On 9/19/07, kat <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> For Ken:  http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0920/p14s01-sten.html
>
> And to weigh in on the debate, I planet myself firmly in the middle - I
> don't think we humans are necessarily the main cause of global warming

The thing that matters is that humans have tipped the global cycles
over what is known as an inflection point.  Think of it this way: for
millions of years the planet has been going through regular solar
variations and adapted many ways to compensate for this.  It's like a
well balanced teeter totter.  Sometimes a little hot, sometimes a
little cold, but always swinging back and forth.  Then humans come
along and start piling a huge amount of green house gases on one end
of the teeter totter.  The teeter totter isn't going to go back into
the normal back and forth pattern without some help on the other end
of the teeter totter.  Humans might not be the main cause for the
teeter totter going back and forth, but we are the main reason it's
going to stop going back and forth unless we do something about it.

> (we haven't been on this planet long enough to be accurate in  our
> records regarding cyclical data)

What may seem surprising is that we can be accurate in figuring out
the cycles of the global climate teeter totter going back tens of
thousands of years without human recorded climate records.  Rather we
can measure the amounts of various radioactive isotopes in various
geological samples.  The one you hear about most often being ice cores
from Antarctica.  The ratios of these various isotopes can tell us
things like temperatures, green house gas concentrations and
geological age.  Nature has been kind enough to provide us with all
the records we need going back over 400, 000 years:

 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/vostok.html

(or search on NOAA antarctic ice cores if you want to get into more
detail, though many of the 1st links are a bit old).

> but I also think we certainly don't
> help matters any in the way we are using up the planet's resources - we
> all need to slow down and each do our part to conserve energy and think
> about how our activities affect the physical world.  When we have
> another Ice Age, how are we going to cope?

Sooner than that: how are we going to have enough resources when 1
billion + Chinese people start to have life styles similar to North
Americans?

-- 
Peter Hunsberger

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