Squeaky, Stick To Your Quick Draw

Recently, at Bearing Drift, Squeaky Wheel unleashed his thoughts on Global Warming. He was immediately called down by his compadre, Ragnar. I say you should stick to your guns Squeaky, as I said in my comment to Ragnar's post;

I think everyone pretty much agrees that we are in a warming trend. But are humans and our various enterprises truly to blame?

That is the sticky point that no one wants to investigate. There is very little consensus among non-governmental scientists that this is true.

It is also well known that there was a cooling trend during the mid to late 19th Century here in America. A couple of hundred years before that, in 1577, Spanish colonists in South Carolina were successfully growing oranges;

Bartolomé Martínez in a letter to the King dated at Havana, February 17, 1577, stated: "And what may be truthfully told to your Majesty is that in Santa Elena [Parris Island, South Carolina] I planted with my own hands grape vines, pomegranate trees, orange and fig trees; wheat, barley, onions, and garlic."

Orange groves continued to be a valuable asset to South Carolina until well after the Civil War. In a letter to the South Carolina Legislature dated 12-16-1861, Governor F.W. Pickens described the state this way, "… from the snowy crest of her rugged mountains, even to the orange groves that bloom over her sunny plains…"

Today however, even during what is alarmingly referred to as "An Inconvenient Truth", and a "disaster to mankind", there is no way to grow oranges very much further north than Gainesville FL.

Now obviously those Spanish Galleons were the SUVs of their day. But I don't think they burned gasoline and produced hydrocarbons. I know they didn't burn bio-diesel.