This is inane. Anthropogenic global warming is progressing steadily,
and will progress faster as more people compete to make more money by
digging up and burning fossil carbon. That these same people have
inversted a small portion of their profits in denialist propaganda is
understandable, if immoral. That some of the kind of techniclly
sophisticated people who post here have fallen for this propaganda is
less understandable - it's the same kind of fear, uncertainty and
doubt propaganda that was spread around by the tobacco companies a
couple of decades ago, and - by no coincidence - some of the same
people who were active for the tobacco compaies back then are active
for the fossil-fuel extractors today.
The earth is heating up. Some dumb journalists thought that this meant
that every place was going to be warmer all through the year, and
siezed on every heat wave as an example of anthropogenic global
warming in action. This was rubbush, just as the claim that unusually
cold weather is evidence against anthropogenic global warming.
Not true. The earth - as a whole - is still heating up.
The climate hasn't changed much in the past few thousand years. If you
go back a bit further we had ice ages. The transitions from an ice age
to an interglacial involves the earth - as whole - warming up by about
6K.
At the end of the last ice age the warming trend was broken - for 1300
years - by the Younger Dryas, which came on and went away in less than
a decade, as the Gulf Stream switched off and turned back on again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
If we let Greenland keep on warming up, the ice cap may decide to
slide off into the ocean (as ice sheets are apparently prone to do,
based on ocean floor sediment data from the end of the last ice age)
and this might be enough to turn off the Gulf Stream, giving you quite
enough climate change to ruin the human community around the North
Atlantic.
It's not likely to happen, but messing around with the climate - as we
are now doing - is not a risk-free pass-time.
--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
==============================================================
Save your breath Bill. Climate change is a political discussion here, not
one to be moderated by fact.....