Wait, what? Here’s the very radical John Holdren, Obama’s science adviser, suggesting that human greenhouse gas emissions are preventing a new ice age. So how then is anthropogenic global warming not a good thing? Here’s Holdren’s concluding bit:
“While the climate of the earth has changed over the millennia as a result of natural factors – principally changes in the tilt and orientation of the earth’s axis and rotation, and in the shape of its orbit around the sun – those changes occur far too gradually to have noticeable effects over a period of mere decades. In their current phases, moreover, they would be gradually cooling the earth – taking us to another ice age – if they weren’t being more than offset by human-caused warming.”
And here’s the 1:38 long video if you want to take in the whole thing:
Is this some clever new climatista tactic?
JOHN adds: Holdren’s claim that AGW is currently canceling out the early stages of the next ice age is wholly speculative, but it is not frivolous to suggest that if the AGW theory is correct, then we should be pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere in hopes of staving off the truly catastrophic–not global warming, but global cooling. Global warming is at worst a mere inconvenience, compared to having ice a mile thick where your house now stands.
This chart, showing mean Earth temperatures for the last 450,000 years, based on ice cores, is no doubt imperfect, but it illustrates the fact that in the current geologic era, warm periods are the exception and ice is the rule. If these cores are at all reliable, and if the past is a guide to the future, we may be nearing the end of the Holocene interglacial period and we should be doing everything we can to keep the climate relatively warm:
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