Speaking of pesky arrogant know-all mammals, I recommend reading the book Galapagos. It introduces the Big Brain theory. Uri ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter L. Peres" To: Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 3:47 PM Subject: Re: [OT]: Is GP fabricating Global Warming evidentiary material? > On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Uri Sabadosh wrote: > > >Even if there is global warming, how do we know how much is caused by > >natural causes? > > If you do some calculations you will quickly arrive to the conclusion that > the warming is not caused directly by heat generated by human activity. > The only other way is by catalytical effect. Increasing CO2 is one of > those. But CO2 increase can be monitored easier than temperature (the gas > diffuses everywhere relatively quickly). The whole question is, how much > are humans guilty of this and how much of a natural cycle are we in. Afaik > the knowledge on long term cycles and their variation is zilch. I am not > an expert but I can theorize that 2-3 meteorites hitting earth in the not > so distant past may have caused weather upheaval that makes our present > problems look like a pleasant summer shower in comparison. Same for more > serious volcanic activity in the past and other things. Nobody knows for > sure what caused the last ice age for example. Or what caused it to cease. > Or what it was like before it started (dinos liked it hot afaik - and it > WAS hot then. *Much* hotter than now. Natural too, no pesky arrogant > know-all mammals around then afaik.). From the spread of dino remains and > other vegetation fossils it seems that the hot areas of the planet > stretched much farther north and south than today. So maybe we are just > riding on the 'tail' of the ice age and the planet is getting back to > being its usual self now, warming up *again*. After all the dino age was > fairly long and it had to be hot as dinos were cold-blooded, and the > respective vegetation was hot weather type. Our 'temperate' age is very > short in comparison, but we already 'know' everything, and are sure to > have done it all by ourselves too. Yeah, right. > > Peter > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different > ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details. > > > -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body