Quote:
We're not the cause of global warming.
Most probably it is a phase our planet goes through.
We're just accelerating it.
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Very nearly correct, IMHO. Let me change a few things ...
We're not
the cause of global warming.
Most probably it is a phase our planet goes through.
We're
just accelerating it.
Climate has been unstable for around five million years, due to either the Panamanian land bridge separating the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Himalayas being thrust up preventing the monsoons from reaching into North Asia, or both. Since then we've been swinging between glacial and inter-glacial ages.
Our activities - including what we put into the atmosphere, and widespread changes of land use and cover - will change climate in ways it would not otherwise have changed.
Now for my climate heretic moment ...
If we did
not alter the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, ti is nearly certain that sometime in the next couple of tens of thousands of years, the Earth would return to glacial conditions. For human purposes, that would be
bad.
[/heretic]
But if we overdo the greenhouse gases, we over-warm the planet, and push through a whole bunch of other changes, most notably shifting weather patterns and sea level rise. Given that our whole infrastructure is set up for things as they are today, significant change to climate is also bad for human interests.
[handwringer] ... but I also think that climate change won't really start to bite us on the arse for 50 to 100 years, and serious sea level rise will take several times longer, and we'll have screwed ourselves up with simple resource depletion (soil, water, fish, forests) and pollution long before then, so although I believe we are fooling with the climate, we have more urgent things to worry about. [/HW]
So, how about that celebrity gossip and sporting scandal, eh?