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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
Glacier National Park in 1850 had 150 glaciers.
Today, in Glacier National Park there are ... 25 glaciers.
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That's why this period is called an interglacial.
The ice left over from the previous ice age will melt.
And the longer this period lasts, the more ice will melt.
That's the normal scheme of things.
Driving through the valleys in the Alps, chances are good you'll be driving through valleys carved by glaciers that have long been gone.
Same experience can be had in the Rockies.
Cruising the Norwegian fjörds, you're sailing where glaciers once shaped the now stunning landscape.
Nobody's complaining that these glaciers have long vanished, or has started a global scare because of it.
It all boils down to what you pick as your reference period - wether for artic ice or glaciers.
What's the reference period against which to judge todays evolutions.
Picking the reference period, clearly determines how
bad things are. Or rather appear to be.
The Holocene graph on Wikipedia labels the period 4 to 8 K years ago as a climate optimum.
Well, we're solidly within the proxied temps from that period.
Look at the spikes you can see there.
Some of them are pretty impressive and point to quick changes in temps recorded in these proxies.
It also shows the reversal in the lightblue and red proxies, with the red proxy spiking again - like it did 10, 11 K years ago.
Climate changes, and apparently it changes quite drastical depending on time and place.
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What will we call Glacier National Park when all the glaciers melt?
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What do we call squares when they are anything but square ?
We still call them squares.
As for the TED presentation, I called it quits when the bloke started about indisputable truth. Once the truth-word is out, once the indisputable is claimed by either side, a debate is no longer possible and you end up in religious-like thinking.
It should be noted that these truth-words in what previously was a climate debate have almost invariably come from the believers' side. Wether it's this TED presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, or the title on Sir Attenboroughs contribution.
That's where the believers in the scientific world have crossed over to the religious/artistic world, and have started screaming "Panic" and have started working on emotions. Have started preaching their beliefs.
And we should note that it hasn't been too pretty or ethical, with instances of believers trying to keep sceptic scientists from publishing or gaining a forum in the controlled media.
If one can't prove his point, these would be the very tactics to push one's beliefs. It's how it was done in the past.
A sceptic isn't an opponent.
It's someone you need to convince with hard facts, not with claims that it is so-and-so. Sceptics won't be won over by the sort of scheming and plotting unearthed by the Climategate scandal either.
If one's really telling the truth, these ploys are quite unnecessary.
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Edit 1: Another amplifying/feedback loop
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Clearly all these effects somehow also create the conditions that lead to the climate cooling down again.
The dust in the Vostok graph could well be that trigger mechanism
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Edit 2: Ten hottest years on record
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Yes. So what ?
We've only been recording for a ridiculously short period of time.
And no-one's debating that the climate is indeed changing.
It has done so forever. It did so before humans even existed.
Climate change doesn't need us to make it happen - and far less to prevent it.
What really frightens me is scientists developing methods to cool down the atmosphere by doing things like emitting sulphur into it, and getting a worldwide media forum to propose these techniques.
They're proposing to actively alter the climate because they see a change they do not fully understand and can hardly explain.
If we were to accept the theory - 'cause it isn't more than a theory - that CO2 drives climate change, the greenhouse effect and all that, then why aren't we seeing unprecedented temperatures with unprecedented levels of CO2 ?
Compared to the coldest periods in the ice ages, temps were 8 to 10° lower, and CO2 levels were 100ppm lower than the claimed "optimum" of 280ppm.
We're now at 100ppm more CO2 than that, so where's the 8 to 10° increase in temperature when compared to the optimum
We're not seeing anywhere near that increase in T.
What are we seeing ?
Temperature peaks that are still lower than proxied temperature peaks 7 and 8 thousand years ago.
And those in turn are still lower than the proxied temperature peaks of the previous interglacials.
It wouldn't take very long for that giant microwave oven called Sun to heat up Earth.
Our total energy consumption is merely 1 thousand of the Sun's energy input on earth.
Yet such an 8 to 10° drop is easily achieved by being rotated away from the sun for a mere 8 or 12 hours, and in a couple of hours, the temperature is restored by turning into the sunlight again.
It just gives an idea of how massive the Sun's input on our climate is.
Using all the human-burned fossil energy, you still wouldn't be able to replicate this daily cooling / heating cyclus. We use a lot of that energy just to buffer the temperature in our small micro-climate enclosures called buildings.
Do we need fuel conservation, and should we look at more sustainable energy sources ?
Surely, because we're eating away at Earth's resources at a rate that can't be sustained by natural processes.
And we're burning off oil that could be put to far better uses.
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