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

To: combjelly who wrote (321046)	1/16/2007 10:39:34 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1573682

Keep your mittens Amid all the excitement that Al Gore is a shoo-in to win an Oscar for his global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," comes this eye-opening story in Canada's Financial Post, dated Jan. 12: "The science is settled on climate change, say most scientists in the field. They believe that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are heating the globe to dangerous levels and that, in the coming decades, steadily increasing temperatures will melt the polar ice caps and flood the world's low-lying coastal areas. "Don't tell that to Nigel Weiss, professor emeritus at the department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, past president of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a scientist as honored as they come. The science is anything but settled, he observes, except for one virtual certainty: The world is about to enter a cooling period." Yes, Mr. Weiss like Mr. Gore thinks man-made greenhouse gases have recently played a role in warming the Earth. However, he points out that climate change is driven by factors other than man. "Variable behavior of the sun is an obvious explanation," he says, "and there is increasing evidence that earth's climate responds to changing patterns of solar magnetic activity." He explains to writer Lawrence Solomon that sunspots flare up and settle down in cycles. Right now, the world is experiencing the latter stages of a hyperactive period that lasts "perhaps 50 to 100 years, then you get a crash," Mr. Weiss says. "It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon." When a crash occurs, as it did for 70 years during the 17th century -- known as the "Little Ice Age" -- and for 30 years during the 19th century, the Earth cools dramatically. It got so cold during one crash, Mr. Solomon writes, that New York's harbor froze solid, "allowing walkers to journey from Manhattan to Staten Island."