On 9/3/01 12:36 PM, "Charlie Stross" <charlie@antipope.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 11:00:23AM -0700, James Rogers wrote:
>> 2) Global warming should make things *colder* at your latitude, not warmer
>> (more extreme latitude gradient with respect to temperature).
>
> Uh-huh. You're maybe thinking about the postulated shutdown of the north
> Atlantic conveyor current, perhaps?
Among other things. Actually, I saw something this weekend where they (a
Japanese research group IIRC) already have measured a substantial decrease
(something like 30%) in the flow rate of the conveyor current in the North
Atlantic over the last few decades.
> I vaguely recall reports that most of the debunking research papers published
> on global warming are funded by the oil industry. However, it's not my field
> so I'll shut up for now (until I have time to read up on it in detail). Point
> of note: global warming appears to be a much more accepted theory/hypothesis
> outside the USA. You might want to consider the political implications ...
Most of the academic sources I've read are coming from European
universities, and are being published in Nature and Science. Hardly an oil
company conspiracy. In fact, these days it seems only the American nitwits
(and a few others) are actually saying that global warming will create a hot
planet.
My point was that "global warming" doesn't actually appear to generate a
warm globe as a substantial consequence, which many people are assuming.
The "new and improved" climate models that take into account ocean
current/CO2 dynamics are mapping much more closely to the ice core data than
the ones that have previously been predicting massive temperature increases.
The first evidence of any of this came many, many years ago when ice cores
revealed that historical atmospheric CO2 levels generally had a negative
correlation to increasing global temperature, contrary to scientific theory.
This has now been confirmed by ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica
by different international teams. The conveyor currents were discovered
many years ago as an accident of oceanic nuclear testing, but have now been
fairly well described and measured by numerous academic institutions.
I'm not saying that the climate isn't changing (it is a dynamic system, why
wouldn't it?), but I am somewhat irritated that popular momentum is almost
completely detached from the scientific work that is being done on the very
same topic. If people are going to come up with a "solution" it could at
least have some basis in science. Of course, the data also suggests that
there is not a whole lot we can actually do to control the climate these
days; every set of ice cores shows that it oscillates wildly by nature and
that we've been living in an anomalous stable period since the last ice age.
Better to stop provoking it and work on adapting to that particular reality.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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