentrate on the possible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In the past 50 years, Bryson points out, the waters around it have warmed by 2.5 degrees centigrade, and collapses have increased dramatically. Because of the underlying geology of the area, a large-scale collapse is all the more possible. If so, "sea levels globally would rise – and pretty quickly – by between 15 and 20 feet on average."

The only trouble is that not even the Sierra Club can bring itself to blame the warming of the Antarctic waters in the past half-century on American industry, and that takes all the fun (not to mention sense) out of demanding production cutbacks to stop it.

The simple fact is that the Earth's climate fluctuates, to a degree and owing to causes far vaster than any specified by the global-warming alarmists. We should respect that fact and not permit these fluctuations to be tampered with by a bunch of hysterics who have no idea what they may be unloosing in the name of their cockeyed political agenda.