Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobblehead
In addition, how much has been learned about the climate in the last 34 years?
The worlds largest supercomputers are being created to attempt climate simulations. If the worlds biggest/fastest computers today are still evolving to attempt to better understand the climate, the modeling they did 34 years ago using those systems would have been absolutely archaic by today's standards.
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Exactly, what we know today compared to then is incredible.
Back then visible pollutants which were a massive problem world wide were causing what is called global dimming, because of the reflective nature of reflective pollutants.
There has been this push/pull between global dimming and warming for quite some time, however recent data shows dimming's affect is diminishing slowly while the greenhouse effect is increasing in speed. Obviously one is increasing the other as we clean up our reflective pollutants with better controls on industrial pollution and advances in technology.
There is of course another thing to the ice age, being that the Greenland ice sheet could cause the stall in the north Atlantic 'motor' which if stalls would bring about a new ice age. Thats why scientists are so worried especially about Greenland's ice sheet and why global warming is a period that seems be the trigger to start the ice age.
Now obviously human impact is having an affect on all of this, how much is about the only debate on it. The sad thing is IF our effect is that significant we could be reaching a tipping point in possibly our lifetime or our children's lifetime that will bring about the start of an ice age.
I do have confidence however in human ingenuity to solve or deal with problems, I just hope we stop the petty bickering and figure out where to go from here.