A Coming Climate Apocalypse?

Everything is coming up climate change. Temperatures on the West Coast are very high. It’s climate change. A condo building collapses in Miami. It’s climate change. Germany floods, causing dozens of deaths. It’s all about climate change.

You see, the climate is changing and we are to fault. More specifically, industrialism has befouled Mother Nature and has set us on a path toward a climate apocalypse.

In fact, every hurricane, every tropical storm, every heat wave, not to mention every polar vortex--proves the point. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if nothing would disprove the hypothesis, we have a right to be skeptical.

As for whether it’s getting worse and worse, Joanne Nova tries to place the recent German floods in context. That is, she asks whether anything like this has happened before. That means, has the Industrial Revolution and the burning of fossil fuels caused the climate to get completely out of whack. Is it all getting exponentially worse, because of us?

We will ignore the obvious points, namely that the climate always changes and that it was doing so even before we all befouled it with polluting automobiles,

Let’s begin with what happened in 1717. Perhaps you do not recall. Nova brings us up to speed:

On a chilly Christmas Eve three centuries ago, one of the most devastating storms in the history of Europe smashed into the coastlines around the North Sea, killing over 13,000 people, annihilating thousands of houses and wrecking countless farms.

The apocalyptic weather caused enormous floods to submerge coastal areas in the Netherlands, Northern Germany and Denmark by Christmas Day.

As the surviving population struggled with the wind and the waves, Arctic gales spread across the continent and caused a crippling frost to descend on the suffering victims.

Want some more?

The two worst floods of Passau, Bavaria, as far as we know, were in 1501 and 1595.

This is the future we expect if we spend trillions to reduce CO2 to “safe levels”? If we all drive electric vehicles will we be able to create a world as safe as 1501?

Flood level markers at the tower of the Town hall of Passau, Bavaria

Wiki-world has a category called Floods in Germany that includes so many previous floods, they are grouped according to decade:

The bridges of Bamberg were destroyed by ice floods and logs in 1784, but also even earlier in 1342.

… the immense floods of 1784 which followed the unusually harsh winter of 1783/84 throughout Germany when sudden warm weather and torrents of rain filled the still ice-packed rivers.

The winter of 1783/84 is known to have been severe and long-lasting in a number of European countries. Two very cold spells occurred: at the end of December 1783 and in January 1784. Furthermore, it snowed heavily in the months of December 1783, January and February 1784. On 21 February 1784, a warm southerly wind led to a thaw which resulted in fast breaking-up of the ice on the frozen rivers and to catastrophic floods. This large-scale and long-lasting event took place in the present-day Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg, northern France, Germany, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Republics.

Or, if you prefer Scripture, we read this in the book of Ecclesiastes:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.