[Sonart]

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Dang, this is moving way too fast for me...

Quote by: Deadeye The Earth has been in a long warming trend started after the end of the last Ice Age. We are still in that warming trend. It will eventually turn and we will experience another Ice Age. This has been happening for a very long time and the cycle has repeated many times.

This is simply false. Since we leapt out of the last Ice Age, temperatures peaked about 6,000 years ago. We've been in an overall cooling trend since then, which, under normal circumstances, would be the beginning of a lengthy, 25,000 year descent into the next Ice Age. The medieval warm period led into the "Little Ice Age", which, if you examine it, was an extension of the cooling trend that ended... {{GASP}} ...what a coincidence! around 1800, near the beginning of the Industrial Age.






Once again, your facts are simply wrong.

Quote by: Deadeye This may or may not be so, but we do know for certainty that the temperature of the Earth is in constant flux and it will always be so.

Do you honestly believe that the world's scientists who've been studying global warming for the last 40 years aren't aware of all these natural fluctuations and taken them into account?

What did you imagine they've been doing all this time? Did you actually imagine that if you simply informed...

National Academy of Sciences
American Geophysical Union
American Meteorological Society
National Weather Association
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NASA
Stanford, Oxford, MIT and gawd knows how many other univeristies
Scripps and Woodshole Oceanographic Research Institutes

...all of whom have declared that global warming is a fact, that we caused it, and that it's happening faster than predicted, that the earth's temperatures are in "constant flux", that they'd all slaps their foreheads in unison and shout, "Oh my gosh, why didn't we think of that?!?!"

Quote by: Deadeye I do not believe that the evidence that man causes climate change is overwhelming enough for me to revise my lifestyles.

Believe it! See above.

Quote by: Deadeye Natural climate change can happen very rapidly without our messing with it. Two examples: The great volcanic eruption in Krakatowa caused an almost immediate reduction in temperature. We suffered cloudy shys for three years. I think it was Shelly who wrote about it.

Yes, and we know EXACTLY what the cause was, and that the effect disapated within a couple of years. Current global warming has been going on for 200 years, it's accelerating, and we also know EXACTLY what the cause is. Human forcing of greenhouse gases.

Quote by: Deadeye Also the so called "little Ice Age" may have been caused by the same eruption. We are just now recovering from that climatic era. The great freeze in our Northwest is an example of this weather.

The "Little Ice Age" is part of the cooling trend that has been happening since the end of the last Ice Age.

Quote by: Deadeye An Ice Age comes very rapidly.

No, it doesn't... it takes about 75,000 years to descend to the bottom of an Ice Age, and about 10,000 years to come out of it.

You're completely full of it... you're simply making stuff up based on tidbits you've heard.

Quote by: Deadeye The temperature of the Earth in the 14th Century was much warmer (about 4 degrees on the average) than it is today.

Once again... no, it wasn't.

An Ice Age lasts a long time. I think around 1.5 million years.

No, Deadeye, it doesn't. An average Ice Age lasts about 80,000 to 100,000 years, about 1/15th of what you're suggesting.

The "little Ice Age" is what historians use to describe the colder climate in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The exceptionally cold winter at Valley Forge, the years of frozen weather during the 1880's, even the frigid 1944/45 winter in Europe.

Once again, the 'Little Ice Age' was part of the cooling trend leading us into the next Ice Age...

...except it got interupted during -- as you yourself stated -- in the 19th century, during the industrial revolution, when human population combined with industrialization to begin pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

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