Anthropogenic Climate Change
By:
Who are those people standing on the corner shouting about the end of the world unless we change our ways? No, it's not those crazed out religious fanatics with the messed up hair yelling about the rapture, but rather scientist that make a livelihood on the ever imminent global climatic disaster. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the danger was on global cooling. The fad then changed to global warming. More recently, these scientists made an astounding discovery, namely, that things change, and hence changed the global climatic doomsday phrase to global climate change.
This is not to say that the global climate isn't changing, throughout the history of the world the climate has changed. The question becomes, are humans the primary cause of this change. In the July 21, 1999 edition of the Nature, scientist postulated that a centuries long cold spell might have been caused by meltwater from the disappearing glaciers. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered parts of North America with ice for more than a million years. When the Earth began to warm 10,000 years ago, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine mind you, the ice sheet retreated back toward the poles. When the sheet finally melted, trillions of gallons of water gushed into the Labrador Sea. Independent research showed that global temperatures dropped significantly within several hundred years of the flood. This is because the Atlantic Gulf Stream normally acts like a conveyor belt to deliver warm tropical water to ther regions. The addition of so much cold fresh water in such a short period of time led to the shut down of the Gulf Stream.
According to ice core date, temperatures in Greenland and Europe dropped by 6 to 15 degrees for the last 200 years. This change in the global climate occurred without the presence of industry, SUVs, or jet planes. What is very interesting to note is that there have been a series of ice ages over the past few million years. During the roughly 2 million year span of the Pleistocene epoch, numerous glacial periods occurred at intervals of approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years. The great majority of these years were spent in an ice age (glacial period, lasting roughly 90,000 years), with much shorter (around 12,000 years) interglacial periods. What is even more interesting is that the last ice age occurred roughly 11,500 years ago. Another interesting side note in the history of the world, 131,000 years ago, in the Eemian interglacial period (again, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine), sea levels were 16.4 to 26.2 feet higher than they are today (roughly at the same level predicted by a former vice president of where sea levels shall be because of anthropogenic global climate change). It is very surpnrising (ot really) that when the IPCC changed it's prediction that sea levels would rise not the three feet that it had initially predicted, but rather 17 inches (to say nothing of the 20 feet predicted by a former senator from Tennessee/former vice president of the United States/former presidential candidate/film maker) that not a single fanatic spoke of the improvement, but continued speaking of the end times.
One method these modern day religious fanatics scare the masses (at least here in Florida), is by claiming that anthropogenic warming will lead to a greater number of hurricanes, and that the intensity of said hurricanes will increase. These scenarios completely ignore solar activity, the Milankovitch cycles (which take into account the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, the tilt of the earth about its axis, and the earth's precession) and even underwater volcanic activity resulting from tectonic plate movements. Of course, these scenarios are only mentioned in years after we get many hurricanes, such as the 2005 hurricane season when Florida experienced five hurricanes. In other seasons, these scenarios are never mentioned by the crazed lunatics, such as the 2006 hurricane season when a grand total of zero hurricanes struck Florida.
These religious fanatics even call for the excommunication of those that do not share in their dogma. Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski is considering firing the state's climatologist George Taylor, who has said human activity isn't the chief cause of global climate change. Dr. Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel's climatologist, advocates that the American Meteorological Society strip its seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of anthropogenic global warming.
To those that state that we must actively try to change the environment before it's too late, we must remember what these very same people proposed thirty years ago: that we pour soot over the Arctic ice cap to help melt it.
People that believe that humans are the sole culprit of climate change, while ignoring natural cycles and activities that are completely independent of human action or inaction, are either trying to sell books and/or movies, or else trying to get funding from some governmental agency or another.
This is not to say that the global climate isn't changing, throughout the history of the world the climate has changed. The question becomes, are humans the primary cause of this change. In the July 21, 1999 edition of the Nature, scientist postulated that a centuries long cold spell might have been caused by meltwater from the disappearing glaciers. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered parts of North America with ice for more than a million years. When the Earth began to warm 10,000 years ago, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine mind you, the ice sheet retreated back toward the poles. When the sheet finally melted, trillions of gallons of water gushed into the Labrador Sea. Independent research showed that global temperatures dropped significantly within several hundred years of the flood. This is because the Atlantic Gulf Stream normally acts like a conveyor belt to deliver warm tropical water to ther regions. The addition of so much cold fresh water in such a short period of time led to the shut down of the Gulf Stream.
According to ice core date, temperatures in Greenland and Europe dropped by 6 to 15 degrees for the last 200 years. This change in the global climate occurred without the presence of industry, SUVs, or jet planes. What is very interesting to note is that there have been a series of ice ages over the past few million years. During the roughly 2 million year span of the Pleistocene epoch, numerous glacial periods occurred at intervals of approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years. The great majority of these years were spent in an ice age (glacial period, lasting roughly 90,000 years), with much shorter (around 12,000 years) interglacial periods. What is even more interesting is that the last ice age occurred roughly 11,500 years ago. Another interesting side note in the history of the world, 131,000 years ago, in the Eemian interglacial period (again, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine), sea levels were 16.4 to 26.2 feet higher than they are today (roughly at the same level predicted by a former vice president of where sea levels shall be because of anthropogenic global climate change). It is very surpnrising (ot really) that when the IPCC changed it's prediction that sea levels would rise not the three feet that it had initially predicted, but rather 17 inches (to say nothing of the 20 feet predicted by a former senator from Tennessee/former vice president of the United States/former presidential candidate/film maker) that not a single fanatic spoke of the improvement, but continued speaking of the end times.
One method these modern day religious fanatics scare the masses (at least here in Florida), is by claiming that anthropogenic warming will lead to a greater number of hurricanes, and that the intensity of said hurricanes will increase. These scenarios completely ignore solar activity, the Milankovitch cycles (which take into account the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, the tilt of the earth about its axis, and the earth's precession) and even underwater volcanic activity resulting from tectonic plate movements. Of course, these scenarios are only mentioned in years after we get many hurricanes, such as the 2005 hurricane season when Florida experienced five hurricanes. In other seasons, these scenarios are never mentioned by the crazed lunatics, such as the 2006 hurricane season when a grand total of zero hurricanes struck Florida.
These religious fanatics even call for the excommunication of those that do not share in their dogma. Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski is considering firing the state's climatologist George Taylor, who has said human activity isn't the chief cause of global climate change. Dr. Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel's climatologist, advocates that the American Meteorological Society strip its seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of anthropogenic global warming.
To those that state that we must actively try to change the environment before it's too late, we must remember what these very same people proposed thirty years ago: that we pour soot over the Arctic ice cap to help melt it.
People that believe that humans are the sole culprit of climate change, while ignoring natural cycles and activities that are completely independent of human action or inaction, are either trying to sell books and/or movies, or else trying to get funding from some governmental agency or another.
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