Would it really be so bad if the globe warmed up a bit? It has happened before, recently, and things were pretty nice at the time. Read this and relax.
... It's quite true that a planetary climatic system exceeds any test that we can design. The best we can do is model it, through computer simulations that are by their very nature incomplete (not to mention contradictory). Wouldn't it be nice if we had access to some natural example comparable to what's occurring now, so that we could analyze it and get some idea of what we're facing?
It so happens that we have exactly that. This isn't the first time warming has occurred on earth - it's a commonplace and recurring phenomenon. As we've seen previously, one such episode took place in relatively recent historic time - the Little Climatic Optimum, better known as the Medieval Warming Period. During the LCO, worldwide temperatures rose by 1 to 3 degrees centigrade for a roughly three-hundred-year period beginning in the 10th century and ending late in the 13th century. Records from the era are abundant and easily available.
Warming advocates have made a series of predictions concerning climatic effects over the coming century. Do they pass the LCO test?...
I guess linking to this article makes me a holocaust denier.
The Midevial warming period is one of the top bullet points that is used in favor of doing things to address global warming.
Let's simplify things for a second: Let's go back to the Midevial Warming period (MWP) and make it a cold period. I mean really cold. So cold that Canada is 45% covered with ice and it is coming our way.
Now do you do something?
Does it really matter what caused it to come to this?
(That's always been an odd argument to me. If you crash your car it doesn't matter if it was the other guys fault when you have to get to work the next morning.)
So, now back to the real MWP. It absolutly changed geo-politics for 500 years. Good things like England's vinyards being considered the best in the world to bad things like the potato famon. Crop failure became almost an every other year occurance. Greenland and Iceland were created and much of what we call the middle east problem was born. Deserts grew and coastal ranges flooded. Millions died.
It was a HUGE deal. It changed everything.
The US wants a stable world. Very large disasters, man made or natural, threaten that stability. Terrorism pails in the shadow that is caused by global warming. We are advanced enough to TRY and keep the planet's weather stable enough not to cause crop failure and disaster. Not to mention so much death and nation building.
To achieve this we really don't have to do much of anything that isn't already a good idea, like cheap clean energy.
Why NOT try to avoid it something this big, something this bad?
Why take the risk of 500 years of global unrest and the risk that our country might not make it through?
Even if we are wrong, even if this is just scientists going nutz because microscopes have rotted their brains, why not err on the side of cation?
Especially when our Mom and Sister own property that every single map says will be underwater. Maybe you do too!
Why not indeed!
Posted by: brandy | February 24, 2007 at 12:16 PM
We need to talk about this antother time, because this post is about to be pushed off the front page.
I don't understand the first part of your argument, though. Maybe you could restate it? Then I'll use that to start a new thread.
Posted by: pedro | March 05, 2007 at 07:55 PM
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