[ale] Disappointed in the recent climate research hack

[drifter]

What Al Gore doesn't want you to know is that the earth (or at least the 
Northern Hemisphere) has been Warm before. Circa 1000 AD Eric the Red and 
his son, Lief, led hundreds of Norse settlers to the shores of Greenland. 
These were farmers.  They subsisted by growing wheat. One of those 
settlements, Godhavn, is more than 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
By 1150 the climate began a shift to colder temperatures and by 1200 most 
of these settlements had been abandoned.  By 1350 all of Europe was caught 
in a "mini-ice age."
I have been trying for several years to get an answer to an obvious 
question:

Is it warm enough now to grow wheat at Godhavn?

I have queried several scientists active in the "global warming" debate and 
none has been willing to respond.

My point is that climate is a horribly complex subject and even the best 
scientists in the related fields have only a thin understanding of the vast 
number of variables involved.

The question is not, "Is the earth's climate getting warmer?"  It is.
The question is, "What all is causing it, and what percentage should be 
attributed to human activity." I would suggest that the answers to those 
questions are not as certain as some would have us believe. After all, we 
know that within the past 1000 years the earth has been at least this warm 
before and that warm spell can't realistically be attributed to human 
activity.

Sean




On Monday 23 November 2009 18:44:10 Jim Kinney wrote:
> > "wattsupwiththat.com".
> 
> It's the physicist in me that laughs when people use sites like that as
>  a reference to justify an argument.
> 
> I happen to have a relative who works in the climate research field.
>  Within the field there is about as much unanimity for climate change
>  being detrimental to human existence as there is within Biology for
>  evolution as a process that creates new species.
> 
> While a particular method or technique may be under intense scrutiny for
> validity, what is under test is not "if" it happens but "how bad" and
>  "how soon" and people are beginning to look at "what can we do about
>  it".
> 
> Sadly, this topic will affect every person on the planet and there are
>  damn few with the background to have it make sense and none of them are
>  in the places that have an impact of those people that can really make
>  changes. People are going to die. At this point it doesn't even need to
>  be catastrophic climate change. Just the population explosion is bad
>  enough. To really have an impact on climate change factors will require
>  a near complete collapse of the global economy since it will require a
>  cut back in energy consumption for decades to give time for the nuclear
>  plants to be built and come online. There's other pollution problems
>  with those power sources as well that have to be mitigated but for now,
>  barring solar powered CO2 scrubbers that can remove all the CO2
>  produced daily by cars and industry, it's an easier mitigation problem
>  as it's a solid and not (usually) a gas.
>