Global Cooling from the 1970's Time and Newsweek

[danastas]

Just wondering, did you actually see the Gore movie. I found it insufferable because of Gore (never voted for the guy) but it did have some alarming bits. Anyone who watches the damage done by boreholes to the Antarctic will realize that our scientists are not being paranoid and alarmist enough. They have never even imagined some of nature's best tricks.

[YetAnotherOne]

I've not seen Gore's film as I view taking information on global warming from Al Gore as being the rough equivalent to taking opinions on the value of freedom of the press from Joseph Goebbels; they would both fancy themselves experts in their field of endeavor and each might put forth a few gems of wisdom but one is far more likely to encounter a mere polemic than a thoughtful discussion.

[xenophobe]

If you want to take merit into Gore's movie, you must also take merit into the counterpoint as well.

To only listen to one side of a story and make judgment before examining the counterpoint is really laughable and shows that one should not even be commenting at all.

[YetAnotherOne]

Agreed. If one is to listen to Gore then one should also consider what folks like Singer have to say. I tend to prefer information sources that aren't actively trying to railroad us towards one end of the debate or another.

[lerxstcat]

No I'm dead serious. The retreat of the permanent portion of Mars' polar ice caps is a phenomenon that has been observed over the past 25-30 years, the precise time frame in which the Earth stopped cooling and may have begun a warming cycle (depending on whether you believe the satellite atmospheric temperature measurements or the observed surface temperature measurements).

You may have noticed that large brightly glowing orb that appears in the sky from time-to-time. It's a well-known fact that the energy output of same is not constant but rather varies quite a bit. The surface temperature of its satellites tends to vary with its energy output. Thus when the surface temperature of two of said nearby satellites begins to rise in a vanishingly short time span (in geologic terms) the simplest explanation is that the large energy source in the sky is likely playing a large role.

Occam's razor informs us that we need not seek a more complex explanation when a simple one already exists. The proponents of the human-induced warming hypothesis typically wish to ignore, belittle, or dismiss with less than even a cursory examination the concurrent warming observed on Mars and other bodies in our solar system when natural climatic variation is certainly the simple explanation in this context. I would merely like to see a number of thorough and unbiased analyses of the amount of warming on other bodies throughout the solar system as compared to the amount of warming on Earth. If there is a negative differential we can stop here, if not we then must examine other potential causes including but not limited to possible human impact.

I keep waiting for Fred Singer to make a pilgrimage to Al Gore's home where Dr. Singer will play Galileo to Gore's Bellarmine.

That makes perfect sense. If the sun is the cause of the warming of both planets then that changes the whole perspective regarding the solution as well. Seems like the prime suspect looked at that way, so we should investigate that first.

[StukaJU87]

Can we get this show on the road any faster here? It is like 48 degrees and I prefer 70 degrees.

[rjohnstone]

Just a little side note on Mars.
It has no moon large enough to stabilize its rotation on its axis.
Its polar ice caps melt and then refreeze because the planet tips to one side or the other and exposes one of the ice caps directly at the sun with no night fall.
It does full 90 degree tilts every few decades as it revolves around the sun.

Discovery channel ran a show called, "If the Earth had no moon" and it gave some interesting insight into how a moon can affect a planets climate.
A simple 1 degree tilt in the Earth's rotation on its axis turned northern Africa into a desert.

[YetAnotherOne]

If it were only Mars that would be one thing but there's also evidence of warming on Jupiter, Pluto (2), and elsewhere in our solar system (sorry I couldn't find other links quickly). After all, we know that temperatures have been significantly warmer than they are today in our fairly recent past. As illustrated by the point and attempted refutation of said point in that article, we don't even know enough about relatively recent past global climate to say with any certainty what a "normal" climate would look like.

At some point we need to step back from the hysteria and take a long sober look at the evidence which strongly suggests that something other than human action is the prime mover in climate change and whether such change, should it occur, is more likely to have a net positive or negative impact. After all there is strong evidence that human civilization has flourished during warm periods and retreated during cold periods.