(should be a question for one of those "ironic questions" list like "Why does sour cream have an expiration date?)
Global warming?
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
Guess Algore cultists don't do facts.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.
Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.
There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.
Oh heck, just go here and read the whole article.
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3 comments:
Plants convert CO2 into carbon-based sugars and free oxygen, but the problem is that we're producing CO2 faster then the plants can convert it back. We've cut down too many forests and too much of our power comes from petroleum and coal (the power your computer is using right now came from coal)...
Anyways, human population has doubled in the last 50 years and it's not going to slow down until food and water sources are exhausted- read the 2nd paragraph- caused by a climate change in the region. It's only a matter of time before push comes to shove...
I wouldn't fully trust an Australian article written by one guy...here's some information (with references and links) to help you form a more informed opinion...
#1
#2
#3
And by the way, climate is the *average* over many, many *years*. One year doesn't erase the past century, and if the global weather patterns are really becoming that unpredictable, we're not in for pleasant things...I really don't want to imagine the world my great-grandkids will inherit.
Why are we so certain this isn't just weather cycle we're experiencing?
I'm not so sure I trust Wikipedia any more than an Australian article.
:-)
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