I remember (albeit vaguely) my undergraduate geology days in the late 1960s at the venerable College of William and Mary. Other than taking fun field trips about the Virginia Valley and Ridge, Blue Ridge, Piedmont, and Coastal Plain provinces, we worried about global cooling.
Our geology books discussed some of the evidence, scant though it may have been, and our enthusiastic professors mentioned the possibility that another Ice Age might soon be upon us. I think I recall writing a paper on that topic in my historical geology class.
Yeah, we were waiting for the glaciers to come sliding/rolling (??) down from the north, swallowing Richmond before gagging on Hopewell (chemical industries, anyone?) and then devouring Williamsburg before marching on to Newport News, Hampton Roads, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach.
Global warming? I don't think so.
I did not worry too much about global cooling in graduate school at the University of Arizona. As a budding hydrologist, I was concerned more with what would happen after all the glaciers melted and provided us with a gazillion acre-feet of water. But the scientific community was reaching a consensus on global cooling.
Or so I have believed lo these many years.
Now come Thomas C. Peterson of NOAA, William M. Connolley of the British Antarctic Survey, and John Fleck (yes, that John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal and blogging fame) who have the collective nerve to tell us that there was no such global cooling consensus, and that in fact, the possibility of anthropogenic global warming was dominating the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Their paper, "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus," recently graced the pages of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).
John talks about the impact of their paper and attempts to debunk their work. Read about it here.
Moi? Bummer. All that angst for nada.
"A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location.... I'm not one, though, who would attribute it to being man-made." -- Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK)
Research into climatic change has taken on huge dimensions. However, many scientists state that, in parallel to the research into so-called greenhouse gases, it is also necessary to pay much more attention to
investigating the relationship between the hydrosphere and climatic change.
Posted by: Best Bottled Water | Wednesday, 05 August 2009 at 03:45 PM
Research into climatic change has taken on huge dimensions. However, many scientists state that, in parallel to the research into so-called greenhouse gases, it is also necessary to pay much more attention to
investigating the relationship between the hydrosphere and climatic change.
If you would like to read some fresh ideas about the relation of the water
cycle and climate change, you may find interesting our publication "WATER
FOR THE RECOVERY OF THE CLIMATE - A NEW WATER PARADIGM". Publication is downloadable at http://www.waterparadigm.org and is destined both to professionals and amateurs in the field.
We wish you a pleasant reading.
It is time for recovery of the Climate
Posted by: Michal Kravcik | Tuesday, 20 January 2009 at 03:20 PM