I am responding to the replies on my post, first on CO2 being absorbed by the oceans. I never said it was good or bad, just that the oceans are still absorbing CO2 which is why the levels are a lot lower in the atmosphere than they should be. The point being, there is too much focus on CO2, the levels have been higher in the past and they have been much lower but nature adapts either way, like a buffer system. I would worry a lot more about CFC’s as one molecule of CFC’s can destroy 100 000 Ozone molecules!!!
I read the part about there being more trees now than 50 years ago in a newspaper article, I vaguely remeber mention that many forests have been replanted across the US and parts of Europe and now the replanting of trees in the pulp and paper industry is standard procedure. One of the largest problems with that I guess is that when you hear about mass deforestation like the intentional forest fires in New Guinea, it seems major, but then again New Guinea is quite small on a global scale… it isn’t a good thing, nor is it a way to dismiss the fact that trees are being cut down, just that it isn’t as bad as in the 50’s to the 70’s where there was no awareness and no one gave two shits.
There are problems associated with both global cooling and warming, and neither one nor the other is really all that much better. The biggest problem with an ice age is mainly the ice cover, forcing people south (if they live more North) where they will no less compete for limited land availability and resources, and with a global population at around 7 billion people, that is not a pretty site. Also the diversity of animals will decline with a colder climate. Yeah sea level will fall and some land will be exposed, and perhaps some animals will appear that are large, but the quality of that land is the problem, but that is a whole other discussion which I don’t really know too much about.
And the last thing I saw as being problematic in this form is all the measuring of previous temperatures used as proof. Ice core samples are only good to about 100 000 years ago. At around 250 000 years ago you start to get anamolies in the O18 (oxygen 18) content which is how they measure mean global temperature through ice samples, and that itself is a fairly long explanationa and is off topic. The ice core sample do indicate we ARE in an inter-glacial period (between a warming and cooling period), which means there are going to be large fluctuations in warmings and coolings.
But recorded temperatures over a course of only a few dozen or even a hundred years, that is not proof of anything, on a global time scale that is a fraction of a second. If the earth’s time scale was a clock, 12 being the present, humans only appeared in the last minute before 12. You’d have to take the temperatures from a period of several millions of years to indicate a general cooling or warming trend. My post was initially to discredit any warming trend occuring due soely to human activity, as the systems that drive these coolings and warmings are massive (as I indicated as generally as possible), and to think we can stop a warming trend is fallacy. Although we are having an impact, it is still pretty insignificant on the grand scheme of things.
I am a geologist…well in trainning… and one way we know about global ice ages and warmings is to look at the rock record, which represents anywhere from 1000 years to several millions of years. So there is no way of knowing right now if indeed we are in a warming or cooling period so there is no point in bickering about what some scientist said for either case. What we do know is we are still in an inter-glacial period, and that, according to the trend going back hundreds of millions of years, we are due for an ice age. Pollution and cutting trees makes things worse no doubt, but compared to the larger systems I talked about, not so much. In the 1700’s they had a mini ice age, in the 1100’s they had a mini ice age, right now we are in a warming period, it happens, we are in a inter-glacial period. Does that mean we are going into a warming period for the next million years, probably not, can we do something about it if we are, no.
Mastiffs are cool by the way, I prefer however the South African Mastiff, better known as the Boerboel. They can kill lions and are used to guard diamond mines in Africa from, well anything. If you google the history, they say that you can trace their ancestors back to before the time of Alexander in some cases. Look them up, they have a superhero line up of traits.