From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Fri Feb 01 2002 - 17:00:49 MST
Sean Kenny wrote:
>
> This isn't necessarily evidence that global warming isn't happening. Climatic
> scientists are pretty much agreed that we are undergoing massive climate
> change all over the planet. The arguement seems to me to be about whether
> this is down to human activity or whether this is the natural pattern of
> activity of the worlds climatic systems. In other words - the world is
> getting warmer, but this is normal and we better get used to it.
Uh, most emphatically NO, most scientists are not agreed, at least in
the way you mean. In fact, the majority do not agree that there is a
significant anthropogenic warming trend. ALL scientists do agree that
"we are undergoing climate change", but that is a semantically neutral
statement which only recognises that the world climate is not a stasis,
it is a dynamic system with a myriad of inputs and outputs that change
over time. Saying that "we are undergoing climate change" is true even
if that climate change is that we are going into an ice age. Even if
part of the world is getting cooler and part getting warmer, to sum out
to zero, this still means that "we are undergoing climate change".
The reason why there is so much doubt about warming, and anthropogenic
warming in particular, is that the period of data collection is so very
short for those claiming that there is catastrophic change happening,
generally only a 30-100 year period. Longer range studies, based on
things like tree rings and ice cores, show that climatic change does
not, in fact, happen, to the degree claimed by proponents of big
government taxes on energy and everything else, nor do ice ages start in
as little as a decade (or stop).
For example, the oceans rose approximately 400 feet over 1000 years
during the end of the last ice age, around 9000 BC, but it wasn't until
5600 BC that sea levels got high enough to breach the Bosporus and
Dardanelles to flood the Black Sea basin, whose freshwater surface was
some 135 feet below sea level.
The antarctic ice cap, for instance, has been completely stable, and
growing slowly over the long term, for the past 15 million years or so,
ever since Antarctica broke away from South America and the circum polar
ocean current became permanently established. This is a known fact that
the cataclysmists have had to recently concede in the scientific world,
but the media has refused to acknowledge this major setback for the
big-government/tax-everything-to-pay-for-climate-control agenda. The
human race will never be flooded with 90 meters of seawater worldwide
from an antarctic collapse. At worst, we may see a 3-9 meter change in
sea level IF the Greenland Ice Cap collapses, however doing things like
flooding the Caspian basin will mitigate this to a large degree, as will
the growth of the Antarctic Ice Cap created by increases in evaportion
at the equator.
The melting of the arctic ice sheet will not change ocean levels even
while the climate changes, since the ice is already floating. What will
happen is the increase in open ocean in the arctic will increase
evaporation and thus increase precipitation in Greenland, thus helping
to mitigate any increase in melting that occurs in the margins.
>
> On Friday 01 February 2002 11:53 am, you wrote:
> > ----- 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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