Cooling down


Maybe we should be more worried about an ice age than global warming
Bill Walker has a great piece on the possibility of global cooling. It won't convince anyone who doesn't agree, but it still makes some nice points.

Fashions change. As Michael Crichton points out in State of Fear, one year it suddenly became unfashionable to look at cooling factors in the Earth’s climate. Today’s academic climatologists are forced to publish within the paradigm that the Earth is warming, that this trend will continue regardless of natural events, and that warming is bad. Major media is even more constrained; Newsweek is not running any stories on the cooling effects of aircraft contrails or the dust clouds from the nomads who yearly expand the Sahara Desert.

The Earth may well have warmed a tenth of a degree or two, if you pick the right starting and ending year; climate fluctuates for many reasons. But the other package-deal premises of the Global Warming meme are completely without scientific basis. There is no scientific reason to believe that the minuscule greenhouse effect from 20th century fossil fuel burning can overcome the sun-shrouding effects of a major volcano or asteroid hit. We know that either of these types of events is going to happen sometime; we just don’t know when (maybe 2036, if you’re the betting sort). And either one will pitch the Earth right back into an Ice Age.

Ice ages are not fun. Even minor cooling events are hard on agricultural civilizations. (You may think you’re living in a silicon civilization, but a few months with no sunlight will radically change your food vs. RAM preferences). Yes, if we were all living in concrete domes with home Mr. Fusion units, maybe Ice Ages would just be long periods of good skiing. But for now, we still depend on solar power for our food.

It does make you wonder where the global cooling scare from the 1970s went, doesn't it?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - December 28, 2005 at 04:51 AM  Tag


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