I got a Paper to do for my College Course. One of the objectives is to explain various view points on climate change.
Anyone willing to share their view point on climate change with me so I can cite this discussion and use it in my assignment?

Thanks,
Kique

Yes it is the only job Al Gore is somewhat qualified to do.

It always has and always will, with or without us.

The end.

C.mon, give him serious answers.

Kique, I do believe there is climate change, but it is not man made in my opinion, it is just the nature of the planet. I believe it is a cyclical thing that has happened since time began, if not, how do you explain the mini-ice ages. ?

My point precisely.

I was typing that up when you posted.

Cool. BTW guys this is for Environmental Issues and Ethics or SCI/362.
Interesting course and this is my final paper I am piecing together for it.
I am using the thoughts here as the various opinions, then I get to give my thoughts, the my wifes thoughts. Should be interesting to see how it all comes together.
Thanks and keep the thoughts coming.

Kique

The Biggest hoax ever plaid. You look at some the countries that signed on to this bs. Like Spain. They you look into things like abandoned wind mills. Do a little work on looking at this and you will find its a farce. Google Abandoned Windmills, you are in for a real surprise and what you are going to be paying in taxes to clean the mess up.

just remember, given the liberal bent of most college professors, if your paper suggests there is no man-made global warming (which is what I believe) then your grade might suffer.....so, for the first time, but not the last, you can decide to say what you believe, or give the answer expected....this scenario will play out many times in your life, so you might as well get used to it...

Or the farmers almanac

It's obviously changing; and change is obviously the norm.

But that doesn't mean we aren't at least partly causing the change(s).

I believe the massive quantities of CO2 we've taken out of storage, essentially, are changing the climate. I also think there ain't a damn thing we can do about it at this point.

We'll see! I could be wrong. I'd encourage everyone to keep an open mind on this and not get sucked into knee-jerk lemming behavior on either the Left OR Right side of things. At present, the issue is so politicized that a "conservative" has to be against it simply because it's part of their values package. That's silly. It's also silly for a "liberal" to be blindly for the notion.

It is what it is, and we will find out, and all the political wailing and gnashing of teeth won't change a thing.

The warmist theory was never supported by much fact.

The hockey stick graph that Big Al was so fond of has been renounced by its authors as having used inappropriate statistical methods. You can probably find more about this at Junk Science, but the long and short of it is that you can feed random data into that model and it will produce a hockey stick.

Right now is not the warmest the Earth has been during recorded history. Around 1000-1100, Earth was warmer than it is now. And what was the result? Prosperity. It was a period during which more people were better off. The Dark Ages, which followed, really were dark, and cold. Philosophers worried that humans would become extinct.

Yes, glaciers are retreating. And it's a good thing, too. They have been retreating for 250 years, beginning long before the Industrial Revolution. My favorite fishing spot in Gustavus Alaska used to be under 200 feet of ice. We spent about 250 years coming out of the Little Ice Age. And, compared with that, it's warmer now.

The warmists have had to publicly admit two incontrovertable facts: 1) The alarming models they were using made an incorrect assumption about how much heat Earth radiates into space. They assumed that it radiated more than it does. With that, the scary models collapse. 2) Warming has stalled. When you have noisy time series data, you do a running average to smooth out the noise and see the underlying trend. The problem with this is that if you average 10 years of data, your data is centered on 5 years ago. The smoothed data have been flat or down for 10-12 years. Taking into account the effect of averaging, it's easy to correctly assert that global warming ended sometime in the mid to late 90s. The models say that is impossible. So when the model conflicts with reality, guess which one you get to change?

"Is the climate changing?" is a wrong question. The right question is, "Is the observed climate change larger than we would expect, based on experience?" The answer to the second question is no.

I have always answered everything on my beliefs and thought process. Never catered to a professor because at the end of the day I like sleeping at night.
Same goes with this paper. Composed to the best information I have. Plus with the campfire being as diverse as it is, this is the best place to get thoughtful information no matter how honest, dishonest, goofy, serious or whatever there is.
Gotta lub you guys.

Good luck on your final! With such a contentious topic that's subject to virtually no real science and all biased, agenda-driven speculation I'd be inclined to consider the profs. leanings when writing it.

You'll do great, I'm sure.

Spend some time reading some of the articles on Dr. Roy Spencer's website. He was a climatologist at NASA and now a research scientist for the Univ of Alabama.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

I dunno, Denton.

Penguin is my favorite 'Fire scientist and he's got a whole different view of it. Makes a pretty cogent case.

Denton: some quick googling isn't supporting what you assert. Got links?

Time is constant. Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter on a grander scale is not only expected, but it is predictable. As the seasons change annually, so does climate thru infinity. Does mankind alter it? You betcha we do. The burning of fossil fuels, cutting forests, nuclear power generation, irrigating farms, raising cattle (belching methane), millions of autos, building dams, etc all have their effect. However, we add change in a miniscule degree, when compared to volcanos (most are under oceans), solar storms, hurricanes, tornados, wind, etc. We don't want to forget that Man is a part of the Natural World and will have to make adjustments with Mother Earth. There are no free lunches out there for energy. With the exception of Hydrogen Generators for electricity and heat, all other sources generate a lot of waste. I am having a hydrogen generator installed this year, as soon as it arrives from Japan. Alyeska has worked a deal for me to get one as part of a settlement with them. No one else is allowed to import them though. Too Bad. They are the closest thing we currently have that would answer the worries of Global Warming cause by humans. You can google them up and see them but you can't have one, because your govt says NO. Just google up Prime Minister of Japan's Hydrogen Generator and see what I will be getting.
Good Luck with the write up on your paper.

The very spot I am sitting at had between 1 1/2 to 2 miles of ice covering it 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. Over the past 10,000 years or so it melted and receeded all the way to the Artic circle. There is a lot of local proof as it is not too hard to find rocks showing marks and grooves from being abraded as a huge glacier pushed them along in front and under it. I really wonder what early mankind did to raise the world temps to that level so as to melt an ice front that thick for many 1,000's of miles. In fact all the way across Canada. It appears there have been several "ice ages" over the many 1,000's and 1,000's of years. The world is most likely STILL warming before the climate reverses and we have ice again. I don't think mankind can be blamed totally for it, possibly we now contribute some.

I agree that there always has been, and always will be, climate change. Back in the old days when I was in college (early '70s) there was all this doom and gloom about (drum roll, please) the impending Ice Age that was going to destroy life as we knew it. Is there global cooling or global warming, i.e. climate change? Sure, as I said there always has been and always will be. Has man contributed to it? Maybe, maybe not, but not to the extent the global warming nuts are trying to make us think. "They" were saying 40 years ago that the coming ice age was caused by man, too. How convenient that 40 years later the doom and gloom is 180 degrees different than in the '70s. Heck, Mt St Helen pumped more crap into the air than man had since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution until then. That does not mean to imply that we shouldn't try to do what we can to minimize man's influence on the deteriorating ecosystem, but in the end, I really don't think humankind has accelerated it very much, if at all.

Good luck with your paper. College profs can be a PITA, some more than others. As long as you are honest with your views, as you see them, you should be good to go.

Just one old fart's opinion(s) . . . use any, all or none . . . Ya didn't pay much for it .

Enrique:

A bunch of the answers here are right on. I say that from the viewpoint of 30 years as a meteorologist.

Hillary Clinton once said, "Never waste a good crisis". If you look closely at the money trail associated with global warming, you'll see a lot that will make you hesitant to subscribe to the warmer's viewpoint. There are just too many people who hope to profit from it.

There is no doubt that world temperatures have warmed recently (e.g. since the Industrial Revolution). There is no doubt that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have gone up recently. There is also good reason to believe that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is responsible for some part of that.

The million dollar question is, how MUCH of the observed warming is due to carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere? In a strict technical sense, the answer is: a tiny fraction.

Why climate modelers promise spontaneous combustion of the earth in the next 100 years is because they assume a small increase due to CO2 will trigger other changes that will, when all added up, make a large change in temperature. The problem with that is that they have to make all sorts of assumptions that are little more than wild guesses, resulting in a variety of future temperature scenarios. If you look up the history of global warming forecasts, you'll see they are all over the place.

Meanwhile, several reputable scientists are putting out peer-reviewed research that identifies more than a couple of completely plausible reasons the world warmed up when it did.

Now you're stuck with the question: who do you believe and what do you do about it? Do you panic and spend billions (probably trillions) of dollars cutting down CO2 with the possible result of driving temperatures down a fraction of a degree over 100 years? Do you accept government control over nearly every facet of your life (after all, CO2 is produced by nearly everything you do and nearly everything that is manufactured) for the same fraction of a degree cooling?

Or do you publish the various theories and debate them publicly among scientists worldwide, narrowing the field down to the most likely couple and then do a cost-benefit analysis? Incredibly, it appears no one has thought of this.

Instead, we have carbon credits and a trading system modeled on Wall Street stockbrokers that stand to do multi-million dollar business for not accomplishing anything at all, just trading the credits. Al Gore is a big player in this part of the global warming action, and I seem to remember that Obama was on the board of directors when the whole scheme was initiated.

The EPA has been given the right to treat CO2 as a dangerous chemical, so government dominance over the individual has been extended.

One prominent scientist has publicly announced that any meteorologist who "denies" global warming should lose their job. Anyone thinking of Hitler yet?

Money, power, government control. What a soap opera!

The issue is way, way too big to come to grips with here. I'll just end with this: there is some science backing up the warmer's theories, but there are good scientific reasons to think they may not be right.

All in all, it just amazes me that no one trusts the weatherman to forecast tomorrow's weather, but millions of people think we can tell what is going to happen in the next 100 years!

Wether the weather is changed by man's actions is simply an irrelevant question.

As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest fuels out there, they will be burnt. Granola munchers on the campuses of US and European coastal cities will not convince 1.2 billion Chinese, 800,000 Indians (dot, not feather), and more than a billion other assorted Asians in developing countries to stop burning fuels. Once people can afford it, they will buy energy and make it turn on the lights, heat and cool their houses, their water and their food.

The elite liberal racists want to keep their comforts, and save the world by denying it to "those people". That's just not going to happen. "Those people" like warm houses and cars and refrigerators and electric lights and t.v.s and air travel, too. And they are going to get them from the cheapest available energy source.

What that will do to the climate/weather -- is what is going to happen.

I agree, Dutch. Minus the partisan sniping.

I had to write a research paper on 'global warming' for my first college English class 2 1/2 years ago. The professor was a liberal so I made arguments that global warming is existent. I believe that it is, but I believe that the liberals exaggerate it. The subject for my paper was ticks, and basically I argued that global warming is increasing their population as a whole.

Remember, for this type of assignment the professor has a lot of freedom in the grading. Manipulate their thinking.

Really? Where's the fun in that.....

I made essentially that argument at a Thanksgiving table, Dutch, several years ago and was branded a hater for it. But it's true. It's gettin' burned, all of it, and the consequences will be what they will be.

It's yet another way we are running the train off the tracks. We are DAMN good at that!

Enrique
When in the non science classes in college the most important thing is to talk to your professor and learn his / her biases and viewpoints.
Do yOur research and paper validating their belief system in order to receive a high grade. If you want to really learn enroll in a chemistry, bio, econ, foreogn language, engineering, comp sci or math based class.

And I consider climate change a non science based course of study like psych and sociology.

Well-put and honest answer with no alternative agenda

Sure.

It's all boolchit.

The end.

Climate always has, and always will change. Whether or not carbon levels have anything to do with it is not proven, after much treasure and time spent in trying to prove it so. In any case, IF carbon levels DO drive climate change, the miniscule amount provided by the activities of man are almost insignificant. What IS significant is that the people that produce carbon are also wealthy. Because of that, carbon levels can be used to extract money from those people. Political influence can be manipulated using carbon levels as "justification" for penalties, whether monetary or otherwise. So - what we are left with is that factually, the influence of carbon on temperature rise is NOT supported by the available data. We are inundated with false evidence (repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes truth) to the point where public consensus (without a factual base) trumps science. Grants and other monies available to scientists are coming from the very people who stand to gain from carbon driving temperature levels. The scientists are "cherry picking" facts that on their face, SEEM to support anthropogenic global warming, in order to obtain that treasure. That's what I think.

People are full of themselves. For humans to think that they have any more than a very temporary impact on this planet is hugely presumptuous. In 10,000 you won't even know the place. We barely crawled out of the stone age 100 years ago. 100 years ago most of mankind was still "choppin wood" to get warm and cook supper. Much of the world still is. 100 years in the History of mankind is not even a hiccup. In the History of the Earth, not even a heartbeat. High end estimates are that we can burn up all the hydrocarbons (petroleum) on this planet in 500 years. Still a smidgen and hardly worth the effort at changing the climate of the planet we live on.

We could do our worst and still the Earth would win in the end, and surely it will. With us or without us.

Alan

As I recall some years back , The Data indicated about a 0.7 F Degree increase over the last 100 Years . Past History shows extended Periods of Increase , and extended Periods of Decrease . Some Studies by Lane Nicolas and Osborne indicate that the Suns activity offers a very good explanation of the recent 100 year Increase . I believe the Lane mathematical Model accounts for over 90% of that Increase . Do some Research on this and present your own opinion . Oh , there were significant Periods of Temperature Decreases too : Look into the Maunder Minimum ( about 1700 ) , and the Dalton Minimum ( about 1800 ). These were substantiated by Carbon 14 Data as I recall . For fun , I used to find my Professors special field of activity and point of view , and take the opposite side . And only a few times did it hurt my Grades !

Precisely. This is the "ethics" part--if you were to concede that global warming is happening, is manmade, and is caused by burning fossil fuels, what should you or I do about it? Ethics is all about doing the right thing, after all.

Given Dutch's observations, the answer is "nothing." Since fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source we have, using them raises our standard of living. If we were to curtail our use of them here in the US, they'll still be burned, the only difference will be that we'll have a lower standard of living because we'll be using more expensive sources and/or using less cheap, abundant energy.

And the Chinese will buy it, burn it, and prosper.

So, since curtailing our use of fossil fuels won't have the desired effect, it's hard to make the case that it's "doing the right thing" ethically, regardless of whether or not you accept that the climate is warming appreciably due to CO2 from fossil fuels.

There is a small island "nation" in the South Pacific .. the name illudes me now..
some 1000 souls that will need to move soon, as their atoll disapears. They will argue the fact with you.
Warming or cooling, it is climate change.

It will be 70+ degrees in Ohio all week.
Not like any March I can remember..?

I need to get spring pre-emergent on the lawn. quickly!

LOL. Got a link to your favorite kool aid drinker? Typical Jeff O logic - I believe cause it fits my mindset.

Climate change is a natural phenomenon and we can do nearly nothing about it, one way or the other.. Period.

Simple, it has always occurred in cycles as the planet moves in an elliptical orbit around the sun not a steady distance. That and the earths core heats & cools due to sub mantle pressures and venting. Man has NOTHING to do with it and it will continue long after we are gone.

Climate change is a geological fact of life. A basic college course will show you millions of years of changes. From ice to water, from tropical to desert, it all changes. Some of these cataclysmic changes killed off large population groups of animals and plants. To think that man can control the forces on Earth and in the universe is idiotic.

Climate models are extremely limited in their parameters and cannot account for variables that are very hard to measure much less factor in, eg. cloud cover and water vapor.

The sun is the energy source for much of what Earth has to offer. Witness the Maudner Minimums and its affect.

I ask you this. Why is it that the man made kool aid drinkers all have the same political persuasion? Why is every solution result in a higher cost, less convenience and a step back in lifestyle? No, this is a pseudo-religion based on political ideologies. This is behavioral modification because a group of people do not like modern lifestyles.

Anthropogenic global warming is a trojan horse made to grow government , raise taxes and control your life. I vigorously claim - bullcrap!

The increase in CO2 does have some effect on climate, but it's not clear how much and maybe not even the direction. It's also unknown if the change is harmful or beneficial for the majority of humankind. Increased CO2 levels may cause rising sea levels and more weather extremes, but may also make vast areas of North America, Europe and Asia arable and combined with the beneficial effects of CO2 on most plants, global food production could soar.

The real problem of climate change is political in that there will be winners and losers in the climate change lotto. The losers could be the U.S. in which case the world would say it was our own fault, but if the losers are mostly undeveloped nations then there will be growing calls for the developed world to pay damages.

The scientific unknowns open the door for various groups to use the climate change issue as a means of promoting their own views and agenda. Extreme environmentalism is a theology that uses what some term "junk science" to fight against human development by targeting its Achilles heel, which is energy production. Thus they push for CO2 reduction, but also are in opposition to nuclear energy, hydroelectric power, wind farms, solar farms in the desert, oil drilling, oil pipelines, and even the increased production of clean burning NG through hydraulic fracturing. The idea is to starve modern civilization of energy to force it to comply with their idea of how humankind should live.

At the same time industry and government are using the climate change issue to promote things like biofuels, alternative fuels for cars, high efficiency lighting, super insulated windows, stricter building codes, and energy saving appliances. Others, such as Al Gore, see an opportunity to make millions in the carbon cap and trade market.

Any science that fills in the unknowns, counters or even weakens main stream climate change orthodoxy is dissuaded through funding and publishing hurdles. Climate science is no longer seeking the truth, and in fact, it's afraid of the truth.

First of all you have to look at what the word "change" means. If we define it by a narrow window of 30 years, we can see that there have been all sorts of differences in weather patterns that we got used to as a kid.

I remember seeing snow on the ground in November that wouldn't leave until spring thaw in April. My norm as a kid was snow on the ground all winter, anything different was change. Then I realized I was using a few years as kid to be my base on which I judged what differences there were as I grew up, noticing "change".

My youth is an extremely short time to compare against what I have seen as I grew older, recognizing the need to have a broader sample to truly distinguish "change" from fluctuating patterns I had witnessed as I grew older.

Expanding that window to hundreds of years will show changes occurring in all sorts of ways that we don't recognize in a lifetime. Expand that to thousands of years and we again find evidence of climatic changes the caused drastic differences in what lived and died.

I also believe we as a scientific community have only had the ability to keep precise records of weather and changes within weather patterns for such an insignificant time, that it is hard to associate a catastrophic end to us and our environment as we are only witnessing a phenomenon that has cycled over and over for tens of thousands of years...

There are merchants of doubt on one side and merchants of fear on the other. The truth about climate change lays somewhere in the middle of both extremes.

In competing views of science, the ability to make the best prediction wins.

I was attempting to give Enrique something they could use. I didn't think denying climate change outright would be a good strategy for a college paper. Beyond the science are the ethics issues of a group using science to push its theology, and of science being afraid of the truth.

The Ethics are of greater import than the "change". The reason the religion of environmentalism has used this issue is that there's ONE society that will voluntarily be subject to self-imposed limiting of its power, on "moral" grounds. That's the USA. The science isn't the reason this got & became big- the opportunity to get the USA to voluntarily become weaker is the reason. The reason attention keeps being given to interpretation of the science is to keep attention OFF the ethical question, so it'll remain useful. This whole deal is some of the best recent evidence that man is a critter subject to
spiritual/intellectual/moral influences, and that does NOT change.

This planet has been through climate change for milenia.
We don't cause it, and we can't fix it

The only human-caused part of global warming is from the heated arguments about global warming.

If you do a bit of searching, you'll find that the polar ice caps on Mars have diminished in recent years. Apparently our excess CO2 has drifted clear out there.

Links to follow:

Mismatch between model and reality for radiation balance.

Scroll down to see graph of global temperature, 4500 years.

Another long term temperature graph.

Ah so, however, you make one sright...r will dissolve more CO2 than warm will.

debunking the hockey stick graph

Scroll down to graph. CO2 does not...oday's CO2 level is extraordinarily low.

global warming has stalled

That's about all I could come up with quickly. One that I failed to find is a 2000 year record of temperature that corresponds with what we know happened: Prosperous farms in Greenland around 1000 a.d., the River Thames freezing over in the Little Ice Age, etc.

Much of the data on the web was put there by people who make their living predicting climate disaster. If there is no global warming, their rice bowl is broken. So they selectively edit what we see, and they apply inappropriate statistical techniques. You really have to read the material closely to see what is legit and what is scareware.

In 50 years, people will regard our period of global warming panic as a huge mass hysteria, fomented by dishonest politicians who paid scientists to prostitute themselves and feed the hysteria.

What do you want to hear? I can tell you I'm glad it's 8 degrees of Fahrenheit warmer this morning than the last three morings, a good thing since this is Spring break for our kids and we hoped to bring them from the coast over to the Yukon, see some of the Iditarod mushers, etc. But we still have 50 degrees of frost (which is better than 58 degrees ) So we'll probably ride in the daylight anyway. I haven't seen as much stable ice on the sea as we have this year, for quite a few years. The Earth doesn't seem worried. We won't be here forever and it'll still turn after we are gone. We don't change the rules even by thinking we aren't playing by them.

I forgot to mention, beer and soda consumption are the cause of excess global climate change.......they 'create' too much CO2.

Beer and soda are excellent sources of carbonation in your diet.

Give them time; the 'gooders' will have burping banned...

Kique, I think the most interesting paper you could write would be one analyzing the reflexive, knee-jerk reactions from both sides of the debate. That's what is most interesting to me... or you could show that if indeed we have changed the climate via CO2, it's a done deal. There's no practical way to sequester what we've put out, nor will we (humanity) be cutting emissions. To the contrary.

Either approach might make your prof's head explode, though.

Do us a favor Jeff O and sequester your CO2 for us. After all, its the right thing to do.

Controversial opinion to voice here, but I do believe that human presence on the planet does have an effect on the climate.

From the web site "Population Growth over Human History" (see: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html#Past ) I've copied "The human population growth of the last century has been truly phenomenal. It required only 40 years after 1950 for the population to double from 2.5 billion to 5 billion. This doubling time is less than the average human lifetime. The world population passed 6 billion just before the end of the 20th century. Present estimates are for the population to reach 8-12 billion before the end of the 21st century. During each lecture hour, more than 10,000 new people enter the world, a rate of ~3 per second!

The existence of 7 billion (and growing), each exhaling CO2 and defecating and producing garbage must have an effect of the climate. These multitudes are driving cars and using energy at prodigious rates. We know that CO2 does increase warming and there is just so much that the earth and its atmosphere can absorb.

I am not saying that this is the only cause, but it certainly contributes.

I don't know how anyone can consider themselves "green" and still be against CO2. CO2 has a wonderful stimulative effect on plant growth. Some greenhouses use it for exactly that effect.

Here's one other interesting link.

It's pretty well understood that water vapor is by far the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect, accounting for 95-97% of the total in our atmosphere. But you see a lot of tables listing CO2 as the top contributor. Why? Well, you can't do anything about water vapor... the stuff is always coming off the top of the oceans, lakes, and rivers. So, since it's fairly constant, and since we can't do anything about it, some workers have taken it off the top of the chart, and put it in a footnote that says "excluding water vapor". Those charts get copied and pasted, and the footnote either carelessly or on purpose vanishes. So you get a plethora of tables listing CO2 as the main greenhouse gas. It's not. It's not even close. Its contribution is very minor. In research terms, it's a woosle. (Look up the story in Winnie the Pooh.) It has been repeated so often that it is an established part of the lore, but it sprang into being without substantiation and became established by numerous repetitions. 16,123 repetitions make a truth.

Follow this link to some opening polar ice cap data.
http://www.real-science.com/greenland-alaska-ice-1979

Given the fact that there are climate cycles, it makes sense that at any given time we are either heading towards or coming out of an ice age, a warming cycle, etc. My Suburban is not the cause. Triton has warmed. Mars has warmed. Pluto has warmed.Many other bodies have warmed. Seems to me that orbits and Sun cycles would be a logical place to begin.

Check out Lord Monckton on the subject.

Here's a good start.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/10/moncktons-schenectady-showdown/

I find it hard to believe that mankind has no impact on the environment. That being said, to what degree we have an impact is the 64,000 question.

My personal opinion is that no one knows yet. It will take many years of researching weather patterns to accurately estimate the impact that co2 may or may not have on the environment.

i, too enjoy the back and forth between the two polarities. and it's different on every website. and that's fine.

my laymen's view is that it's a combination of factors involving changes on the Sun, the Earth cycles, and yes, to a degree us humans. to think all the cars and industrial production doesn't have an effect, along with all the forest clearing, and paving of roads, and concentrating energy consumption in the mega-cities just boggles my mind.

we understand too little, and it may already be too late, but noone really knows for sure.

what is concerning is that elements in the leftist political movement is attempting to tie global warming to our capitalist political system of gov't. that is, can free markets be allowed to exist given global warming? btw, please don't call me a leftist. i'm just someone who is aware of their message.

Kique,

Take a look at the views of the Viscount Monckton. He was recently at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Very smart guy with excellent points...jim

Of course man has had an impact. Without man, the Great Plains would be millions of square miles of grassland, good only for grazing. Instead, they're among the world's greatest producers of food.
Here in so. Idaho, it used to be all sagebrush high desert. Now it grows millions of acres of all kinds of foodstuffs.
Water that used to just flow to the oceans to continue a never ending water cycle now irrigates millions of square miles to produce food for billions.

Is this all bad? According to the radical environmentalists, yes.

I know it's superficial, but I have the damndest time giving credibility to somebody named Viscount Monckton. Might as well be named "Bubbles"...

The Washington Post:



The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen , Norway ..

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

* * * * * * * * *
I apologize, I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post - 89 years ago

You guys are amazing. So much information and so much research in less than a day. I gotta give you all a big Thanks!!!
This thread was cited in my reference page, so any information the professor wants to see that we say on this topic can be seen and so my report is supported by what was said.
Te report is not the best I have done and I wish I had the ability to write more words on it, but fact is I was limited. however with the various views on here and the links to support the discussion. The credibility of citing this thread for reference is strong.
Luckily I have done my papers and discussions in this course from my right wing stance. It adds to the discussion and the professor seems open minded to different views which I enjoyed.
Anyways thanks to all that contributed and thanks for all the valuable information provided.

Kique

With hundreds of thousands of dollars in weather equipment at your local TV weather department, you can see how accurate they are - 72 hours out!!! How in the hell can they make any real judgment on stuff years and decades away?
Mother Nature gives and Mother Nature takes away.