Ozone layer has nothing to do with the Global Warming phenomena, first of all. Second, the depletion rate for Ozone has slowed down significantly over the past few decades.


As for the Global Warming - I'm very skeptical about it. Over the past century various doomsday scenarios have been proposed from over-population to the theory of cooling Earth, and none of them have panned out. We simply don't know what will happen in the future, and death of human civilization because of Earth warming up by a degree or two is certainly not a concern to me.

You're a dreamer!

But I'm not the only one ;-)

That's the real tragedy...

Growing scientific evidence is confirming that the world’s climate is radically changing and that human activity is now contributing to global warming, according to a report released today by The Conference Board.

The report is based on the collective views of 11 noted climate scientists who met this June under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Conference Board’s participation in the meeting was facilitated by Environmental Defense, which links science, economics, law and innovative private-sector partnerships to create breakthrough solutions to the most serious environmental problems. (For the names of participating scientists, see pages 3-4.)

Concludes the report: “The Earth – for whatever the exact reasons – is on a trajectory toward an ever warmer climate. This cannot be avoided at this point, but the trajectory can be jiggled and potential risks associated with the warming can be mitigated. Ultimately the trajectory could be reversed.”

The report finds that “governments and markets are likely to act” on expanding scientific evidence and perceptions that climate change has become “an urgent priority that must be addressed through a variety of measures.” Participating scientists in the report strongly believe that “a reduction in human-caused emissions is an essential step in any overall strategy for dealing with climate change.”

HERE

wertham is right. It has been confirmed a few days or weeks ago that the melting of the polar ice caps has exceeded even the most pessimistic scenarios by far.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich)

:wink:

Under the first treaty addressing global warming, 193 countries, including the United States, pledged to avoid “dangerous” human interference with the climate.

There was one small problem with that treaty, enacted 11 years ago. No one defined dangerous. With no clear goal, smokestack and tailpipe emissions of gases linked to rising temperatures relentlessly climbed.

On February 16, a stricter addendum to that treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, enters into force, requiring participating industrialized countries to cut such emissions.

But its targets and timetable were negotiated with no agreement on what amount of cuts would lead the world toward climatic stability. The arbitrary terms were cited by President Bush when he rejected the Kyoto pact in 2001, leaving the world’s biggest source of such gases on the sidelines.

After a decade of cautious circling, some scientists and policymakers are now trying to agree on how much warming is too much.

One possible step toward clarity comes last week, as 200 experts from around the world met at the invitation of Prime Minister Tony Blair in Exeter for three days of talks on defining “dangerous climate change” and how to avoid it.

The researcher running the meeting, Dennis A. Tirpak, formerly of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that experts always realized it would take a long time for science’s projections to be absorbed by society, but few thought it would take this long.

“I’ve always been a believer that science and truth will win out in the end,” he said. “But I have a sense we might be running out of time.”

HERE

I've never really understood your position on this issue Krem. If you're right and global warming's a myth, then signing the kyoto agreement will ultimately cause a bit of economic turmoil, but humanity will live on. If you're wrong and global warming turns out to be a very real and dangerous threat, then not signing the agreement and doing our bit to reduce emissions will ultimately cause a bit of economic turmoil, and the death of the human race.

Wouldn't it be better to be right and buggered financially than wrong, buggered financially and dead?

"A number of reconstructions of millennial-scale climate variability have been carried out in order to understand patterns of natural climate variability, on decade to century timescales, and the role of anthropogenic forcing. These reconstructions have mainly used tree-ring data and other data sets of annual to decadal resolution. Lake and ocean sediments have a lower time resolution, but provide climate information at multicentennial timescales that may not be captured by tree-ring data. Here we reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the past 2,000 years by combining low-resolution proxies with tree-ring data, using a wavelet transform technique to achieve timescale-dependent processing of the data. Our reconstruction shows larger multicentennial variability than most previous multi-proxy reconstructions, but agrees well with temperatures reconstructed from borehole measurements and with temperatures obtained with a general circulation model. According to our reconstruction, high temperatures—similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990—occurred around AD 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 0.7 K below the average of 1961–90 occurred around AD 1600. This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue."

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