OT Global warming and human activity 13534

Aragorn

We also know for a fact that a significant percentage of climate changes did not occur in timeframes of tens of thousands, or even thousands of years, but litterally in decades or few hundreds of years.

The string of abnormally cold winters in Western Europe in the eighties was caused by the explosive eruption of Mount St Helens.

Some scientists argue that global warming started in the fifteenth century. Probably all that lead the Romans used caused it, eh?

Why not? There are cycli within cycli, and a slow global warming does not show up as a gradually climbing graph. Maybe we just happen to be within one of the peeks of the graph, and in twenty years' time people start complaining about the cold weather again and reminisce on the time of their grandparents, when it was so much warmer.

The important thing to remember, amidst all the panick-mongering, is that we know next to jack-sh*t about long-term, or even mid-term climate changes. The fact that one thing (global warming) appears to occur in close temporal proximity to another (the industrial revolution) does not automagically imply causality.

2006 is an election year, remember? Tradition dictates thatallroads must be broken up by then, to show that the previous administrations have done a good job.

How exactly that shows, is one of life's eternal mysteries...

We're not screwing up more than we used to; it's just that we get more information about faraway screwups, so we think things are getting worse.

-- Karel "de Jazz" Jansens

"Those of us who fail history, are doomed to repeat it in summer school." (Buffy Summers)