My own opinion is that we wont need to wait 10 years. From what I understand satellite data has shown surface warming and, simultaneously, high altitude cooling. I hear you biknut regarding the earlier predictions for global cooling. I find the most strident characteristic supporting that contention is the record, virtually like clock work 100,000 years cold, 10,000 years warm repeatedly for a million years or so. The transition from cold to warm appears slow and the transition from warm to cold very fast, a matter of a couple of decades. The entire curve as best we know it so far for the earth's climate for all of its existence appears to be a simple damped harmonic. First hot for a long time then cold for a long time, then hot for a shorter time and cold for a shorter time, with the cold taking up 90% of the time. The interglacial can then be seen as a precariously balanced state of affairs and the ice age conditions as the more stable usual set of conditions. Humans have not directed their influence to the situation to sustaining the interglacial. We have not organized our efforts in virtually any regard to global climate. Our influence has been basically a random one, not determined. When you hit a precariously balanced state with random perturbations the usual consequence is to cause it to collapse into its most stable state. The Hamaker hypothesis appears to detail the mechanism of how this occurs and unlike current predictions does have some real-time experimental evidence to support it. Have people noticed the record cold at the start of this year over a large portion of the Northern hemisphere? Think about it, ice age conditions are characterized by mile high glaciers on most of the Northern hemisphere. That means a lot of moisture needs to relocate from the oceans, from existing (and quickly dwindling) ice caps onto the land masses. It takes an influx of energy to do that and greenhouse gases appear to be the mechanism that does it. If you look at the Devil's Hole studies in Nevada or coral deposit analysies, you see what is considered the best time line for past ice age onslaughts, far more accurate than ocean sediment analysis. They show ice ages starting at peak carbon dioxide content when correlated with the ice core samples that have been made.
I truly expect we are going to see some record cold spells, record snow and ice on North temperate zones this winter. Under current trends we may lose a warming during the summer months at all in a few short years. The Hamaker hypothesis is detailed in some online books at http://www.remineralize.org .
So, biknut, I don't find you all wrong. I do find your time frame seems rather without basis and this stereotyping of a large portion of the human population, that is just plain too crass and ill founded that it really decreases the credibility of anything you have to share.
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