Mark Hickey wrote:


You need to do some more reading on the subject. The best data on the
subject shows that there has been a net cooling trend - not a warming
trend. If you are as old as I am, you should remember the hysteria
that we were entering another ice age from a couple decades ago.

I probably am at least as old as you are. Here's what I remember from
that time period.

The worry was about "Nuclear Winter." Carl Sagan was one of the
scientists prominently discussing this. At the time, between the US and
the USSR, there were enough nuclear warheads to thoroughly destroy world
civilization several times over. But Sagan and others pointed out that
a similar effect could happen without literally exploding civilization away.

They pointed out that nuclear explosions loft dust and soot into the
upper atmosphere, and that the effect of a moderately large number of
such explosions would be shading the earth from the sun's rays.
Depending on the volume of dust and soot, this could cause anything from
some disastrous harvests to severe climate changes to an ice age.

For reference, something like this is now widely thought to have
triggered a worldwide economic crash at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
At that time, it was an earlier explosion of the volcano later known
as Krakatoa that is thought to have been responsible. (Krakatoa erupted
with much less force in the 1800s, but still caused significant turmoil.)

People took the Nuclear Winter issue seriously, including people at the
top of the relevant governments. The number of nuclear warheads has
diminished greatly - although we probably still retain enough to trigger
that sort of catastrophe.

Massive nuclear war and the attendant nuclear winter never happened.
But that's hardly jusification for saying that global warming isn't
occurring.


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Frank Krygowski [To reply, remove rodent and vegetable dot com.
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