<how worried I should be about global warming>
You should not worry at all--there is nothing
that can be done. Even in the unlikely event
that the first world could slow our intake of
fossil fuels, India and China will pick up the
slack, and then some. Global warming is a
foregone conclusion. That said, I rather doubt
anything that has happened yet is any more than
natural decadal variation.
Wait 500 years if you want to see something
interesting, ha. And anecdotal evidence is useless.
Nothing has changed all that much, yet.
But I tell you, it is possible that the Earth warms
for a few centuries, and then, finally over a period
of a few tens of thousands of years, freezes again,
right to the equator...and stays that way for ten
million years.
No kidding. The poles are severely cold and dry, the
whole problem gets very interesting if you put more
precip at the poles. And there is an awful lot of land
even in the Northern Hemisphere at high latitude.
Start dumping real snowfall on Baffin Island--it
certainly would not melt now with current temps,
and it wont melt after global warming.
The high latitudes will be not as cold, but wetter.
The middle latitdes...uncertain, a mix--shift
everything north ten degrees over hundereds of
years. The tropics, a tad warmer.
Oh shit, I remember an email that warned us not
to say anything about global warming. Well, this
post comes from home, and is my personal opinion.
I have no official position on global warming as
an employee of the National Weather Service--and
I have next to no education in climatology anyway.
Just some synoptic and mesoscale meteorology, and
a few forecasting classes. So that is my disclaimer. |
