About 25 years ago we had several unseasonably mild winters strung together. It devastated the snowmobile industry and ruined several cross country skiing events for me. A millennia ago Erik the Red had a thriving agricultural settlement in Greenland - it must have been a-lot warmer then. Weather is highly chaotic and unpredictable. If there's any doubt to this simply monitor the accuracy with which the heavily funded national weather service can predict the weather five or ten days from now. I'm pretty sure the hottest years this century were in the thirtys and they were also accompanied by increased tropical storm activity. Funny the media has forgotten the dust bowl years.
This is a truly clever pseudoscience in that anything that happens can be argued to support it. If it gets hotter then it must be true. If it gets colder then the cold is somehow explained to be caused by global warming so it must be true. If theres a bad storm (like there never used to be bad storms) that's a sure sign of global warming and it must be true.
The Earth is a changing place and always has been. Even the continents are on the move. Species are constantly appearing and disappearing. I'm told where I live used to be under 100 feet of ice - glad it's warmed up since then.
If my limited knowledge of the Earth is any indication we can expect the climate to change drastically from what it is today and many species to become extinct as a result. Fortunately, we can also expect the climate to continue to change drastically and many new species to appear. It happened before we were here and it will continue to happen long after we're gone.
Damned if it isn't snowing again.
Originally Posted by gerv
"Global warming" is probably not a great term for what we are seeing and there's no guarantee that your particular neck of the woods won't in fact become cooler. If climate change affects ocean currents anywhere near what is now suspected, Northern Europe could be considerably cooler.
I still can't believe, though, that folks still refuse to believe the climate is *way* different than it was 25 years ago. There are definitely some serious side effects from this. I come from a part of Canada where a 500 year old fishery resource disappeared practically overnight. Scientists there thought over-fishing played a role, but they now also believe another factor was that changing water temperatures affected reproduction cycles. Whatever happened, the resource is gone and is not coming back anytime soon.
I guess if this was the only story about "climate change", I would be skeptical, but there seem to be quite a few others.