Climate report:
Droughts, starvation, diseaseThe harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17554963/from/ET/
1 comment:
Pete,
I think I figured out where they get their stuff. It's from the Book of Revelations.
Google up Prof Bell, Canadian climatologist.
Notice all the apocalyptic scenes of glacial calving. We watched an hour of them the other day on one of the HD channels, "Sunrise". I think the impression is being spread that these huge falls are something new and accounting purely to global warming.
But all these I've seen so far pale next to those famously filmed by Father Hubbard and his Bolex-16 in Alaska back in the 40s. Hubbard used to circle the public forum route and showed his films annually in our high school auditorium. In those days the calving surpassed the imagination. He described one of these magnificent slow motion falls as producing a wave big enuf to "sink the Lexington".
Maybe they're running out of ice, I don't know but doubt it. Anyway I don't rush around yelling about the sky falling as Gore is doing.
My feel about climate change is, we can only see shifting weather, not shifting climate. If we lived a few centuries longer it might be more clear, and then you'ld probably still only be guessing.
History channel had a good hour about short term climatic shifts through time, like the one that plunged Europe into a mini-iceage starting in the 1300s. That changed the entire political and agricultural history of the world, bringing about the abandonment of Greenland, starting the 100 year war, and countless other social disruptions caused by famine, and established the potatoe as a staple since grains couldn't survive the cold weather.
The Pentagon, it said, has been running scenarios about a coming iceage that might result if glacial ice melt covers the north Atlantic with light water that doesn't fall to bottom and supply the southward bottom flow of water that completes the convection cell that drives the Gulf Stream and warms the northern latitudes. Pentagon have been making a detailed study of the history of the 1300s and later, with an eye to the social destabilization we might expect from a shift to cold weather and the military necessities that would be called for.
It seems if we are on the side of either global warming or global cooling or neither (and one shouldn't really be on "sides" any more in climatology than in astronomy) we'll likely see a revisit of an ice age in any case. I think the film, The Day After Tomorrow", addressed this global freezing aspect.
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