Monday, January 14, 2008

Puzzling stuff from William Calvin

I just happened to stumble across these paragraphs from William Calvin:
Back in 1968, when I first heard about global warming while visiting the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, almost everyone thought that serious problems were several centuries in the future. That's because no one realized how ravenous the world's appetite for coal and oil would become during a mere 40 years. They also thought that problems would develop slowly. Wrong again.

I tuned into abrupt climate change about 1984, when the Greenland ice cores showed big jumps in temperature and snowfall, stepping up and down in a mere decade but lasting centuries. I worried about global warming setting off another flip but I still didn't revise my notions about a slow time scale for the present greenhouse warming.

Greenland changed my mind. About 2004, the speedup of the Greenland glaciers made a lot of climate scientists revise their notions about how fast things were changing. When the summer earthquakes associated with glacial movement doubled and then redoubled in a mere ten years, it made me feel as if I was standing on shaky ground, that bigger things could happen at any time.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see any obvious relationship between American SUVs and Greenland earthquakes.

You really should check out his "Path To Climate Restoration" graph here.

See also his article "The Great Climate Flip-Flop" here.

Excerpt:
When 'climate change' is referred to in the press, it normally means greenhouse warming, which, it is predicted, will cause flooding, severe windstorms, and killer heat waves. But warming could also lead, paradoxically, to abrupt and drastic cooling — a catastrophe that could threaten the end of civilization.

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