global warming

While listening to Rush the other day, I heard about 86 year old Reid Bryson who is an Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. Back in the 60s, he was laughed to scorn as he was one of the first to pioneer the idea that humans can affect global climate change. Since then, he has reversed his views, and once again he challenges mainstream thoughts on the causes of global warming.

Here is an article the Wisconsin Energy Cooperative wrote about his recent views:

http://www.wecnmagazine.com/2007issues/may/may07.html

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson says. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

To put it simply, the earth’s climate changes are independent of anything humans have done, are doing, or ever will do.

Did you know that the Vikings used to farm on Greenland for about 300 years? That’s how Greenland got its name. Then, sometime after the 13th century, it froze over and began to look like this:

Now, as glaciers are melting all over the world, can you guess what archaeologists are finding underneath? Mature forests, agricultural water-management systems, and in the Alps, silver mines complete with tools stacked up outside waiting for the following mining season after the winter snows melted. The only problem was that one year, the snows didn’t melt. They didn’t melt the next year either…or the next…or the next. Enter the Little Ice Age. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes’ mastery of deduction to figure out that the earth used to be a lot warmer than it has been for the last several hundred years. Things are just now going back to normal after the earth’s “cool season.”

Al, you really need to wake up and smell the silver mines.