On 25 Feb 2004 at 0:00, Automatic digest processor wrote:

> The Greenland ice data strongly suggests to us now that those fallovers
> can happen a great deal more rapidly than we had expected in the past.

Which is why I have respectfully disagreed with Wirt and others over
the Kyoto protocol and similar anthrocentric explanation/solutions to
climate change. Just  18,000 years ago the place where I live was
under 5 km of ice.  It is likely to be under a similar weight of ice
within the next 2-5000 years.   A severe change in the earth's
climate in the geoglocially near future 2-5000 years is inevitable,
with or without human influence.  Further this change will no doubt
generally follow the pattern established in the ice records of
Greenland and Antarcticia; a fairly brief geological period of rapid
warming followed by a nearly as abrupt change to extensive
glaciation and global cooling.

Depending upon whom one takes as credible, the earth is currently
6-10,000 +- years into the current inter-glacial period, periods that
based on examinations of fluvial deposits apparently only last 5-
10,000 +-. years (for those interested the citations are: Cleveringa,
De Gans et al. 1988; Schirmer 1988; Schirmer 1995; Vandenberghe
1993; Vandenberghe 1995; Bridgland 2000; Maddy, Bridgland et al.
2001; Vandenberghe 2002).  Whether human activity is
accelerating, inhibiting, or having negligible impact on the pending
cyclic change in climate seems rather beside the point; this change
will eventually occur regardless of human agency or its absence.
Therefore it seems prudent that what resources humanity
collectively possesses should be directed at mitigating the eventual
consequences and not thrown away in a misguided attempt to
forestall the inevitable event.

Kyoto's premise is that global warming can be halted or delayed; but
delay is in itself pointless, while halting the event seems to me,
based on the available archaeological and geological records,
impossible.  Therefore I disagree with Kyoto on the basis that it
creates the expectation, and thereby fosters the illusion, that
something can be done to stop the unstoppable.  Humanity needs to
confront the impending requirements to relocate vast numbers of
people away from coastal areas; reform agricultural and food
distribution processes to cope with rapid and appalling changes in
food production; and to substantially lessen the numbers of future
generations without resorting to wholesale slaughter of human
beings on a scale that will dwarf anything in history.

Sincerely,

--

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