“TO WARM OR NOT TO WARM? - MORE!"

Leonard Melman

 

 

Note:  For readers not familiar with the concept of our “Melmania” section, this is where your editor can take any subject and develop arguments regarding some ultimate conclusions.  Since some of those conclusions might sound extremely radical, the name of “Melmania” seems appropriate.

 

FEBRUARY 7, 2007

 

My apologies for not adding comments over the past few days, but your editor has been exceedingly busy bringing another production to completion in the face of truly onerous deadlines. That is over, thank goodness, so we can now pay closer attention to what is happening in our cozy little world of metals prices and mining investments.

We are indebted to a group of Finnish geologists who were hard at work attempting to explain away a series of huge boulders in northern Quebec - which happen to be prospective for both gold and uranium. The great question was how they happened to be in such a remote location in the first place? The answer the gurus from Finland came up with was glacial movement. But they also threw in this kicker: in order for the geologic events to have taken place in an explicable manner, the glaciers would have had to have moved FAST - at least in geologic terms.

That got us to thinking about relative climatic changes over the past one hundred centuries or 10,000 years.

At the height of the preceding Ice Age, the glaciers are known to have reached at least as far south as southern North Dakota, near the 46th parallel of latitude. The range of permanent ice in the Arctic Ocean or on Ellesmere Island today is located at about the 75th parallel, a distance of about 3,000 km north of North Dakota.. Therefore, in 100 centuries, the ice would have had to retreat at a rate of about 30 kilometres per century - or an average of close to 700 metres per year! That isn’t just retreating slowly, it is galloping!

Compared to today’s rate of mountain glacier retreat in British Columbia or Alberta, the ice ages of old were in a class by themselves - and yet, there was obviously not the slightest hint of human activity which could account for the amazing speed the glaciers accomplished in their backward retreat.

However, isn’t it odd that the modern day scientists who are screaming “Human-Caused- Global-Warming” in a maddeningly shrill crescendo, never seem to place today’s warming within the historic concepts of the earth’s geologic history. Doesn’t that seem to be a rather strange - and important - omission from proper scientific procedure which presumably is supposed to objectively examine every important fact relating to a question under investigation?

There is a theory which has been put forward which would seem to be relevant and that is the cycle of sun-spots. As they increase, it seems to make sense that more heat would be radiated into the solar system, and vice versa. That could account for the enormous climatic cycles which have affected the earth’s vegetation, ocean movements and continental drift since geologic history began to be recorded. At least it is a theory which should be investigated thoroughly.

But the mad dash toward the ‘politically correct’ theory of human-caused-climatic-change appears to be in the ascendancy, a theory which a skeptic such as myself might notice has enormous implications for access by the obedient scientific community to the treasuries of the world’s nations as legislatures pass regulations and laws requiring their universities to investigate means to solve this ultra-important ‘crisis’.

As noted earlier, unless this horrific dash toward over-regulation of the entire world, specifically including the mining industry, is reduced, the implications for mineral production and mine development in coming decades could be dismal indeed.

Just some thoughts which go against the grain of the current media stampede...