(Untitled)

[tgrauzer]

In today's strange synchronicity, did anyone else notice that the front page of today's Wikipedia has a featured article on global warming; meanwhile, in sports news, the Miami Heat won the NBA championship; and the NHL season concludes with a Stanley Cup victory by the Carolina Hurricanes. And, of course, it is summer solstice today. Weird enough

Comments

[earlofstomp]

Why yes that would be just about weird enough for today...

Happy Solstice, may the seasonal tides bring you balance in good times and bad...

[saveena]

Are we really facing global warming or is this just part of the Earth's natural trend? I remember hearing about global cooling when I was a child in the 1970's. I've even read articles about global cooling from that time period. Are we sure that this isn't a natural cycle that will go back to cooling in another decade or so?

[tgrauzer]

This point is brought up by conservative politicians and business interests to dismiss the idea that Earth's average temperature rise might be caused by industrial sources. The Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming# explains things more precisely than I can, but essentially the rise in CO2 emissions has increased hugely in the years since the Industrial Revolution in the 1750's. While solar activity does fluctuate from year to year and century to century, its variation has not undergone such a rapid increase. Yet average temperatures all over Earth have been rising along with the increase in CO2 emissions.

I might wonder whether the articles you read on global cooling had to do with nuclear winter, a concept posited by Carl Sagan and others in the 1970's, that holds that the dust blown into the air by a large-scale nuclear war would dim the sun for decades, causing an overall decrease in global temperature.

[saveena]

No, there were news articles about global cooling that were not associated with nuclear war. While trying to find the exact article on the web, I stumbled on something connected to global warming causing global cooling: http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/news/freeze.html. An article proving this theory: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20020015034521data_trunc_sys.shtml... )