Charlie Edmondson  wrote:
>
> Well, it is generally agreed that the Earth is getting warmer.  But the
> why and the result is where the real money is getting made!

Exactly.  When things change the folks with the working crystal
balls make the bucks.

> Anyone else read the interesting article in Analog this month, that AGW
> has been going on a lot longer than a couple of hundred years, but more
> like about 11,000!  If it weren't for man, the glaciers would be pretty
> thick around Chicago now... 8-)

Wtihout broadcast B5, may as well have glaciers.

Most of the press ignores the Little Age age and all press seems to
ignore the idea that the current warming trend might just be a higher
peak between ice ages.  How much this is true in the scientific
journals I can't say.

There's little enough mention in the lay magazines like Sci Am
and Discover about the non-human contribution of volcanoes and
such.  Is the human effect like a tempest in a teapot or like a
lever triggering a big rock to start its fall?  I sure dunno.

> And, why all the negatives with global warming?  Much has been made in
> history about the period 1000 years ago when it was WARMER than it is
> today, when the Vikings settled Greenland, and there was a great,
> fertile age in Europe.  Again, bad news and fear sells, telling everyone
> that its getting warmer, and we are in for a golden age of fertility and
> growth just gets you patted on the back and ignored!

The biggest effect seems to be a shift of arable land away from
the equator without a huge difference in the change of total amount.
More deserts, less tundra, farmland shifts north.

It isn't the fact that the total ends up nearly the same, it's the
*change* that people see as the problem.  People want to view the
world as fixed.  It isn't fixed.
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