In the back of his latest book, Michael Chrichton suggests that global warming is only an abberation of data. If I understand the argument, limited data before 1900 (once available on-line but which has been purged since) show that the 19th century was warmer and that the lower temps used for a base-line for global warming were a dip, so temperature rises we see are possibly just noise in the signal. He likens global warming to eugenics, a pop-sci trendy mistake also of the turn of the 19th century and early 20th.
When we lived in Houston a few years ago, there was a little article about some 100-year-old newspapers found in an attic in Galveston. The agricultural news talked about crops that can no longer grow in that part of Texas--because it is now too cold. (I do not remember the details. Any Houstonian trivialists out there?)
I do remember a Nova that explained that for 90% of the last 100,000 years, Europe was under a mile of ice. Maybe we are warning up. How would I know?
Another Nova on the subject of global warming showed that the solar constant seems to have been increasing steadily over the last 150 years by about 1%. Not much we can do about that.
If it really gets to be a problem, we could put a big aluminized mylar umbrella out at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and the sun and reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth just enough to cool us down a trifle. By the way, I just learned that we have a satellite at L1 now: the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Satellite (SOHO).
I figure we are in greater danger from major earthquakes such as The Big One coming to the Pacific Northwest one day or The Big One coming to California, or a repeat of the biggest earthquake in recorded US history on the New Madrid fault in Missouri. My favorite geological disaster to worry about is the big pluton pushing up under Lake Yellowstone that will give us a supervolcano one day...real soon now. (OK, I heard it subsided a little recently. Go back to sleep.) Another reason to be interested in moving to the cone of South America, no?
I am going back to worrying about escaping debt before retirement.
El Gitano
[Hey! I just cracked 200! Eats dryer sheets for breakfast, now is it?]