The Ice Age is comin', the sun's zoomin' in...

I just can't leave this topic alone, but I consider it important to preserve some semblance of a "debate" in the whole Global Warming thing. It seems to have been hijacked by some sort of Luddite soft-lefty/environmentalism cabal who have an agenda I don't quite fathom.

The US Senate speech the title links to gives me some hope that there is more than one side to the issue. For the record (again), I have enough geology and history to know that the Earth's climate isn't constant, "an inconvenient truth" that Al Gore and co. don't seem to want people to know about. Check out the link provided for "the Science" and see a lot of alarmist claptrap with no supporting evidence, and if you're so inclined go look it up. I've done my research already and I know it's taken from very self-interested sources who ignore things that conflict with what they want to put across. That, by the way, is NOT science.

I am a sensible person, and I'm very much in favour of us limiting the amount of waste we dump into the ecosystem just on general principle. This is where I think our efforts should go, to keep us from poisoning ourselves and everything else. However, I remember a geology poster session I went to in the late 1980s. The topic I reported on for class was "Holocene Proxy Climate Data from the Canadian Arctic".

It was a while ago, and before the current hysteria about warming, but the upshot was that 5000-8000 years ago it was a lot warmer in the arctic than it is now, evidenced by the remnants of plant life that couldn't possibly survive there now.

So is it getting warmer? Looks like it. There are a number of other questions, the big ones being: is this such a bad thing? And, is destroying the industrialized world's economy (Kyoto Protocol, if implemented) going to make a difference to the result?

I have yet to be convinced that the answer to either of these is anything but "no". It was warmer than this when humanity thrived in places we can't really live today (e.g. Greenland). China, Russia and the entire developing world have not ratified Kyoto, so it'll only screw us over and not cool a damned thing.

Al, spend your time and money on things that will produce results, like improved alternative energy sources. The writing is already on the wall for our dependence on oil, and I am not going to freeze in the dark in the meantime to meet some feel-good international agreement that most of the world has no time for.