My problem with the word "consensus" is that it doesn't lend itself to science. If we had a consensus that pi was 3.1415887, that wouldn't make it true.
The fact is that the Earth has gone through both cooling and warming cycles in the past, quite independently of human activities. The Little Climactic Optimum occurred around 1000 A.D., and it was warmer then than it is now -- and there wasn't enough human population of the Earth at the time to have any effect on the climate at all. As a matter of fact, there is now global warming on other planets in the Solar System as well -- Mars, and even Pluto, and I hardly think we can blame humanity for that. Every time a volcano erupts, it spews more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the cars on the planet. When Krakatoa blew itself to bits in the 1800s it blasted a tremendous amount of CO2 and dust into the atmosphere, and temperatures around the Earth were cooler for a few years afterwards, while the sunsets were more spectacular.
I'm not saying that the theory of global warming has no merit. I'm saying that there are so many variables that we simply don't know enough to form a meaningful conclusion yet. We don't hear much of it from the media because they've bought into the idea of global warming, but the fact is that there are a good number of very reputable scientists who disagree with it. So I, for one, am not going to go running off half-cocked while we don't know what we're talking about. We need to study the climate a lot more thoroughly before we do anything drastic. After all, considering that we *don't* know what we're doing, we could as easily make the wrong choice as the right one.
And there's also this to think about. There is a greater climactic cycle as well -- the ice age that occurs about every 100,000 years, and lasts about 90,000 years. We've had about 12,000 years of temperate climate since the end of the last ice age. Going by geological evidence, we could be headed for an ice age soon.
See what I mean? When you don't know enough about it, you can find statistics that can "prove" anything you want. Besides, it's a known fact that as soon as politics gets mixed with science, the science immediately becomes unreliable. Remember the theory of acquired characteristics being inherited? They were pushing that one because a powerful leader wanted them to. That still didn't make it true.
I prefer to wait a little while until we are a little more sure of our facts. Jumping the gun could do a lot more harm than good.
Nan
