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To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (2635)	1/13/2001 10:12:56 AM
From: Moominoid	Respond to of 4583

GZ Yes, glaciers have retreated everywhere since the mid-19th century. Not in Greenland and Antarctica so much they are still too cold. Composition is changing in terms of the trace gases like carbon dioxide, methane etc. Dramatically. Though of course they are tiny fractions of the whole. You can also use isotope records in the cores to reconstruct past temperatures. Our work uses measured temperature for the last 150 years and direct atmospheric composition for the last few decades + ice cores for earlier periods, estimated sulfur emissions and observed and reconstructed solar radiation. I am pretty convinced of the global warming hypothesis though the increasing brightness of the sun over this period is also an important factor. I've taught some basic meteorology but I'm not a physical scientist. We used statistical methods from econometrics and applied it to the physical data. These data are lot like macro-economic time series but climatologists haven't been aware of the new developments in econometrics. We've been trying to teach them :) It's been hard going but we have had two publications in well respected journals that they read. One of them got me a bit of media coverage here and in some newspapers around the World. I figure the more people test an idea with different methods and come to the same conclusion the more reliable it is. The cold water thing in the North Atlantic is something that is definitely on people's agendas. It could shut down the gulf stream circulation to Europe. A lot of research is focused on that. The effect would be most pronounced in Scandinavia. I'm not sure how much the climate would change in Britain and France though. London is on the same latititude as Vancouver and has a pretty similar climate even with a less pronounced warm current effect on the American West Coast. The climate was much warmer about 6000 years ago than today - that was the post ice age peak. There are lots of theories on how ice ages get going. We know that orbital fluctuations are the main driver but there are lots of still poorly understood feedbacks on Earth. The long-term climate system is very little understood. Most of the global warming research is focused on the fairly short-term. That is getting better understood. Some of my papers are in Working Paper form on my website: cres.anu.edu.au The abstracts are all up as webpages and papers as pdfs. David