Gene Kearns wrote:
On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 10:26:54 -0500, Black Dog
wrote:


Gene Kearns wrote:

On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 01:09:23 GMT, "JamesgangNC"
wrote:



For hundreds of millions years the planet had a considerably milder climate.


That is just stupid.

There have been four major "ice ages" in the last 2 million years. The
last "ice age" began about 70,000 years ago, and ended 10,000 years
ago.

Please don't post any more of this foolishness until you bone up on
natural history, it makes you look foolish.


I suggest you do the same -- you know -- bone up on natural history
before making foolish posts... Look past the Pleistocene and the
Pliocene, in fact skip the whole Tertiary era and go back to the
Mesozoic. You will find periods of hundreds of millions years when the
Earth's environment was much warmer than now. Must have been all those
dinosaur farts that caused the global warming then :-)


First of all, the Tertiary was a period not an era. I never adopted
the position that the earth has not been warmer before nor that it has
not been cooler before, either.

Sorry, you are right - it is period. But read what you said - the OP
said the earth had been warmer for hundreds of millions of years and you
said that was just plain stupid. But it's not stupid - it's true. We
Canadians wouldn't have the known largest oil reserves on the planet
(yes, folks, we got more of this **** than the Saudi's)if it weren't for
the fact that what we now call "the prairies" hadn't been "the sea".


We are likely not the sole cause of global warming, but you'd have to
be sticking your head into the sand to believe that we don't influence
it. Our global sole source of heat is the sun. For millions of years,
this energy has been stored in things like oil and coal. Modern man
has found a way to turn these millions of years of energy into heat to
serve him. Do you really think this isn't a net increase in available
heat energy? Where do you suppose all of that heat goes?

I know where it is. I can see the thermometer in my car climbing by
three degrees every time I drive from my house in the country into the city.



Do you think that major climate swings haven't had an effect on the
level of the oceans? Or that life (like the dinosaurs) has survived..
or not? If you want to go back to the Mesozoic Era, do you really
think that we can compare weather in Gondwanaland (the super
continent) to the weather that we have today with the seven current
much smaller and more spread out continents? You can't be so silly as
to try to argue this apples and oranges position.

I never said any of that. See paragraph 1. But are you saying we don't
understand the climate well enough to compare Gondwanaland and today?
That certainly is the truth. And yet "climate scientists" do so all the
time.


The OP also made some statements that you'd like to support....
scientifically, of course:

No, I wouldn't. What I find so frustrating about the whole climate
change/global warming/greenhouse effect/whatever you want to call it
this week it is the complete and total LACK OF SCIENCE of both sides.
It is an emotional and political debate - for example, you can't resist
name calling and probably conclude I am a "right winger" (which is funny
because, outside of this issue, I'm probably waaay more of leftie than you)


"We have sampled the tiniest fraction of the planet."
Really? At least a quarter of the globe is inhabited!
We have a tiny sample upon which to base our climate models. 130 years
of accurate temperatures over a very limited part of the globe. Even if
every inhabitant was out there with his little themometer, it's still
a small sample.


"We can't even predict the weather next month ..."
Seems we hit that hurricane season on the nose!

This is a fair criticism of climate modelling. We can't accurately
predict tomorrow, or next week or next month. (Yes, I understand all
about chaos theory). It's just that in MOST of the sciences I've been
involved with, models were useful things for, well, modeling. You do
not take predictions made by a model and treat them as data. Data is
something that goes IN to a model, not OUT. I could create, for
example, a mathmatical model that describes the chemical reactions that
occur as body of magma cools. I could use it to figure out if there is
any possiblity of, say, finding gold in the core of Mt.St.Helens. But
my model won't tell me where it is or even for sure it is there. Only
drilling will tell me that. My problem with many environmentalists is
that they treat the climate models as if they were drill cores or maps,
not a mathmatical construct that reveals a possibilty.


"And global warming is pseudoscience."
So, we've agreed that this has happened more than once, but it never
was real?


Like I said, emotion and politics. Not science.

Of course climate change is real. It happens ALL the time, always has,
always will. Can we do anything about it? I don't know. I certainly
don't condone spewing toxic waste into the air. The rates of asthma in
children is reason enough to stop that. I worry a bit about
concentrating too much CO2 (harmless and necessary to life on earth) and
not enough on mecury and sulfur and other very nasty stuff to breathe.

In 1985, as an undergrad geology student, I attended a lecture on "The
Greenhouse Effect" as it was known in those days. Lots of maps and
graphs and models. Perhaps I wouldn't be quite the sceptic I am today
if any of the dire consequences predicted at that time had come to pass.
My sister in Nova Scotia should be under water, along with most of the
eastern sea board. Refugees flooding in from the Maldives and other
barely-above-sea-level places. The model I saw said it was going to
happen by 1997. By now I was planing to open that Club Med on Baffin
Island. Hasn't happened yet.