On 20 May 2002, at 10:46, Wirt Atmar wrote:

> You all are missing the central point of the word "global." Local
> instantaneous weather is always erratic, but if you want to prove
> or disprove the global warming thesis, gather up the weather
> records from hundreds or thousands of sites world-wide and then
> plot their aggregate trend.
>

However, urbanization creates micro-climatic influences.
Many of the weather data collection centres that were
established in the forties and fifties in rural areas are now
located within built-up urban areas or have been moved. This
makes the comparison of data points over time from even the
same station suspect since local environmental factors having
nothing to do with global weather may have compromised the
relevance of the data.  The fact of the matter is that there are
three times as many people alive today as there were when
systematic records began to be kept on any significant scale,
and those people are now congregated in urban
concentrations four or five times the rate prevalent only 150
years ago.  The local conditions surrounding these data
collection centres has radically changed during the course of
collecting the records.  There are just too many unknowns
inherent in collection of these records to place any significant
degree of reliance in the raw data itself. There are very few
control points that have been exempted from extreme
disturbance of local conditions and these are typically located
in Greenland and the Antarctic.

However, to take a far longer view, available from the
geological record consider that I live in Hamilton, Ontario on
the edge of Lake Ontario, on land that is still rebounding (3-5
cm / year) from the last glaciation.  Where my house stands
was once under a three to five kilometre deep ice sheet, and
this was only some 20,000-30,000 years ago.  Now that really
is global warming and it self-evidently had precious little to do
with aerosols, fluro-carbons, gasoline consumption, livestock
proliferation, or mankind at all.

On the other hand, immediately and artificially driving up the
cost of carbon based energy via political measures to
(possibly) prevent (or perhaps only delay) something that
clearly happens independently of man's activities, over time
scales that exceed the current span of human civilization, that
will have clear, dramatic, and unavoidably negative
consequences on the quality of life for the vast majority of
mankind living today, seems to me to be rather inconsiderate
and demonstrates a hubris that the ancient Greeks would
have readily identified.

Even if the doom-sayers are right, and I have grave rational
reservations as to whether they have sufficient evidence to
draw any conclusions whatsoever about long-term global
weather trends, let alone their actual causes and
mechanisms, the solutions proposed thus far are
unacceptable in their implications for the the future quality of
life of individuals currently living in the non-industrialized world.
 They also have some fairly draconian implications for the
majority of people living in North America and Europe.  I may
appear selfish in holding this opinion, but I don't see the
advantage to condemning my children and grand-children to a
marginal existence on the basis of the 'scientific' and
'diplomatic' communities' forecast for the the future natural
environment of earth. These are the same people who can't
even forecast with any accuracy how much money they need
to operate on for the next six months, much less the weather
for the next 100 years.

Sincerely,
Jim


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James B. Byrne                Harte & Lyne Limited
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