Bob Schroeck Wrote:I'd add that long before I ever heard of "Global Warming" and long before it became a political issue, I'd come across (in the late 1970s and early 1980s) serious speculation that the "Little Ice Age" of the 1700s-1800s had been in fact the beginning of a new, full Ice Age, which Mankind had inadvertently headed off with the pollution of the Industrial Revolution. But no one at that time had seen their way to making the next obvious deduction from that reasoning. When I first heard of Global Warming as a coming disaster, I flashed back to those speculations and said to myself, "well, that makes perfect sense, why didn't anyone think of that sooner?"Technically we are still in an ice age, merely an interglacial period of it. The earth's been a lot warmer than this in not-so-distant geological time.
And, uh, plenty of people thought of this. Man-made global warming has been a scientific theory in currency since the early 20th century. The problem is that the evidence wasn't rock-solid until some decades afterwards (though it's been the general consensus in science for a lot longer than people think), and that it's taken many decades after that to convince the general public of it over the screaming, kicking objections of corporations with a financial stake in not believing it.