You're getting warmer, but are you any closer to truth?

By FRANK MIELE

In the 1960s, the question of the day was "Where have all the flowers gone?"

Now it's "Where have all the polar bears gone?"

Global warming has captured the popular imagination, and barely a week goes by without some new study appearing in a prestigious scientific journal attesting to the breakup of the polar icecaps, variations in the jetstream or loss of flora and fauna due to climate change.

The supposition, of course, is that - as Red Skelton used to say - "we dood it."

It's certainly possible. We humans are determined to leave our mark on the world, and sometimes our mark is a stain. There is plenty of evidence that the Industrial Revolution has mucked up our water, our air and plenty of our neighborhoods. So it's easy to believe that mankind's constant tampering with nature has also bollixed the temperature.

The prevailing theory is that gases released into the atmosphere by cars, factories and other industrial developments of the past 150 years have created a greenhouse effect which has led to a heating of the earth. The idea essentially is that the gases in the atmosphere act like a greenhouse's windows - allowing sunlight to enter in, but not allowing heat to leave.

It makes sense. From a purely theoretical point of view, the logic of the argument is quite reasonable. But it may assume into evidence facts which have not yet been proved - namely that mankind is the likely agent of the climate change in question.

Consider this. The last ice age, the Pleistocene, began about 1.8 million years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. So far as we know, mankind had nothing to do with either the start or the end of that epoch; instead, something entirely natural caused climatic shifts so sudden and so dramatic that they resulted in the extinction of numerous species, and major shifts in human as well as animal migration and behavior.

The end of that last ice age, which might be called a form of "global warming," was particularly significant to mankind because it gave us the breathing room to develop an agrarian society, and then the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and so on. All of our modern culture, when you think about it, has been made possible by climate change. If the ice age had not had a meltdown, then mankind would not have had its build-up.

You can imagine, too, that the hunters who lived then in the icy tundra did not call it "global warming." They probably called it something like "the dawn of a bright, new era" or "God's gift to our people." I'm sure they weren't happy about the demise of the woolly mammoth and the mastodon, but on the other hand, if you could come out of your cave without getting frostbite in June, that was probably reckoned a good thing.

Consider this, too: Twenty years after the big thaw started, our cave dweller friends may have noticed a nip in the air and suffered though a horrible winter that killed off half the population. Maybe two such winters. Maybe even a dozen. Suddenly, "God's gift" had become "God's wrath." The survivors would start to look for an explanation of why God was angry at them. They would assume that they had done something wrong. They would pray for forbearance and for forgiveness.

It might seem a little silly to us - with our sophisticated, modern understanding - the notion that this primitive society would blame itself for the doings of mother nature - but that is just how the human mind works. You can find evidence in the Bible or in any other account of man's relationship with God. In all such accounts, it is generally taken for granted that God is paying close attention to our human doings, and throws a fit whenever we step over the line.

Call it a human-centric "cause and effect" model of the natural world, where we human beings are the central cause for everything that happens - both good and bad.

Now jump forward 10,000 years to our present day, and consider global warming again. The certainty of at least some warming seems to be indisputable. You need only compare the ice sheets of Glacier Park from 1906 to the ones of 2006 to see that something is going on.

But the question ought to arise: How do we know - beyond our own cussed, self-important arrogance - that we had anything to do with it?

Considering that we have no particularly brilliant explanation for why temperatures started getting warmer 15,000 years ago, what makes us so sure we aren't just in the middle of a continuing warming trend that has everything to do with planetary dynamics and nothing at all to do with little old us?

In a sense we are just like those cavemen types from 10,000 years ago. When the weather suddenly got colder and they started to die off, they assumed they had done something to offend their God. At that point they either prayed, offered sacrifices or otherwise changed their behavior to try to get God back on their side.

It's the same with us, except we are smarter in our own eyes, so instead of praying to God for answers, we pray to science.

We don't assume any longer that it was our "sin" that angered God and led him to change the weather to kill us. Instead, we assume it was our "technology" which angered the environment and caused it to change the weather in order to kill us. But the point is, it always comes back to us.

The question that we ought to ask before we decide to dismantle all our technology and return to the halcyon days of the feudal system, however, is whether there is any evidence that we are the real cause of the problem. Isn't it just possible that the global warming we see in our world today is just part of the long-term global warming that accounts for the fact that we don't have any more giant ground sloths in Montana?

As noted, the last ice age started 1.8 million years ago, long before mankind even existed. That's about 180 times longer than our short-lived blip of a Holocene era, and it should be acknowledged, too, that the so-called "ice age" was punctuated by long periods when the temperatures were quite warm, possibly even as warm as today. These so-called interstadial events give rise to a few final questions:

What if the last ice age never ended?

What if global warming is the least of our worries?

What if we are lucky the temperature is still getting warmer by a degree or two, because 100 or 200 or 1,000 years from now, the warming trend is going to pull up short and we are going to watch much of North America, Europe, and Russia covered over by ice caps again?

And finally: If it turns out we are still in the middle of the ice age, will we be grateful for fossil fuels then?