Re: Supposed “cooling” predictions, the only problem is that the holocene is one of the longer interglacials, and the subtle Milankovitch cycle isn’t in it’s negative phase/won’t be for millennia:http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=24Even a “little ice age”-type event likely wouldn’t stop global warming:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/06/what-if-the-sun-went-into-a-new-grand-minimum/http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/15/246202/sun-hibernation-deniers/And I see the contrarians are still recycling the straw man argument that scientists have predicted catastrophe and got it wrong. So which climatologists said we should have already tipped the system into hopelessly non-linear acceleration, and/or disrupted holocene ecosystems and societies? Last I checked, the models gave a range of potential change over decades (that is, climatic averages, shorter-term ‘internal’ variability aside), based on everything from physics and observational data to paleoclimatology. And this is just the beginning of the process, considering thermal inertia and long-term feedbacks.
Onguard, if you’re talking about Yellowstone, what do you mean by “due”? An “average” frequency of several hundred millennia can mean a lot of variability from our perspective, as the fact that we’re tens of millennia “overdue” (based on only the last two eruptions) suggests. The other known two were apparently close to a million years apart, so there really isn’t a specific “due” millennium, let alone century. As the USGS noted, “Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption. The probability of a large caldera-forming eruption within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low”.
Maybe in a couple thousand years we’ll be able to predict them, colonize Mars, and stop Earth from freezing with a measured dose of short-lived greenhouse gas/other advanced geo-engineering. That is, if those pointing to natural disaster as an excuse for risking our own lasting hell don’t get their way, and civilization is still in good shape …
Re: Supposed “cooling” predictions, the only problem is that the holocene is one of the longer interglacials, and the subtle Milankovitch cycle isn’t in it’s negative phase/won’t be for millennia:http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=24Even a “little ice age”-type event likely wouldn’t stop global warming:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/06/what-if-the-sun-went-into-a-new-grand-minimum/http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/15/246202/sun-hibernation-deniers/And I see the contrarians are still recycling the straw man argument that scientists have predicted catastrophe and got it wrong. So which climatologists said we should have already tipped the system into hopelessly non-linear acceleration, and/or disrupted holocene ecosystems and societies? Last I checked, the models gave a range of potential change over decades (that is, climatic averages, shorter-term ‘internal’ variability aside), based on everything from physics and observational data to paleoclimatology. And this is just the beginning of the process, considering thermal inertia and long-term feedbacks.