I don't think the Pentagon is prone to fantasizing. Hollywood yes, Top
Military scientists, hardly.

spam this wrote:

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message
t.cable.rogers.com...

THe Pentagon had a recent report made available to the mass media in
which the scenario of Abrupt Climate change was analysed.


What is "abrupt"? a day, a week, a year, a decade, a century, a millenium?
In any event it the study was not to determine IF an abrupt change ws
likely, or even possible, but what the defense department would need to do
in response to such a change. the DoD does this routinely for many
potentially adverse scenarios. Hey, these guys get PAID for fantasizing!
And that is all it is, expensive fantasy. Using such a report as a basis
for a scientific argument is like using a Kelly Freas painting as an
anatomical reference for an alien. Yeah, it is pretty and detailed, but it
is just fantasy.


:snipped
CURWOOD: Why now all this attention to the question of abrupt
climate change? The Greenland ice core samples that you told us about
have been around for a long time, demonstrating that it didn't take more
than a few decades to change a lot of temperature. And yet today, folks
like the Defense Department, folks in Hollywood, are suddenly paying
attention to the question of abrupt climate change. Why is that happening?



OOOOOHH!! people in HOLLYWOOD!! That's who I look to for answers and
insight concerning complex scientific questions.


SCHRAG: I think there are powerful forces in our society that have
a lot of economic stake in our current energy technology, and are
resistant to change. And therefore have promoted the idea that this was
just a theory, that climate change was just an idea that scientists had
that they weren't sure about, and discouraged action on this front.


What about the powerful forces in our society that have a lot of interest in
the capitalist system failing? What about the people that just have some
oddball agenda and glomp on to any narrow focus "scientific" opinion that
advances their cause?

Global warming? For sure!! Many people are under the impression that the
weather in 1957 was the way it "should be" and ingore the fact that the
earth undergoes constant changing weather patterns affected by the position
of the continents, proximity to the sun, solar activity, and hundreds of
other factors. Man could cease to exist tomorrow and the weather would
continue to get warmer (prehaps) and then get colder (perhaps).

In conclusion, if the weather changes abriuptly, so what. Oh, you can claim
a million people will die. What's the point? We are all going to die in
any circumstance. New York City flooded? They can build a retaining wall!

The popular "science" surrounding global warming is mostly crap based on
incomplete modeling and driven by politicians, not scientists. In the past
fifty years scientists have predicted all kinds of horrible ends based on
climate change. None have occured.

chuck petterson