Thursday, February 2, 2012

Global Cooling

Secrets of the Soil (1989) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird

Chapter 14 (pages 173-186) "Icicles in the Greenhouse" discusses the relative merits of global warming and global cooling hypotheses.

Support for global cooling includes:

- loss of 1.5 degrees Celsius in average Northern Hemisphere temperature since 1938

- expanding arctic

- shorter growing seasons

- drought caused by cooling

And on page 175, they offer this:

"Fred B. Wood, Jr., of the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress reports that between 1960 and 1980, based on data for about 400 to 450 glaciers observed each year, advancing glaciers have increased 7 to 55 percent."

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Did they mention how they collected their data that supposedly show a decrease in 1.5C? Because that doesn't really jive with the seminal paper in the field.

Orthoclase said...

Like most works of that type, they are long on conclusions and short on data to support the conclusions.

But very interesting conclusions.