From: Sean Kenny (seankenny@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Fri Feb 01 2002 - 15:05:35 MST
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.
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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