[Dean's World] Dean: Massive Climate Change

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dean:
Massive Climate Change
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1141213337.shtml


   Researchers at NASA have published a recent paper in PNAS (Proceedings
   of the National Academy of Sciences) showing massive flooding caused
   by drastic climate change [1]about 8,900 years ago. [2]massive climate
   change 

   This sort of thing is why a lot of us are rather skeptical that human
   action is causing unprecedented changes to the planet's ecology: the
   ecology has never been all that stable in the first place. We came out
   of the last major period of glaciation barely 10,000 years ago. Europe
   came out of its own "little ice age" only about 500 years ago. When
   George Washington famously crossed the Delaware river, his troops
   walked across it because it was frozen over solid--the famous painting
   of them doing it in boats was pure artistic license. I don't believe
   the Delaware has frozen over in living memory.

   For less than the cost of implementing the Kyoto protocol, which all
   the scientists admit would be only a tiny first step, we could provide
   clean food and drinking water to 100% of the world population.
   Meanwhile, there's substantial reason to believe that within another
   half century most of the world will be off of petroleum as a primary
   energy source anyway. Why turn the world upside down when we're on the
   brink of bringing most of humanity into a better place anyway?

References

   1. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/abrupt_change.html
   2. file://localhost/files/deanesmay-143186main_giss_map_lg.gif