Hi Christy!
>>Duncan, can you believe it? The earth really IS warming! Forget about all that confusing satellite data, and look at the results these scientists got when they drilled a bunch of holes. Curiously, or maybe not so curiously in my opinion, the warming seems to correlate to the Industrial Revolution:
Few contend that the Earth isn't warming - most just agree that man has little to do with what is a natural cycle. The "global warming crisis" is the product of power-mad central planners and politicians.
Meanwhile, John Carlisle, the director of environmental policy at the National Center for Public Policy Research, recently published a paper in which he concluded that the 1.5-degree Fahrenheit temperature rise over the past 150 years that some blame on global warming is actually as natural as day following night.
He points out that over the past 10,000 years, the earth has been in a general warming trend, called the Holocene, that encompasses seven major warming and cooling trends, each lasting between 650 and 3000 years. In the process, the planet's average global temperature has fluctuated between 57 and 62 degrees.
The most recent cooling period occurred between 1650 and 1850, when the average temperature dropped to 57 degrees. During this two-century-long cold snap, know as the Little Ice Age, the Thames River froze in London, glaciers crushed long-established villages in Switzerland and Scandinavia, and growing seasons were painfully abbreviated.
This frosty spell ended around 1850, when the global thermometer started rising again. Strangely enough, this is the year used as the baseline from which the 1.5 degrees of global warming is measured.
Dr. Hugh Ellsaesser, a climatologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, sees the current temperature rise as nothing more than a continuation of the earth's natural climate cycle. Furthermore, he expects the world to get another 1.8 degrees hotter over the next few centuries before the cycle starts downward again.
Before you dismiss Carlisle and Ellsaesser as crackpots, you should know that many scientists share their doubts about man-made global warming. Some 2300 climatologists, meteorologists, geophysicists, and environmental scientists signed a petition opposing the Kyoto global-warming agreement, along with thousands of other scientists and engineers. Their names and titles, all 16,400 of them, can be found at oism.org;
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