Chris Peterson wrote:heehaw wrote:Despite all the talk of global warming, the fact is that we are 10,000 years into the most recent interglacial. Earth has been in an ice age for 500,000 years, punctuated by about 5 brief interglacials each lasting less than 10,000 years. And ice cores show that just before each interglacial ended there was a sharp increase in atmospheric CO2. And we are having just such an increase now, augmented hugely by our own contribution. I don't know why people are predicting global warming will continue: if past is prologue, within a few hundred years all the power poles will be buried in ice!
But we understand most of the forcing elements involved in the long term cycles, and they're accounted for in the models. If we were looking at a return of the ice in a few hundred years, we might approach things differently. But there's no suggestion of that over any such short term. Tens of thousands of years is much more likely. And in terms of profoundly impacting our societies, all that really matters is the next decades.
I'm glad you responded to heehaw's post Chris. His rather contrarian take has personal appeal, but it undercuts very real looming disasters due to AWG, such as:
RocketRon wrote:Aren't all the weather recording folks reporting that less and less snow is falling. ?
Glaciers all around the world are retreating, and none are growing - anywhere.
Some isolated cases of a few advancing glaciers used to be pointed to, but that was a few years back. Is RocketRon's claim that
all are now in retreat true? If so, yikes.
Long term, its the Himalayas where this is going to have the most impact. ?
Meltwater from there feeds almost half the worlds population.
If the monsoon fails for even only a few years, the social disruption is going to be bigger than anything ever imagined ?
Whole empires in the past have fallen from lesser calamities....
And he didn't even mention global sea level rise, or collapse of ecosystems...
Bruce