Who else thinks Global Warming is like Y2K - a sham.?

Question

The "scientists" if you want to call them that are so full of ****. Global warming has been doing its thing since the dinosaurs. Ice ages and warming for millions of years. It is nothing new NOR is it getting worse. The temperature variations are not huge, in fact not even out of the norm for the most part if you look at the facts.

Answer 1

First of all about the "Y2K sham". I'm a software engineer and there certainly was a Y2K problem. The world's software and databases were riddled with 2 digit years. Everywhere. An enormous amount of time, money and energy was spent hunting this stuff down and fixing it. We were worried that we hadn't found all of it. But we did. And so successfully, that people like you have the ignorance to even doubt there was a problem. Let me assure you, there was a problem. And let's hope we can address the atmospheric imbalances so that 20 years from now, another generation can doubt there ever was a problem.

Now, to discuss GW:

Yes, climate change occurs naturally, since way before the dinosaurs. Why would that fact have any bearing on the established more than 90% certainty that man is the cause of the current global warming?

There are natural cycles of about 20,000 years, 40,000 years and 100,000 years that have been somewhat regular over the last 800,000 years for which we've been looking at ice core samples. (There's information from other sources such as sea sediments that goes back further, but it's not contradictory.) The information from the ice cores leads us to infer that we have been enjoying a cyclical warm period and we were about to head back into an ice age.

However, due to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the descent into ice age isn't happening. This would be a good thing except that the buildup is so huge as to send things reeling in the other direction.

This recent buildup is primarily due to deforestation, end products of fossil fuel combustion and methane produced by livestock. Right now CO2 is at a level 30% greater than any seen during the last 800,000 years and the rate of CO2 increase hasn't been seen in millions of years.

Here's some background info on climate change from a politically neutral source written about 8 years ago: http://www.lakepowell.net/sciencecenter/paleoclimate.htm .I found one inaccuracy in it. It says, "So far in the past 18,000 years, the earth's temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and the sea level has risen 300 feet." That directly contradicts the graph above where it shows a rise of only 5c which is 9 degrees F. Otherwise, the information seems to agree with other stuff I've read.

The 4th IPCC report was made available a week ago and said basically that the science was unassailable. It had been presented to policy makers earlier and as a result, Bush got into line in his SOTU address. And now, ExxonMobile, which had been responsible for funding most of the global warming skepticism (http://www.exxonsecrets.org/ ), just put out a statement saying basically the same thing (http://www2.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Newsroom/NewsReleases/corp_nr_mr_climate_ipcc.asp ).

I think the discussion now is going to be more centered on what to do about it rather than whether or not it's a problem.