Cheat Seeking Missiles: Intergallactic Global Warming

So much news, so much going on ... my mind is reeling. So instead of Iraq, Feingold, Moussaoui ... here's the other GW, Global Warming.

A Russian scientist thinks the whole global warming thing has nothing to do with the industrial revolution, SUVs and those particularly nasty American hydrocarbons. Nope, global warming is caused, he says, by the Tungska Event.

Tungska Event?

According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the global warming of the past 100 years could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil.

Shaidurov explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century, which flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.

The Tunguska Event, sometimes known as the Tungus Meteorite, is thought to have resulted from an asteroid or comet entering the earth’s atmosphere and exploding. The event released as much energy as fifteen one-megaton atomic bombs. As well as blasting an enormous amount of dust into the atmosphere, felling 60 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres. Shaidurov suggests that this explosion would have caused “considerable stirring of the high layers of atmosphere and change its structure.” Such meteoric disruption was the trigger for the subsequent rise in global temperatures.

Shaidurov studied atmospheric water vapor -- "the most potent of the greenhouse gasses." Small changes in atmospheric water vapor cause big changes in global temperature, but man has virtually no control over it. Shaidurov concludes:

... only an enormous natural phenomenon, such as an asteroid or comet impact or airburst, could seriously disturb atmospheric water levels.... The Tunguska Event was just such an event, and coincides with the period of time during which global temperatures appear to have been rising the most steadily — the twentieth century.