If you're as old as me, you've lived through more than one of those "end of the world" days. I remember in middle school the entire student body was so upset that it was rumored that on a particular day the world was going to come to end; the day came and went and here I am to talk about.
"The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."
"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."
"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind."
Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO{-2} is the cause of climate change.
Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current US approach of CO{-2} reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."
Globe Columnist / January 6, 2008