From: Sean Kenny (seankenny@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 04 2002 - 01:00:19 MST
On Saturday 02 February 2002 12:00 am, you wrote:
Oh right , now I see. Global warming theory is a conspiracy against
Libertarians. I think the jury's still out, and despite your protestations
most climatologists do believe the earths avaerage temperature is rising and
weather change is accelerating, yours is a minority view; but it must be
lovely to be so certain about almost everything.
> 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.ht
> > > > > >ml
> > > > > >
> > > > > > 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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