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GLOBAL WARMING: ARE WE HEADING FOR GLOBAL CATASTROPHY IN THE COMING CENTURY? Don J. Easterbrook Dept. of Geology Western Washington University Bellingham, WA 98225 dbunny@ ABSTRACT As shown in the Greenland GISP2 ice cores, late Pleistocene abrupt temperature fluctuations occurred in only 20–100 years, clearly not caused by atmospheric CO2 because they occurred thousands of years before atmospheric CO2 levels began to rise. During these climatic changes, 10Be and 14C production rates also varied, suggesting the possibility of solar changes. Similar changes also occurred during climate changes in the Little Ice Age, again suggesting a connection between climatic changes and solar variation. Global temperature curves show a cool reversal from ~1955 to ~1980), inferring that global temperatures then were not driven by atmospheric CO2. Solar irradiance curves almost exactly match the global temperature curve and satellite data suggest that the earth has received increased solar radiation over the past 25 years, coinciding with the present 25–year warm cycle. If the cycles continue as in the past, the current warm cycle should end soon, and global warming should abate, rather than increase, in the next 25-30 years. Using these data as a basis, the coming century should experience a cooler climate from ~2006 to ~2035, a warmer period (probably warmer than the 1977–2005 warm period) from ~2035 to ~2065, followed by another cooler period from ~2065 to about the end of the century. The coming decades will test this prediction. INTRODUCTION The present global warming and discovery of abrupt climate changes in the geologic record have pushed climate changes into the forefront of scientific inquiry with a great deal at stake for human population. However, we don’t yet have an unequivocal, “smoking gun,” cause-and-effect answer to the question of the fundamental cause of global climate change and thus must rely on empirical data to formulate possible causal me