One then wonders what kind of SUVs the Vikings were driving to cause all that warming. Surely the Earth wouldn't get that warm on its own, right? Right?

The point, if you read the link, is that in the 980s, the Vikings were harvesting wheat from Greenland. The name "Greenland" did not come from a real estate broker trying to unload the property; it was a description. Greenland was exporting wheat!

Warmists keep telling us that, after some tipping point, the Earth would not return to its current climate. They freak out over a tiny bit less ice in Greenland, but ignore entirely when it was warm enough to farm there, and yet the Earth survived just fine.

If Greenland were to get warm enough to, say, farm wheat, surely we'd be seeing the end of civilization as we know it, right?

Right?

Well, the person I was replying to noted he'd only seen a couple of the first season eps of Fringe. If he'd only seen that much of B5 or Caprica, I think my description of what he would have thought is about right. Your description of those series as a whole is right, but you wouldn't necessarily have gotten that from a couple of first seasons shows. My point being, again, that you need to give shows like these a chance.

You're correct. I was thinking mostly that B5's first season could have given a very wrong impression of how the whole show was going to be, not that Abrams had anything to do with it.

I had no illusions of Galactica 2.0, rest assured. I really wanted to like Caprica.

You needed to watch the series to understand the series. Indeed, much of the beginning of the first season was in "incident of the week" format, but it set up the character development and introduced many of the concepts (the Observer, for instance) for use later. In fact, the first incident turned out to be a foreshadowing of something we see with regularity in the alternate universe.

Never judge a J. J. Abrams project by a couple shows of the first season. This guy knows how to build a story. If you do jump to conclusions this easily, you might have thought "Lost" was just going to be a 21st century Swiss Family Robinson. That "Babylon 5" was just Star Trek at the United Nations. That "Caprica" was going to be one jumbled mismash of disjointed story lines.

OK, that last one may have been right, actually.