By 2020, kiss the snows of Kilimanjaro goodbye

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The sky is falling!

Although global-warming hysteria in articles like this make good reading, they fall far short in context and are chock-full of dire predictions and guesses based on a very limited time of accurate measurements. (about a hundred years of records for limited land-based temperatures, about 25 years of records for global satellite measurements)

Also, anomalies such as el nino-la nina, the arctic oscillation, the north atlantic oscillation and other large scale cycles have only recently been discovered and are still not well understood.

While no one doubts the earth is warming and few doubt that man is helping in some amount, there is no consensus on man's contribution to this warming.

The northern hemisphere is recovering from a cold spell that lasted about five hundred years. That recovery began in the eighteen hundreds, a time when man had very little effect on the climate compared to the present.

Earth's climate is not static, it has varied widely and sometimes abruptly since it was formed.
Thankfully, life has managed to thrive for the last few hundred million years even in the worst of times.

We should be concerned about the current changes and take steps to minimise our impact on the environment and we are. We could move faster but there are limits on how rapidly changes can be made in industrialised countries without damaging their economies and hurting those who depend on them for little things like food, potable water, shelter, medicine, etc.

Sure, the industrialised world could stop using fossil fuels today and start building an infrastructure that uses only renewables like solar or wind or geothermal. That would certainly stop much of the man-made CO2 emissions and would certainly result in instant world-wide chaos and death. Hardly an alternative to relatively slow adaptation that would be forced on us even in worst-case scenarios that seem to be in fashion lately.

While chicken little stories may help raise awareness of a problem, they serve no purpose in solving a problem when facts are twisted, taken out of context or omitted in order to serve 'the sky is falling!' theme.

Here are a couple of links that might offer some longer-range perspective on global warming.

Why warmer is better:
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~moore/history_health.html

A bit of climate history (a big bit):
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/

Posted by: bony tryan   Posted on: 05/24/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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