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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (12867)	5/22/2007 10:04:33 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

...if we peak now and decline significantly, then one could say it does not look terribly different. We are of course placing bets on what it does going forward. Sure we are. No matter what we think about the future its a bet. And the historical record is what we have to go on and it shows a long history of cyclical climate variation. A personal note. I first heard of the global warming theory back in 1979 or 1980. I was getting my masters and took a course on energy economics. While doing some research on a paper, I ran across some journal articles which pointed out that human burning of fossil fuels was putting a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere and CO2 was a greenhouse gas. With just that little bit of information I became a believer in human caused global warming (which hardly anyone except a handful of college professors had heard of at the time). I concluded that we would eventually heat up the worlds climate - back to what it was a couple hundred million years ago when the fossil fuels were being created. Life would survive but some adaptation would have to take place. I also concluded there wasn't a chance in hell that people would stop using fossil fuels regardless of the environmental effect. Of course, I've come to believe my initial reaction was quite wrong. It was based on a very simple knowledge of climate history and science. Turns out CO2 is a pretty minor greenhouse gas - if you double it, its still pretty minor. Water vapor is much more significant. Additionally, it turns out the history of the climate on earth is not some benign steady state. For the past couple million years the earth has been in a period of recurring ice ages, with brief warm interglacial periods - the most recent one of which human civilization has arisen in. So if we could raise the earths temperature a bit, it might be a good thing in the long run. Cause in the long run, most of North America is eventually going to go back to glaciers and tundra. An eye-opening book for me was After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou. Doea a great job of explaining in one of its chapters, the Milankovitch cycles which to a large extent drive long term climate change. Shorter range, sunspots and other solar cyclical changes seem to be the main climate drivers. Historically, I think CO2 has followed climate change not driven it.