Open Your Eyes

I don't believe that you have a firm grasp of global climate changes, both historical and recent.

The "sheep", as you demonstrate, are apparently on both sides of the argument.

"global warming effect caused by man-made behavior", "Florida go 20 feet under the waves", "someone starts up a 57 Chevy" all demonstrate the ridiculous arguments of people who are paid by special interests to deny that "smoking causes ling cancer", "burning coal does not cause air pollution"(we won't talk about carbon emissions), "the air is perfectly healthy in China" and we've been keeping records for 100 years now, so we know what all this means?

You praise NASA with one sentence and try to discredit them in the next....

http://climate.nasa.gov/

Geological history tells us the earth runs in cycles, it warms (droughts) and cools (ice age). According to NASA, the earth has an elliptical orbit, we see the climate change every year.

The 25¢ phrase today is green house gases. It wasn't man made that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. My gut feeling is we're headed into another geological climate change, and it's something man kind can not change (as of yet). Darwin's Theory may very well in fact be proven, if man kind is still around to record it!

Good analogy is to look what happened after the last Ice Age (!0,000 years ago). Man was then able to start farming and stop much of the Hunter Gathering. The amount of agriculture and the rise of human population rose in proportion.(It got warm enough to grow crops at higher latitudes, and allowed populations to flourish in higher latitudes). Once of the best current hypothesis is that once the earth got warm enough to begin agriculture , on a planet -wise scale, the population increased , resulting in more demand for food, more animal inventory, more manure, more methane and CO 2 into the environment etc. For this we should be happy. I do not want to have to go onto my neighbors' property and hunt the last rabbit. Without the change in temperature since the last Ice Age, and after the last Little Ice age (!300-1850), we would still have the Great Plague, the incessant coal burning to stay warm (Cheap and no brainer technology), and food shortages. Look at the standard of living before oil was discovered, and compare it to the present with all of the advantages it has given us. What you are talking about is POLLUTION, (IMHO), which , indeed is bad, as it prevents natural reconstruction and purification of our resources. With that in mind, based upon the latest data, only Western civilization countries should be allowed to burn any fuels, or use oil, as they use it the most cleanly and effectively. I appoint you as the Energy Ambassador to China, India, and Malaysia. What would you like to tell them?

We in the West, truly admire your steadfastness in cycling wherever you wish to go, and support your drive to design new saddles .Meanwhile , we have 67 tonnes of haemorroid cream that we can let you have at a small discount.......no we don't have applicators"

If we are really constantly looking back at ourselves. From up there. We should. All. When we look up. ....Smile!

Cool _{(pun intended)} video!

I believe we don't have enough data yet...maybe in a few hundred years.

From "Climate". Glossary of Meteorology. American Meteorological Society.
"Weather generally refers to day-to-day temperature and precipitation activity, whereas climate is the term for the statistics of atmospheric conditions over longer periods of time.^"

"I believe we don't have enough data yet...maybe in a few hundred years."

I won't be around to see that time (No, REALLY? Why not?) but I'd be willing to look at the data THEN with a new eye, one not jaundiced by the present rhetoric.

What would make the difference? Two things.

1) We'd HAVE more data, and (I'm hopeful that in a few hundred years, we'd look at it from a balanced, SCIENTIFIC perspective, instead of the politicized perspective we have now, because)

2) All of the stupid politicians who are alive now would be dead, too, and I have hope (Rose colored glasses ON!) that the "scientists" then in existence would NOT be duped by that generation's Al Gore, and that that generation's politicians would actually be intellig....

Oh, hang it. It ain't gonna work. It requires honest, intelligent politicians. That will NEVER happen!!

But I've always made the point that we don't have enough data over a long enough time period to be making life altering decisions. Especially when the only obvious reasons to make them is to line rich lying politician's pockets with OUR money at the expense of OUR lives! But I'd be willing to watch us embark on a long-term study, which would be fitting for a long-term understanding of a long-term effect.

I'm betting we'd just find more cyclical change, though.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along now. Come back in a few hundred years, and there probably still won't be anything to see, but, check back later, K?

Friends,

Just remember that CLIMATE ≠WEATHER. Small changes can overwhelm systems that are not flexible. Consider the abandonment of the Anasazi lands in the USA southwest a few centuries ago because of the loss of rainfall for many years.

Pragmatism would say that we are not sure what the effects will be (or if--as you assert), but we can plan the flexibility into our systems to allow for them. If the effects do not occur, we have lost little, but if they do, we have lost all. Thus, we should build infrastructure in areas a few feet higher than we used to--just in case.

Many businesses are finding that changes to their processes and/or their suppliers' processes can be made to reduce carbon emissions or energy use or water use or trash production by as much as 25-80% and actually be less costly than continuing with "business as usual". (Return on investment on these frequently is as short as 2-3 years.) Are these approaches wrong?--I think not.

A dictum from millennia ago is still valid: "First do no harm." Unfortunately, we generally have failed to apply this in our approach to the earth. Deny that climate change is occurring and say that we need to do a decades-long study before we accept this as a possibility? OK--I can live with this IF we use the same decades-long approach to our gargantuan extraction and consumption of fossil fuels--i.e. do a decades-long research on the effects of how we mine the coal or remove the oil from the tar sands, or free the tightly bound methane deposits from shale before doing large-scale "damn-the-torpedos" adoption of these technologies. On that, how about a full disclosure of the chemicals added to the injected water instead of a fierce protection of this information?

Go ahead, Fredski and Micahd02, and many others who hold your viewpoints. Deny or question or otherwise insist on being heard. The minority (and yours is) viewpoint needs to be heard. Occasionally this viewpoint is correct (look at the history of the theory of continental drift as an example). There was a time when most respected physicists considered that field to be mature and not worthy of too much effort because everything had been explained--just with a few minor inconsistencies that had to be checked more. OOPS--in came relativity, and a whole bunch of stuff that turned the whole field inside-out. Can this occur to the topic of climate change? Yes, but I suspect that the inside-out results will actually be a worse-than-expected result instead of showing it to all be false alarms.

--JMM

After thinking this all over again, I don't think chicken little is a good example in today's age. Because the sky is falling, with used space junk with a few meteorites and meteor air-bursts tossed in for good measure.

As far any problems man-made that will throw the earth out of balance, would be launching all this material (weight) into outer space and not returning it back to earth.

Oh yeah, we've launched far more weight than what's rained back down on us

I'm also waiting for me 8 digit After thinking this all over again, I don't think chicken little is a good example in today's age. Because the sky is falling, with used space junk with a few meteorites and meteor air-bursts tossed in for good measure.

As far any problems man-made that will throw the earth out of balance, would be launching all this material (weight) into outer space and not returning it back to earth.

Oh yeah, we've launched far more weight than what's rained back down on us

I'm also waiting for my 8 digit research funding to be approved

Damn, don't what happen there

I expect that if the "deal" - corporate government agreement to suicide - goes through with Iran, there will indeed be some man-caused climate change (global warming), but it will not be through burning fuels made of carbon or even hydrocarbons. I would expect a full-blown nuclear holocause within a decade.

One man's problem is another man's opportunity:

http://insights.globalspec.com/article/640/cutting-greenhouse-gas-emissions-with-a-more-effective-carbon-capture-method?frmtrk=cr4digest&et_rid=614380648&et_mid=77284521

New sodium nitrate doped magnesium oxide absorption media, reduce footprint and cost of CO2 removal. Now what to do with it after you capture it?