Cesar V wrote:can anyone say "the day after tomorrow"
Please don't.
We just don't know enough about the climate cycles to understand what't happening. Like the 100 year snow in Texas, it's just unusual, but not unheard of, since it did happen 100 years ago. And who know how many hurricanes hit Florida 100years ago? Maybe it was 8 or 10? What was the weatche in California like 200 years ago?
We have no records to tell us. We just assume tghat the last 20, 50, 100 years is normal. It wasn't that long ago (300 years) when people couldn't manage to track a 76 year cycle like Halley's Comet. Am I supposed to believe that we have a clue about the weater over the last 1000 years? Maybe it's a 500 year cycle, and in 500 years it'll be back to "normal" again But after 500 years who will remember what normal was?
ThomasDodd wrote:We have no records to tell us. We just assume tghat the last 20, 50, 100 years is normal. It wasn't that long ago (300 years) when people couldn't manage to track a 76 year cycle like Halley's Comet. Am I supposed to believe that we have a clue about the weater over the last 1000 years? Maybe it's a 500 year cycle, and in 500 years it'll be back to "normal" again But after 500 years who will remember what normal was?
Actually, we do have some pretty good hints.
When I had dead limb removed from a big oak in my front yard, I could get a good idea of the seasonal variations over 300 years ago. In California, corings of giant Sequoias can yeild data going back more than 2000 years. Ice cores from the Antarctic can tell volumes about volcanic activity going back much earlier than that. Geological strata can go back much farther than that.
I'll agree that short-term "freak" happenings aren't usually charted by the above methods, but we can get a pretty good general idea of year-to-year variations in weather.
Galveston suffered a hurricane, too -- the worst natural disaster in our nation's history, killing some 8,000 people. The storm was so violent that none of the island's land was left above water, and they had to -- oh, wait -- that was 104 years ago. Never mind.
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Joe Baker, who is willing to be convinced, but not yet convinced, that our weather patterns are anything but cyclical variation.
But after 500 years who will remember what normal was?
