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• It IS About the Science (Score:2)

  by pudge (1)

  Look, we have just over 100 years of good data on weather patterns. The Earth has been around for, what, billions of years? And we think that just because it is hot now, that it is the hottest summer on record, that we didn't have a hotter summer 500 years ago? Maybe a period of 20 years of increased heat in the 1500s? We can only assume we didn't. That's not good science.
  • Re:It IS About the Science (Score:2)

    by rafael (2125)

    AFAIK the study of ice at poles and at higher mountains gives good hints about the wheather for the last few dozens of centuries.
    • Re:It IS About the Science (Score:3, Informative)

      by darobin (1316) on 2003.08.27 8:28 (#23557) Homepage Journal

      Yes, it does. In my hometown of Grenoble there's one of the more advanced glaciology research centers. We have super-high precision weather direct measures for the 20th century, and less precise for part of the 19th, but we also have very precise indirect data extracted from glaciers and ice caps for more than the past 500 years, and less precise (though I hear it's getting better) for many centuries back. Tree cuts also give information on weather as old as the tree, which can be several centuries old. And the data is better than hints really.

      We also have history to inform us that summers this hot aren't on record in France. All droughts, inundations, and marking meteorological events were consigned in writing in much of Europe for the past twenty five centuries. It would seem that the last really hot and dry summer preceded by a terribly cold winter (as this year) was in the 1780s (and is believed to have helped the revolutionary climate through starvation, etc) and can be linked to the terrible eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland. See for instance http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~GEL115/volcs2.html [ucdavis.edu] and scroll down to "THE LARGEST BIG BANG‹TAMBORA 1815". You can clearly see how the effects run worldwide for a major volcanic eruption. It's an accepted explanation, there is enough corelation.

      Pollution releases way more same and similar gases into the atmosphere. Permanently.

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      -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

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      • Re:It IS About the Science (Score:2)

        by darobin (1316)

        There are a few small errors above, written too fast, sorry 'bout that. I just wanted to add that the rest of the article is worth reading to see how climate can be directly affected. Volcanoes are very interesting because they show abrupt changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and provide good data on how global warming operates.

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        -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]