What causes climate change, or global warming or global cooling for that matter is the sun itself. A very simple analogt would be one of those gas powdered Coleman lanterns. If you don't keep them pumped up, the light waxes and wanes due to the erratic pressure and lowering fuel level. Pump it up and it gets bright. Let the air pressure drop and it gets dim.
Paul, that is one way to look at it. but there are lots of additonal things that can effect the intensity of the sun's impact on the planet. Sunspots, atmospheric makeup of elements and compounds, global shading (atmospheric particulates from fire, volcanos, excessivley large wind storms, etc.) and the reflectivity of the earth's surface.
While I don't know the physics on how the sun operates, over the eons there has been radical climate change well before the advent of man. At one time, the mean temperature was on the order of 120 degrees. Man was nowhere around. Later, temperatures dropped so much that the glaciers literally covered massive areas of the earth's land mass. [quote=PJGunner] yes that's right. The difference is that those changes happened more gradually which allowed a lot of species to evolve along with the changes; the way girzzlies adapted to become polar bears during the last ice age, but aren't faring quite so well in reverse. Rapid climatic change doesn't allow sufficint time for genetic adaptaion to occur and species simply die out. I'm not in a hurry to be one of those.
[quote=PJGunner]I guess Al Gore must be right. After all, he did invent the internet, right?
He never said he invented the internet. He was a senator when the defense department demonstrated what it was working on (the recursor to the internet), and he was one of the first to be supportive of their efforts in terms of voting for additonal research money.
It's funny (not funny Ha Ha, but funny wierd and sad) how effective, cheap and long lasting personal distortion and smear campaigns can be.
