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A New Ice Age?
barakn writes "Scientists have savaged the new movie The Day After Tomorrow, which depicts global warming causing a new ice age and freezing New York solid. The movie follows on the heels of a report to the Department of Defense in February, written by two guys who are not climatologists, about the implications of global warming triggering the growth of ice sheets in the northern hemisphere. There is a plausible theory which suggests that melting ice may release enough fresh water to halt circulation of warm water from the Gulf Stream, thus significantly cooling Europe and the east coast of North America. Note that this theory depends on melting ice, not growing ice, which may be one reason scientists find the ice age scenario so hard to swallow. New satellite evidence suggests a part of this circulation may already be slowing down. Those on the North American west coast will not have to worry about ice sheets, but changes in Arctic ice could mean the western drought will be permanent. For those of you who would rather do something before it's too late, iron seems to work, but the long-term ecological implications are still unknown."
But people, even otherwise intelligent people, just simply don't want to know the truth. They attack the messenger, they bury their heads in the sand. After a while I just decided that we might as well let Nature takes its course. If we're too stupid to clean our own nest we deserve extinction.
Now I know how the Easter Islanders could let themselves get into the position they did...
it occurs to me that people dismissing global warming are either
1. arrogant Americans (mostly) who refuse to accept that they are destroying the environment at a far greater rate than the size of their population justifies. but are ready to accept Shell-sponsored studies reported on commercial TV about "hey, fossil fuels are okay after all!"
2. ignorant people who get stuck when people mention "ice age" or "Europe cooling" and "global warming" in the same paragraph and assume that all the educated scientists somehow missed the "obvious" fact that warming makes things hot not cold!!!!oneoneone
all of you claiming that humans can't possibly effect the world are either very, very stupid or don't want to admit it because you don't want to feel guilty.
> I haven't seen any
Oh, an armchair climatologist. Can't wait for the reposte that claims that climatologists are doing it for their own personal agenda.
> It would take a massive development to make this anything other than junk science
Yeah, that is why those things are published in such back-world papers like Science and Nature.
> The U.S. already consumes more CO2 than it produces.
Care to back this up? Is the US secretly growing vast forests? The US has the most CO2 emissions, how do you achieve to have a netto minus? Maybe you can tell the other countries about it.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Given that humans can adapt to a new climate very easily (often over the course of a few days or even hours), this isn't a concern. We don't need the time. We have the transport capability to completely move the largest countries across the globe inside of a year. For example, using air planes alone we could depopulate India inside of two years and move all of them to the US mideast. Adaptation of humans isn't a problem.
The real problem is the stagnant political and social systems we've built up.
Rush Limbaugh said it, so it must be true.