From: steve (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Fri Feb 01 2002 - 04:53:22 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Spike Jones" <spike66@attglobal.net>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 4:50 AM
Subject: Re: CLIMATE: Cooling, not warming...
> > From: "Mike Lorrey" <mlorrey@datamann.com>
> >
> > Subject: CLIMATE: Cooling, not warming...
> >
> > > It seems that the West Antarctice Ice Sheet is getting thicker, not
> > > thinner, and temperatures are dropping now, not rising....
> > >
> > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62336-2002Jan17.html
> > >
> > > So much for the cataclysmists....
> >
> > steve wrote: Maybe we'll now see a return to the predictions that were
rife
> > in the early
> > 70's, of a new Ice Age! Steve Davies
>
> What I want to see is if the media hype engine will rev up as high for
> global cooling as it did for global warming. Will it be symmetrical?
Will
> there be political movements urging us to hurl more greenhouse gases
> into the atmosphere to save our planet from the advancing ice? Will
> there be international treaties to pressure nations into cutting down some
> of their CO2 hogging lifeforms?
>
> Imagine the horrors: Oceans could recede, vast stretches of frozen
> tundra could be covered in ice, beach resort towns could be left hundreds
> of meters inland, causing the tourist industry to suffer. Cataclysmic
change
> in climate could burst forth over a mere few centuries! How will we ever
> cope? spike
>
Excellent! I can see a wonderful spoof TV documentary right now. Seriously,
even when there was a mini-panic about global cooling in the early 1970s
(remember "The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice" ?) it never got the
coverage of global warming. I think it's obvious why - global warming can be
used to argue for lots of government controls and getting rid of technology
but you can't do that with cooling, quite the opposite in fact. In fact as
people like Matt Ridley have pointed out global cooling is a much more
credible threat than global warming, given that the default setting for the
planet's climate right now is an ice age. Also, all the evidence suggests
that the end of an interglacial and the onset of an ice age happens *very*
quickly - less than ten years is the figure usually given. Steve Davies
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