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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (3505)	12/17/2008 9:46:23 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

So let's say it is a given that over the last 50 years, human activities such as the industrial revolution drove CO2 emissions sky high and was the primary cause of CO2 increases. Then today, the resultant global warming has started to kick in other reinforcing global processes. One problem right away. Global warming has been going on for several centuries - since the end of the little ice age and didn't begin only with the industrial revolution, the explosive use of gasoline engines, etc. Also its only an assumption that any global warming in the last 50 years has been "resultant" of human activity. We don't know that if we'd stuck with horses, buggies, sailing ships, etc, the same warming might have occurred. there is less ice to bounce sunrays back off the earth. Instead, the ground and seas absorb the warmth. In areas like Siberia, that can create situations that leads to large quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas orders of magnitude more harmful than CO2) to be released. So at this point of self-reinforcing processes, if we were to remeasure root causes, perhaps we would find that humans are no longer the prime movers in increasing greenhouse gases. We could rightly say that natural processes are the largest causes, despite humans being the initial catalyst. One thing to bear in mind is the earth has been at least as warm and probably warmer before (within the last ten thousand years) and no self-reinforcing process of continual warming occurred. For example during the Roman era, the Alps were mostly free of glaciers, wine was produced in England - things were clearly warmer then than now. I love the international debate and the scientific process that we have for arriving at grand unifying theories. Another thing to bear in mind about science is that things science is sure of at one point in time are regularly overturned and abandoned. At one time during our lifetimes, it was believed out of control human population growth was a crisis that was going to doom the earth and produce massive famines and wars. Outside of local weather related famines in the southern Sahara, the famines neve showed up and population growth is falling in many countries. I first heard of global warming and its possible relationship to CO2 back in the 1979-1980 timeframe. It impressed me as likely being true. Over the years I learned a good bit more and realized the underlying assumptions of the human caused global warming were simplistic. There are too many things much more powerful than CO2 which affect the climate.