(February 13, 2011 at 3:41 am)Chuck Wrote:(February 13, 2011 at 12:28 am)Zen Badger Wrote: Makes you wonder what caused all the ice ages before we came along.....
Much of our infrastructure, demographic and geographic foot print is built upon and laid out according to the temperature norms that the world has experienced in the last 300 years. A deviation away from this norm of even 5 degrees, much smaller than what it takes to repeat the Wisconsonian glacial maximum of 20,000 years ago, will bring about a massive and persistent demographic, agricultural, and economic crisis of a scale that will make the 1-2% GDP growth rate impact of proposed GHG measure seem negligible. The fact that earth has seen natural temperature swings over hundreds of thousands to millions of years vastly larger than what we've been able to pull off in our vainglorious attempt to burn all the carbon we can get our hands merely meant the earth will happily move on after our civilization all but collapse.
Maybe you would like to point out that earth has experienced and survived multiple asteroidal impacts with energy millions of times larger than the combined yield of all of the world's nuclear weapons, and propose that it would therefore be no big deal if we were to fight a nuclear war or two.
Still goes nowhere to explain previous glaciation and 'global warming trends' prior to humanity and our love for burning fossil fuel.
"The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest." G'Kar-B5
