Montana Evidence Suggests Climate Change is Natural, Inevitable

BREAKING NEWS: The best parts of this post are in the comments. I welcome yours.

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While the Scoop is a big fan of conservation activities that help keep our environment clean, I don’t see joining the alarmist global warming movement as a logical extension of this activism.

Missing are the facts and evidence that suggests man has any meaningful role in driving global climate change.

In actuality, it appears there is more evidence to show that global warming and cooling is what has been occurring for many, many millions of years…far before man appeared on earth. For me, the evidence needs to be more than the presence of an Academy Award or a Nobel Peace Prize.

But that has not stopped some of my well intentioned friends from declaring this week a major victory in the global war on warming. Especially dear to their hearts is UM Professor Steve Running, a member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group that was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

My friends tell me that if I only would take time to hear Dr. Running speak, I’d immediately see the error of my ways.

But the truth is, the Scoop HAS HEARD Running speak, and while he is a great speaker and sharp academic, I don’t see where his theory is any more grounded than Gore’s. Both make the huge assumption that coincidence equals causation.

The Scoop is frustrated with the new loosy-goosey form of earth science employed by most of the global warming advocates I follow. While they often make strong points, it appears to me that they do so in a vacuum, ignoring the evidence of hard sciences that are more familiar; like biology, chemistry, and geology. It also bothers me that these scientists speak with such certainty without having successfully proven their theories using basic scientific principles, like the scientific method.

But Running is not the only one at UM with solid scientific credentials to have an opinion. The Scoop recently heard two other UM professors speak on the issues of global warming, at two unrelated events. One was a leading geologist, the other a leading paleontologist.

While neither of these researchers spoke with the certainty of the global warming alarmists, they both said that they did not believe that the evidence in their fields proved anything out of the ordinary was happening.

In fact, they stated the opposite: global warming and cooling has been happening for millions of years. And to prove it, you only have to look at the mountains of evidence around us in Montana.

Literally, the evidence is in the mountains around us… and on the plains.

EXHIBIT ONE: GLACIAL LAKE MISSOULA

The first is in the evidence left by Glacial Lake Missoula, which was a huge lake that filled the valleys of most of northwest Montana. The water was so high in Missoula, Mount Sentinel and Mount Jumbo were islands. If you look closely, you can see the various water lines that represent the lakeshore at different levels. At the lakes highest point, most of the city of Missoula was 500-1000 feet under water. The lake was created as the climate warmed, the huge northern ice sheets melted, the valleys filled with flood water, and the water failed to find an eastern or southern drainage route.

So what ever happened to the lake? Per the prevailing theory, global temperatures continued to warm, causing the northern ice sheets to continue to melt. Consequencially, the large ice dam (located near present-day lake Pend Oreille, outside of Spokane) that held back the water of this huge lake failed. In essence, it started to float in the warming waters itself, like a melting ice cube pops up in a glass of water.

The contents of Lake Missoula suddenly found a downhill direction to flow.

Most geologists believe that this happened quickly, causing a catastrophic flood that helped wash out most of eastern Washington and etched the now famous Columbia River Gorge. Interestingly, Scientists at UM have hard evidence that the lake filled and emptied up to 30 times, as the climate cooled and warmed repeatedly, over hundreds of thousands of years.

EXHIBIT TWO: THE SPECTACULAR FOSSILS OF EASTERN MONTANA

Fossilized dinosaurs also contain some clues about climate change. The main question: How did these fossils end up in the dirt of eastern Montana? (…and I’m talking about the Jurassic type, not any of the current Republican members of the Montana Legislature).

It appears that eastern Montana was actually a coastal plain, covered with lush vegetation…a prefect breeding (and dying) ground for dinosaurs looking for food and water.

But last time I looked, eastern Montana was closer to being a desert than a lush coastal plain. Was the geography of eastern Montana at one time different?

The evidence suggests it was. In earlier geologic periods, during warming trends when the polar ice caps would melt and send our oceans to the high water mark, the middle section of North American would turn into a vast seaway, connecting the Artic Ocean with the Gulf of Mexico. The land mass of North America would itself turn into three much smaller islands.

Science is uncertain how many times this occurred, but it appears to have happened less and less as plate tectonics lifted the coasts and plains of North America out of the reach of the warm period high water mark.

These two bodies of evidence make the comment of Phillp Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, even more relevant.

“Sadly, the idea of a sustainable climate is an oxymoron. The fact that we have rediscovered climate change at the turn of the Millennium tells us more about ourselves, and about our devices and desires, than about climate. Opponents of global warming are often snidely referred to as 'climate change deniers'; precisely the opposite is true. Those who question the myth of global warming are passionate believers in climate change - it is the global warmers who deny that climate change is the norm."