Averting Climate Catastrophe? Ostriches Can’t Keep Their Eyes on the Prize ~ Confusion prevails around the tropical topic of climate change. The term ‘global warming’ has been replaced by this far more anodyne label since corporate spin doctors and related liars were paid vast sums to apply their talents to distracting the public from the greatest threat planetary human civilization has ever faced (with the possible exception of nuclear technology and weaponry). Are our rampant industries responsible for today’s undeniable alterations in weather systems, the rapid disappearance of the world’s fresh water supplies and the melting of the icecaps – or are all these effects merely symptoms of grand cycles that have prevailed for millions of years? Do we face catastrophic global heating and concomitant sea level rises or an equally devastating ice age? Is the Sun the only real driver of our planet’s suddenly chaotic weather systems or can we moderate the changing cycles on planet Earth - and even in the heavens? Despite argument and contention about facts and figures, it’s a foregone conclusion that the effects of human influence on the Earthly ecosystem have never been so profound. Alterations in the makeup of the atmosphere, the disappearance of vegetation from much of the planet’s land surface and the radical depletion of oceanic life – and lifeforms in general – are radical changes for which humans are definitely responsible. Human activity now rivals the powers of the mythical gods and goddesses whose tempestuous wills ruled over our minds in bygone times of civilisation’s infancy. To understand our present situation we must understand what occurred in the past. As many climate change skeptics (including Australia’s Ian Plimer, for instance) have pointed out, the Earth has undergone six great Ice Ages and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were extremely high when each of these major glaciations commenced. As many ask, how can CO2 be a major ‘greenhouse gas’ in light of these findings? Simplistic thinking fails to recognise the causes and effects of profound events which always occur at the end of each relatively warm interglacial period such as ours, which modern humans have inhabited throughout all clearly recorded history. The beneficent climate of the Holocene era – the current warm interregnum which we inhabit – is the longest interglacial period Earthly life has ever experienced, since planetary glaciation cycles first commenced only a few million years ago. By all known precedent the planet’s higher latitudes should already be covered with miles-thick sheets of ice. The ends of interglacial periods are marked by global heating which throws vast amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere. This is how so much of the world’s fresh water manages to fall – as snow – on the poles and mountaintops, forming the massive stores of ice that prevail in the long cold millennia of so-called Ice Ages (when much of the world remains quite warm and stable - but quite a bit drier with so much of the world’s available water locked up in icecaps). At the end of the interglacial warm times, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are usually poured into the air by unimaginable conflagrations of much of the world’s vegetation. Extraordinary amounts of dust and debris (and more CO2 and greenhouse gases) are thrown into the air by more or less simultaneous volcanic convulsions, chilling the planet in a fairly regular cycle of devastation our intellects have difficulty envisioning, let alone understanding. What can we learn from these precedents? Continues @ nexusilluminati.blogspot.au/2009/12/averting-climate-catastrophe.html by Ram Ayana
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 04:07:38 +0000
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