Wednesday, July 14, 2004

GEOLOGY SPEAKS

And tells us we are in the middle of a warm period between ice ages. The last similar warm period ran for 28,000 years WITHOUT any nasty industry to create it.

"Despite the recent trend toward global warming, scientists have long wondered whether the Earth is nearing another ice age, an end to the 12,000-year temperate spell in which civilizations arose. Some have said such a transition is overdue, given that each of the three temperate intervals that immediately preceded the current one lasted only about 10,000 years. But now, in an eagerly awaited study, a group of climate and ice experts say they have new evidence that Earth is not even halfway through the current warm era. The evidence comes from the oldest layers of Antarctic ice ever sampled.

Some scientists earlier proposed similar hypotheses, basing them on the current configuration of Earth's orbit, which seems to set the metronome that ice ages dance to. Temperature patterns deciphered in sea-bottom sediments in recent years supported the theory.

But experts say the new ice data is by far the strongest corroborating evidence, revealing many similarities between today's atmospheric and temperature patterns and those of a prolonged warm interval, with a duration of 28,000 years, that reached its peak 430,000 years ago. The findings were described Thursday in the journal Nature by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. The evidence comes from a shaft of ice extracted over five years from Antarctica, composed of thousands of layers that were formed as each year's snowfall was compressed over time. The deepest ice retrieved comes from 10,000 feet, or 3,000 meters, deep and dates back 740,000 years. The relative abundance of certain forms of hydrogen in the ice reflects past air temperatures.

No ice core worldwide had reached back beyond 420,000 years, making this core the first to capture fully the conditions during that long warm period. Several independent researchers familiar with the project said the case that the current warm period would be prolonged was now strong."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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