<snip>
Think global warming's bad? Wait till you see global cooling.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm
Todd Swearingen
<snip>
Good piece by Thom Hartmann, as usual.
This below is part of a previous discussion here in 2003, between me
and MM, which you might find interesting:
Interestingly, as a followup, the one response I got there was that
the possibility of global cooling is not getting enough attention.
The author nearly descended into vituperation (obviously my little
post must have been super-provocative), though that was not directed
precisely against me either.
That was the view in the late 60s, and indeed much earlier, up to as
much as a century ago I think. Since the early 1980s at least more
and better data, better ways of crunching it, further studies, have
increasingly indicated the opposite, now overwhelmingly so. I don't
think global cooling has been entirely disproved, but it's heavily
outweighed.
In 1982 a book appeared called The Survival of Civilization, written
by a strange person named John D. Hamaker, which predicted global
cooling. He paints a picture of rising CO2 levels triggering a
sudden and catastrophic ice age. He sees it as a regular phenomenon,
tracing it back through the last 17 ice ages, or something like
that. The mechanism is that the topsoil runs out of minerals,
leading to a decrease in the amount of biomass and a consequent
release of CO2 into the atmosphere, which at first triggers warming
and then an ice age. The ice grinds up a huge amount of surface rock
into dust, as glaciers do but on a much vaster scale, finally
retreating to leave a remineralised soil behind via the rock dust.
It's quite a persuasive picture, and he does have his evidence for
it. He reckons this time we've simply hastened the onset of the
process with our fossil-fuel CO2 releases. He also proposes
arresting the process by remineralising the land worldwide with rock
dust. He even designed a handy machine to grind up rocks on the spot.
I read the book at the time (a convert friend sent it to me). It's a
cranky book but there's quite a lot of sense in it, particularly
about soil mineralisation, but I didn't accept the main conclusion
that a rapid transition to a new ice-age was imminent: "The broad
truth is that without radical and immediate reform (particularly in
this nation [the US]), civilization will be wrecked by 1990 and
extinct by 1995." Well, maybe he just got the timing wrong. Or was
he right and we just didn't notice? :-)
He was ignored by the science community (which probably means he's
either a misguided nut or a great prophet). And now it's become a
bit of a cult book on the Internet, bad timing notwithstanding.
You can find it online (pdf) here, FWIW:
http://www.remineralize.org/don/tsoc.pdf
or here:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010146tsoc.pdf
So we'll fry or we'll freeze, or something. But certainly something.
And it definitely makes sense to cut the fossil fuels, but fast.
I wondered whether it wasn't Hamaker who inspired that silly movie, I
forget it's name:
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/35379/1/
And also Andrew Marshall's perhaps equally silly Pentagon report (or
maybe the movie did that):
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/BIOFUEL/32387/
Weathering the Crisis - World Bank, Pentagon: global warming red alert
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/BIOFUEL/32446/
Pentagon Goes Crazy for Massive Climate Change
See:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Andrew_Marshall
Andrew Marshall - SourceWatch
... along with acolytes Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz
and many others, including the odious Thomas P.M. Barnett:
http://wwia.org/pipermail/biofuel/Week-of-Mon-20050110/004788.html
[Biofuel] Oil politics trumps everything.
Best wishes
Keith
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