Climate change: Back to the future? By Mark Alexander My father
phoned from the Florida Keys last week. At 86, he likes warmer
climates in winter, but there has been nothing warm in Florida
lately -- it was zero degrees Celsius the morning he called.
Three decades ago, scientists coldly calculated that another ice
age was imminent. (See AccuWeather's analysis of these
predictions.) But, no longer. Today, they are prophesying that
ice caps will melt within the next hundred years and swamp
coastal lowlands. That is unless, and only unless, an
international governing authority is established posthaste to
control economic/industrial development that is blamed for
global warming. What is the truth? Earth's climate is changing.
It always has, and it always will. Mean global temperatures
might, in fact, have trended upward, though recently, many
climatologists are now suggesting that the planet might be in a
10-30 year cooling trend. If anthropogenic (manmade) CO2 really
has been responsible for a global warming tre