To: Tim Hall who wrote (10737 ) 7/23/1998 8:35:00 PM From: toma Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 34075
Tim Hall (and any one interested), OT - Global Warming continued: Tim - if you'll refer to post 10646, i noted that no global warming researcher would refute the fact that there is a great body of evidence supporting the periodicity of warming and cooling cycles...as you'll recall from Geo 101 these are the so-called Milankovich Cycles, resulting from osscillations in the Earth's rotation and orbit about the sun. But, as Schlessinger points out we are hardly half was through the current glacial cycle cycle, set to end in the year 12,000 AD, and yet our global mean temperature is far warmer than expected. The problem is not that temperature change is occuring, it's that the rate at which it is occuring is unusually fast. The level of influx of CO2 into the atmosphere during the last 150 or so years, has been greater than the natural geochemical cycles of the earth-system can handle. A recent article in the July 10 edition of the journal Science contains an article in the Perspectives section descibing the cycling of carbon, the authors note that data from ice cores indicate that atmospheric CO2 levels are at their highest level during last 100,000 years. The natural carbon cycle can only take up fractions of the addional "man-derived" CO2...meaning that it may take 100's or possibly a thousand years to get back to pre-industrial steady state. Again, I refer to you to the Schlessinger text, and search on the web for reports by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...in the mean time I would be interested in reading any current research you know of that supports your point of view... respectfully, toma