I think we are experiencing the normal ebb and flow of weather that the earth always has had. The earth was in an ice age 10,000 years ago and also 75,000 years ago and probably even at other times. It subsequently "warmed up" between those events. Did manking cause that? I live among the evidence of the glaciation that resulted from those long cold spells - on the floor of of glacial Lake Missoula.
It"s a fact that Greenland was relatively ice free and colonized by Scananavians in ~14th century. They farmed the countryside but ultimately starved out due to cooler weather causing the island to be snow covered and the growing seasons too short. This has been borne out by reputable forensic archeologists who have studied the locations where these settlers lived.
In my other life, I worked on some programs for high speed commercial aircraft flying at 60,000 to 70,000 ft where the effects of engine emmissions were feared to have an effect on weather and the ozone layer. Studies funded by NASA with several universities around world cmae to the conclusion that the effects would be immperceptable. Now these projections were made on the basis of atmopheric models which I don"t have a lot of confidence in based on my many years of computer modeling experience in the field of internal aerodynamics. None the less those were the independent analytical results that were put forth and there is no historical background to fall back on to support or not support the results. It was the only methodology that could be used for this problem.
Further in the course of these studies, data was generated to quantify the ammounts of various gases(almost every gas you can think of including water vapor are greenhouse gases) that were generated naturally and not mankind linked. These were compared to estimates of projected levels of man made emmissions and the the additional man made contributions were fractions of a percent. (I found it interesting that most of the methane release in the atmosphere is from rotting vegatation in jungle areas of the world. Most of the nitrous oxide comes from equitorial thuderstorms in thes summer months.)
The current belief in projecting climate is based on the results of modeling excercises. Without getting overly technical and going into all the details of the modeling, let me say that first of all, with all the super computing capability that is available today, the methodolgy of reliably predicting the weather three days from today is iffy at best. Why would I believe something as complicated as mankind "s effect on what climate would be like 100 years or even 20 years from now could be predicted now? As I said earlier, I was involved in aerodymamic modeling and with much wind tunnel data and detailed flow measurements, we were able to reliably predict flow fields around a streamlined body in about the 1985-1990 time period. These were 3 million node problems( relatively small compuational space)with no heat transfer, no chemical reactions, etc. While I don"t know the exact details of the climate prediction models, I would estimate that this model would have to have a minimuim of about one billion nodes and the constituative equations to tie it all together would number in the tousands and these would all have to be validated (as we did with measurements for our three million node aero problem )in order for the results to be believable. I would submit that this has never been done. Therefore GIGO-garbage in,garbage out!
I would also challenge the moedelrs to march back in time and predict the last ice age since they claim to have the ability to predict climate change. M y point is that changing the world economy on the basis a relatively short time span of arithmetically averaged weather data (and even some of that is questionable) and an unvalidated computer model, in my opinion, is just plain foolish. It is the height of arrogance, in my opinion, for these modelers to say "we know that we are right and the science is incontrovertable." People whio don"t agree with them are written off as shills of the oil industry, big business, yadda,yadda yadda.
My conclusions are:
History says we have had variable weather for many years Mankind is responsible for a small prcentage of "greenhouse gases" found in the atmosphere.
Our ability to even predict short term weather with any certainty is not that great.
Accurate modeling of the climate requires validated constituative equations and an enormous computational space. The validation is lacking so the results are, at best, questionable.
Therefore I don"t believe anybody knows, quantatatively, whether mankind is having an effect on the planet"s climate.
Does this mean we continue to foul our planet? Absolutely not! But lets do the right things and try to maximize our energy efficieny, use alternate, renewable energy sources where appropriate and continue to study the effects of mans use of resources on the atmospher in order come to conclusions that are supportable with hard eveidence and not emmotion. And for God"s sake, keep the politicans out of the discussions until the facts are established.
We have done this with DDT and with flourocarbons/ozone. The evidence was solid and everybody got behind it and made the changes for the right reasons.
You asked and that"smy opinion on this subject. Opinions are like belly buttons;everybody has one.
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