The U.K.’s Bill McGuire has long been on the hysterical side of the global-warming controversy. After all, he has a book called Surviving Armageddon: Solutions For a Threatened Planet. But this article in the Guardian is over-the-top even by his standards.
The gist of the article is that past climate changes have involved more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; therefore, our CO2 emissions will lead not only to hotter, more extreme weather, but also to other natural disasters. Earth uses these methods to mitigate the effects of climate change.
The entire article is one big self-contradiction. McGuire tells us: “The Earth is responding as a single, integrated system to climate change driven by human activities.” Yet every piece of evidence discussed is about past global climate changes to which we most certainly did not contribute. And his example of Earth punishing us for our iniquities is a hypothesized negative feedback by which the Earth counterbalances increased solar radiation on its surface with more volcanic activity, which leads to atmospheric gas and dust, which mitigates global warming. But instead of concluding the obvious, that the climate changes a lot for reasons we have no control over and the Earth has all sorts of complicated ways of compensating, the article becomes an hysterical call for repentance, before it’s too late…