The Great Warming (Again)

            Yo, liberals! One last time: Stop playing on guilt and insisting on Truth and that global warming is caused by people. 

            It's enough if we accept that Earth is going through a warming period, that the period looks to last a long time, and that the last time around — the "Great Warming" of the Middle Ages — that trend was peachy-keen for the Vikings and northern Europe but very bad for people in hot, dry places. 

            A standard book on the Medieval warming has the subtitle "Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations" — and the "fall" part got nasty. 

            If current warming has its root cause in subtle variations in energy production by the sun or in the Earth's orbit or inclination (etc.), there's nothing we can do about root causes. What we can do is slow the warming by reducing greenhouse gasses in Earth's atmosphere or at least slow down the increase in those gasses. 

            The obvious way to slow down the release of greenhouse gasses is to burn less carbon, which we should do anyway on the conservative principle that we owe future generations oil and coal and other carbon-stuff they might want to use. 

            And we really need to slow down climate change because there are a lot more humans than there were in the Middle Ages, we still like to live in areas subject to flooding, our civilization is much more complex, interdependent, and vulnerable, and we're armed with far more dangerous weapons. 

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REFERENCE: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations Paperback – March 3, 2009, by Brian Fagan