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This hemlock log shows climate change

Climate change has been a normal and natural fact of life on Planet Earth since the planet was created. Volcanoes explode and the earth warms up as a result. Glaciers that build up covered entire mountain ranges underneath, then recede and create new mountain ranges, then melt again, and their flood waters created new rivers, several times. Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek in the “PA Grand Canyon” used to flow north into the Genesee River watershed, until a huge ice dam from the last glacial period melted, broke, and caused an enormous torrent of water to flood southward. In that brief moment about ten or twelve thousand years ago, naturally occurring climate change forced Pine Creek to flow south, where it has become a major tributary to the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.

Climate alarmism is quite another thing, a false thing, a made-up thing, a silly thing, a destructive thing, and it is ruining a basic scientific fact that should be easy to study and understand.

Climate alarmism is where political activists falsely claim that “scientists agree that humans are causing Planet Earth’s climate to change” and that all Americans and Europeans (not the Chinese or the Indians) must therefore make drastic changes to our lifestyles, to our diets, to our freedoms. This is a fake emergency, a fake crisis, designed to help political activists get political outcomes they can not otherwise get through the democratic voting process where informed voters choose elected officials and policy positions themselves.

To illustrate how climate change naturally occurs all on its own, I took a picture and posted it here. Below is a picture I took of a roughly 160-year-old hemlock tree that a logger I work with cut down in Clinton County, PA, a month ago. If we look at the growth rings in the base of this tree, we see clusters of rings that are very wide, where the tree grew a lot in one growing season (April – September), and we see clusters of rings where the tree grew very little in one season. What is really interesting about looking at tree growth rings is that we can easily understand the climate surrounding that tree at the time of each growth ring.

Wide growth rings are associated with both an open forest canopy and lots of sunlight reaching the tree, and also with years of plenty of rain and warm temperatures conducive to plant growth after the canopy has grown up and over.

Thin or narrow growth rings are associated with a dramatic lack of sunlight, a lack of water, and/ or colder temperatures.

As we can see from this picture, this 160-year-old tree has experienced several major climate shifts over its lifetime. Each colored box is a clump of similar growth rings, which represents a period of about ten to twenty years. See how this tree went for a decade or two subject to long stretches of either very wet and warm climate, or very dry and cold climate? And we know that this tree’s life experience was largely outside of the period where the climate alarmists say humans have had the greatest influence on climate.

This tree’s life, as we see it in its growth rings, clearly shows that northcentral Pennsylvania’s climate has naturally fluctuated on its own, with no meaningful human intervention, for a long time. The picture also shows that within periods of intense dryness, there were single years of abundant rain, and then the dryness returned for years.

Today, climate alarmists seize upon every dry spell, every rainy period, every storm, to falsely claim evidence of human-caused “climate change.” If what the climate alarmists say is true, then this poor tree has had both a schizophrenic life in a natural world where equilibrium is more the natural rule, and it also experienced a lot of human caused climate change while the planet had very few humans on it to affect the climate.

In other words, this tree shows that the climate alarmists are wrong. Really wrong. The trees don’t lie, but the political activists do lie. And that fact is alarming to me.

Hemlock log cut in July 2023, in Clinton County, PA. This tree has experienced widely varying climates over its long lifetime, especially while there were very few humans on Planet Earth. There is no such thing as human caused climate change. Environmental damage, yes, of course, but not climate change. Climate alarmism is a political claim, not a scientific claim.

Climate Change’s Story, as Told by a Rock

The subject of climate change has been a political issue for about ten years. Before that it was called global warming. Before that it was called global cooling. Despite having dramatically different, even diametrically opposed, oppositional names, this subject of earth’s changing climate has been treated the same by political activists for about 30 years. No matter how different, under all rubrics it has been presented as a result of planet-altering human intervention into Planet Earth’s fundamental forces.

In all of the undocumented claims presented about this subject over the past thirty years, especially the fake junk science claims, the ignored elephant in the room has always been the very well and long-documented evidence of great periods of climate change pre-dating the appearance of humans on Planet Earth. In other words, climate change/ global warming/ global cooling did not automatically appear in 1985 because Al Gore wrote a book about humans emitting too much carbon dioxide. Nope. The scientific elephant in the climate change room was standing here all along, because decades of non-politicized scientific inquiry demonstrated how mile-thick ice glaciers covered northern America, Canada, and northern Europe and Asia many times over the past 100,000 years.

That is, a natural ongoing cycle of climate change, real dramatic alterations to the face of the planet, even without one human being present to contribute one breath of carbon dioxide to it.

Well, here is the short and easy story of actual, real climate change; the long documented climate change that shaped the land you are standing and driving on every day. This big story is told by a simple humble rock. Here is a picture of that rock (below), unearthed the other day. It was unearthed about 600 feet above the Pine Creek stream bed and channel. Until it was unearthed, it was entombed on a hillside way above the existing channel, in mostly clay dirt amid sharp shards of shattered sandstone, all jumbled together like a giant mixer had tossed them around.

Look carefully at this stone.

It is rounded, unlike most of the other rocks around it in the dirt from whence it recently emerged. Someone with a bit of curiosity would ask “Gees, this rock looks totally different from the rocks around it. It is rounded like a typical long water-washed and tumbled river cobble I can find in any stream bed in the world. Now why is this rounded rock sitting hundreds of feet above the Pine Creek river bed? How did it get all the way up here?”

Great question! In most American class rooms, asking this question might get you ejected, or a bad grade from a fake educator who doesn’t want you asking good questions, but instead you are supposed to repeat a mantra of junk science that ignores the actual science represented by this simple little rounded rock.

Pine Creek’s history is retold at Leonard Harrison State Park, in DCNR geology circulars available online, and in many other places and publications. It won’t be reiterated at length here. But we do provide a history lesson in a nutshell.

Essentially it goes like this: Until about 15,000 years ago, Pine Creek flowed northward into the Genesee River watershed. After the last glacial age ended 20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Glacier began to melt, as prior glaciers there before it had melted. As the glacier melted, a pool of water built up against an ice dam, which eventually broke from the weight of the water and the thinning ice. When the ice dam broke, an enormous torrent of water was unleashed southward as a tidal wave. As it raced southward, the tidal wave followed the landscape’s natural contours, including the river bed of north-flowing Pine Creek.

As soon as the tidal wave hit the Pine Creek stream bed, the tidal wave followed that natural channel southward, scooping up hundreds of millions of tons of stream bottom rocks, as well as surrounding ledgerock. We have seen the videos of the Japanese tsunami from several years ago, and this one probably looked similar. Thus, an increasingly muddy tumultuous mess of water, dirt, and rocks flowed southward to the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. Along the way rocks like our little rounded river cobblestone here were picked up and deposited high up on the river channel’s slopes.

Even though the rock had come from deep down in the river bed, it remained in place on the hillside as the roaring water receded to the stream flow we know and love today. The rock is an artifact of climate change, real honest-to-goodness climate change, devoid of any human causation or intervention.

Our pet Pine Creek stream bed rock now in Lycoming County, PA, probably originating due north in Steuben County, New York, 15,000 years ago, already rounded from thousands of years of tumbling in a stream bed

Ever since that melting glacier released that tidal wave and placed our little rock here on the hillside, Pine Creek has flowed south, into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, and not northward into the Genesee River. And as a result of that huge rushing torrent southward, the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon was cut and shaped.

Climate change, folks. It is as natural as the Sun rising and setting on the Earth’s horizon. It can be real. It was real, and still is real and ongoing, even without human involvement. But you probably won’t find the real climate change science taught any more, because it is contrary to a radical political narrative that tells us modern capitalist societies are evil and destructive and must cease and desist, because we alone are destroying the Earth’s climate.

Which just goes to prove that Marxism really is anti-science, anti-truth, anti-fact, and anti-human. Shame on the Marxism Climate Change fraudsters who represent themselves as guardians of the environment. They are no such thing. They are destroyers of the environment, as every Marxist society’s destroyed environment demonstrates.

Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone you saw this, because the “climate change” activists will have me locked up for disseminating actual science!

All this climate change happened before humans were even present on the planet, let alone before we and our cows began farting so much and creating green house gases…

Be careful showing this glacial map to a New Yorker. They believe that New York City pre-dates all human civilizations and was founded by the gods, who would never let a mile of ice stand on top of their sacred ground.

Showing this image in a modern class on “climate change” is like showing a crucifix to a vampire, and you will probably be ejected from the classroom and declared unfit for indoctrination by the fake teacher. Be careful how you use this science.

Oh no, we did it, we showed New York City under ice. NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio will probably ban me from entering NYC henceforth.