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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (261679)	11/22/2005 6:20:19 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571690

"You mean like Global Warming just thirty years after Global Cooling?" Sigh. We were going through a cooling period in the 1950s and the 1960s, though the trend from the early part of the 20th century was a general warming. But, there had been a many century overall cooling trend over the past few millennia, with the local minima being during the Little Ice Age. You know, Hans Brinker skating on the canals of the Netherlands. The dying out of the Viking colonies in Greenland. So what changed? For one, We know a lot more about climate now than we used to. In 1975, chaos theory was but a whisper of a possibility, 30 years later we know a great deal about it. You can't even being to model the climate with out it. For another, there is this marvelous thing know as a computer. In the past 30 years we have made some minimal, but important advances with those things. And finally, climate never moves in straight lines. There are always local minima and maxima. For another, the cooling during the 1950s and 1960s had an awful lot to do with those cycles, plus the large amount of dust kicked up during WWII and, as the world recovered from that, industrial pollution put a lot of particulates in the air, which tend to reflect sunlight. The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s caused a sharp drop in particulates, as our output of CO2 kept its exponential growth. We have significantly raised the CO2 content of the atmosphere, although our methane contribution has moderated in recent years. You can't find any respected climatologist who doesn't accept global warming as a fact. There is just too much evidence, and the models back it. True, it could be our models are wrong, but they also predict pretty well other things, like hurricane development. It is hard to get a model with predictive capability that is fundamentally flawed.