Today’s headline stories on yahoo said that in the past three summers more arctic ice has melted than any other time in history.That is a very scary thought!

What bothers me the most in the “debate” over climate change is that one half of the debate largely comes from people who think Creationism is a valid “scientific” theory. A couple centuries ago these same kind of people found it heretical that the earth rotates around the sun.

I agree, Mike. Maybe it’s just my Libran nature, but I think that any kind of hysteria needs to be balanced with rational thinking and I don’t like the idea of using fear to push one point of view. Even if I agree with it!

Glaciers are melting here and there, but also growing here and there. No one really knows what’s going on, and if they do, they’re trying to sell you something or impose their will on you. I say, do nothing until we have more proof. And anything Al Gore says doesn’t count.

Actually, we do know what’s going on, although current models are inadequate to predict the consequences. It’s called too much CO2 (and some other gases with similar effects) in the atmosphere.

Our entire solar system is experiencing strange planetary changes. NASA has been documenting these wild and weird happenings for years. (David Wilcock gets into the scientific reasons in his work.) As we approach 2012 our bodies, our planet, and our whole universe is continuing to change. It’s nothing to fear, it’s a tremendous growth experience. That said, I do hope we start showing the earth some well deserved respect!

Regardless of what is happening, we owe it to our planet, ourselves, all living things and maybe future generations to keep from being wasteful and destructive. Earth gives us so much that the least we can do is be responsible. Not through fear but through basic common knowledge.
It’s interesting. I believe that global changes aren’t being caused by humans but by the natural cycles of our planet. Granted, it doesn’t help when we’re wasteful and destructive. But still.

I disagree, Mike. We don’t really understand the greater, wider cycles going on here, CO2 or no CO2. BTW, if you who are so gung-ho to eliminate carbon dioxide would think rationally for a moment: what do plants consume? CO2. In turn, they exhale oxygen. If there really is more CO2 in the atmosphere than there should be, then the plants and trees will increase because CO2 is their food, so to speak.

Kieron, the problem is that the system is already maxed out. The plants are already absorbing more. We are adding much more than the plants can absorb in addition there are other natural processes that remove CO2 such as oceanic limestone formation -which are also maxed. If the tundra thaws it will release it’s trapped CO2 so we are looking at an acceleration of the process from many different angles. Maybe we can’t do anything about it but it surely seems that the climate of the planet is going to change dramatically over the next 100 years. Even if it does change dramatically, I don’t think the Earth would be destroyed, but don’t you think we should start taking action to reduce our impact? I believe we should until we are much smarter than we are today. We don’t know the consequences of screwing with the chemical combination of the atmosphere of our planet. The atmosphere keeps the entire planet alive and it’s a very thin layer.

If the problem is that the system is maxed out, why are over 30.000 Scientists for Global Warming suing Al Gore for fraud? Why is Hollywood asking he return his Oscar?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHW7KR33IQ
Pollution and global warming (or cooling) are very different issues and get mixed up. There is plenty of pollution that needs to be dealt with, but the temperature of the planet can´t be controlled by human beings, it´s totally natural for the temperature to fluctuate. In the same way we have yearly seasons here on earth, so does the galaxy have galactic seasons that influence the earth temperature over millions of years.
Cap and Trade is just an other abusive way of exploiting the masses whilst doing nothing for the environment.
A must read
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/7
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with a series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H.L. Mencken
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. – Groucho Marx
How fortunate for leaders that most men are followers.
~ Adolph Hitler

Analysa. It’s not true that we can’t influence the temperatures. We could destroy the whole planet with a fraction of the nuclear arsenals out there. Regardless of your position on whether we have had undue influence on climate (to believe this you must also believe the melting of the polar ice caps is natural btw), what is wrong with limiting CO2 emissions? It’s bad idea to pollute the atmosphere I think we can agree on that. Cap and trade is bad, we should just cap. On another note Al Gore invented neither the internet nor global warming. -I studied the CO2 problem back in the 80′s in high school. Gore, a mere politician, is perhaps an unfortunate spokesman for either one.

Mike, if you studied CO2 then you know that the ice core proxies show that warming PRECEEDS elevated CO2 by 600-800 years. The warming happens first– probably solar activity– and the CO2 elevation follows. Oceanographers have been telling us that for years… that the atmospheric history contained in the oceans can go back for centuries. The oceans produce most of the atmospheric CO2. It goes through cycles of sequestering CO2 and then releasing it centuries later. That is what is recorded on the ice cores. The oceans are massive and can not turn on a dime… it takes centuries for the cycle to work through.
So there is a very high probability that CO2 elevation that we’re seeing today was actually caused by a warming period in the distant past… probably the Medieval Warm Period.
THIS is why it is important that we STOP NOW and wait to see what is really happening. It will destroy the economies of the entire industrialized world to go into cap and trades schemes. If there is no problem, would it be worth it?
This Saturn-Pluto configuration is turning all sorts of secrets out for the world to see. Just today we have the leak that the US, UK, and Denmark were plotting some sort of takeover of the Copenhagen conference, to issue a treaty that would have made the 3rd World nations the virtual slaves of the US and EU through carbon control.
Do you really want to rush headlong into something like that, or IS it better to stand back and see what is really happening? Saturn-Pluto is giving us the opportunity to do this. We need to put the brakes on everything… the most overused word of 2009 was “Crisis!”

PS: Mike, it is also true that SOME PORTIONS of the Arctic ice are melting, and others are building up. The bit on the melting glaciers was within the past couple of days revealed to be a typo in the IPCC report… the glaciers will be gone by 2350, not 2035. Someone goofed. That this revelation occurred during the Saturn-Pluto configuration suggests that it was done deliberately and revealed to clear the air. We’ll see. The things that are coming out LOOK like a major conspiracy has been uncovered, but we’ll have to trust that Pluto will do his thing.
The point is that if the planet IS warming… which I seriously doubt is anything beyond a natural cycle… it isn’t something that’s going to be causing us any trouble tomorrow morning. Chill.

There was a time when walking in Tokyo, and other major cities was a danger to your health. They wore face masks not to prevent a virus but to shield pollution. I used to own a water company-I found out almost every city and town in the USA was breaking EPA standards by averaging all the months. This would hide the months where the water is not fit to drink. Now every major city mixes chlorine with ammonia to kill the cancer in our drinking water. This anti Co2 movement is part and parcel of a greater awareness to turn back the clock so the mistakes of greed won’t prevent our kids from living a healthy and happy life. It is about air, water, oceans, sky and earth.

If the problem is that the system is maxed out, why are over 30.000 Scientists for Global Warming suing Al Gore for fraud? Why is Hollywood asking he return his Oscar?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHW7KR33IQ
Pollution and global warming (or cooling) are very different issues and get mixed up. There is plenty of pollution that needs to be dealt with, but the temperature of the planet can´t be controlled by human beings, it´s totally natural for the temperature to fluctuate. In the same way we have yearly seasons here on earth, so does the galaxy have galactic seasons that influence the earth temperature over millions of years.
Cap and Trade is just an other abusive way of exploiting the masses whilst doing nothing for the environment.
A must read
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/7
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with a series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H.L. Mencken
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. – Groucho Marx
How fortunate for leaders that most men are followers.
~ Adolph Hitler

Not sure what happened there, I did not post my previous post again. But Im having a hard time posting anything at all, so much energy on this!
Anyways, a good read:
I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that “human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming” is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.
Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England).
Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason. If the MWP is “allowed” to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a “runaway greenhouse” in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen’s runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.
As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why “hide the decline”?) are ignored or hidden.
As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their “Copenhagen Diagnosis”); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.
Read the rest at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/a-devastating-response-to-theres-nothing-to-see-here-move-along/#more-13710

Thanks Analysa it seems to be complicated for the layman. My aim in writing was to make sure that the larger picture that greed, selfishness and waste will bring a civilization to it’s knees before just about anything else.

Good discussion, although I disagree with the need to quote Hitler. I don’t think there is cause for alarmism. I don’t think the planet is in imminent danger of destruction due to rising CO2. Yet I stand by my belief that reducing pollution is a good thing. I don’t believe that capping carbon emissions will destroy economies. That is just another form of alarmism. You can pick your alarmism. Be alarmed about capping emissions or alarmed about not doing it. Both forms of alarmism are being advocated by opposing camps. I find both camps of alarmists annoying and stupid. We already have the technological ability to move to less destructive forms of energy production, but powerful lobbies try to scare people into thinking catastrophe will result if we try to limit “the right to pollute”. This reminds me of “Reefer Madness”. Don’t be fooled either way is my recommendation.

Mike, attend:
Article 77 of the Copenhagan convention:
“77. The agreed full costs of enabling activities undertaken by the national coordinating bodies shall be met by developed country Parties. The administration costs of national coordinating bodies shall be covered through international financial resources made available for this purpose. A separate pool of funding to finance national coordinating bodies through a direct line item in the secretariat’s budget shall be established. Such support shall not be subject to measurement, reporting and verification.”
This is only a small part of what was revealed by the Copenhagen Leak.
The clowns in charge of the Copenhagen Conference were going to write themselves a blank check, at YOUR expense, that no one would be able to even investigate, never mind challenge. “Such support shall not be subject to measurement, reporting and verification.”
Be afraid of these people. Be VERY afraid.
The question is not whether we should “limit the right to pollute”, but rather whether we’re polluting at all where CO2 is concerned. Another way to think of CO2 is “airborne plant food”. We learn about that in 6th grade General Science. Plants use CO2 to help in photosynthesis. More CO2 means lusher, greener plant life, producing ever more oxygen. Commercial nurserymen actually PUMP CO2 into their greenhouses when they can afford the complex setup. So additional CO2 means a greener Earth. This SHOULD be obvious to anyone who got past the 6th grade, but too many people bought into the “complexity”.
Remember the Saturn square Pluto. AND add in the Uranus direct.
Those outer planets work in a generational way. When one of the inner planets aspects one of the outer planets, things happen in a generational way. When a slow-mover like Saturn aspects one of them, BIG things happen. When it’s Pluto involved, secrets are purged. Saturn places the secrets at an institutional level.
Add in Uranus direct. Uranus is the upper octave of Mercury. In the same way that Mercury retrograde confuses communications in all sorts of small ways that can create big problems, so Uranus retrograde causes communications muddling at a generational level. When Mercury goes direct, all of those little miscommunications clear up. Same thing with Uranus. Uranus direct is breathing truth into the miscommunications that were being covered. Pluto purges the lies. Saturn places it at institutional level.
And it’s all coming out in the wash.

The above “Your Name” comment was by me. I have no idea why it dropped my moniker.

I’m not afraid. They already write themselves blank checks at our expense and we haven’t been able to stop it. I think it’s pretty silly to say the planet isn’t warming and we haven’t any impact on it. This has been scientific consensus for decades, long before conspiracy theorist have gone wild about the geopolitics of it. Of course now that global politics are involved it’s full of conspiracy theory. I don’t follow the politics. We could switch all this manufactured controversy around to be about 9/11 and the gist is the same. Healthcare, Military Industrial Complex, a new war -basically when they want our money they will get it one way or another, and they will use fear for and against it as they see fit. Most of the people carrying signs in the street are drones. They don’t have a single thought of their own in their own heads. I think it’s silly to pretend it’s any other way. It’s child’s play to the global elites. I’m for personal responsibility. We all need to change our lifestyles to live more responsibly on this planet. I don’t care what “they” do unless I get to vote on it. Then I will probably vote not be taxed, and I won’t be fooled by hidden taxes like unpaid for wars or the federal reserve printing endless supplies of new money.

Mike, the conspiracy freaks say that the Copenhagen Conference is about a Marxist plot to redistribute wealth from the Western nations to the 3rd World nations. What the Conenhagen Leak demostrated is that it isn’t a “Marxist plot”… they aren’t plotting to redistribute anything. In fact, far from giving money to the 3rd World, they’re going to tax them less than the industrialized world. So this isn’t a “Marxist plot” at all, it’s a perfectly ordinary smash-and-grab robbery.
We would do well to put ALL climate legislation on ALL STOP until we get this mess sorted out.

PS: Science does not function by “consensus”. The world’s GREAT scientists, the Newtons, Einsteins, Copernicus’, Pasteurs, etc etc etc, became famous because they rejected the “consensus” and proved that they were right.

Reality doesn’t care if we are on-board with its mandates or not. The human race has to get with whatever program reality is serving up at a particular time. Are we shocked to learn that scientists fight among themselves and cheat as much as congressmen? Does that really change the relationships we understand about parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and the weather?
What the people of the world can do or will do about a change in climate is something else. My guess is that the undertow of entropy is now too great to provoke any meaningful unified change in behavior. The collapse of the US economy is too close to the horizon, and the so-called developing nations will have problems equally severe. In the meantime, it is unlikely that any of the major players will burn less coal and oil, or not cheat on each other even if they pledge to burn less. People who are not knuckleheads will make the practical arrangements that they can. These will, by definition, be localized, small-scale, and non-global communities, doing what they would have to do anyway.
By James Howard Kunstler “Climate, Oil, Reality and Delusion”
So the key point here and let´s capitalize it:
PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT KNUCKLEHEADS WILL MAKE THE PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS THAT THEY CAN. THESE WILL, BY DEFINITION, BE LOCALIZED, SMALL-SCALE, AND NON-GLOBAL COMMUNITIES, DOING WHAT THEY
W O U L D H A V E T O D O A N Y W A Y.
And that will result, over time, in what that prior scientist´s post I linked, was pointing towards, a return to sensible environmental science: water use, habitat destruction, land use.
I recommend people buy silver and or gold, and store up on foods like whole grains, pulses (beans), sea salt for cooking and other healthy foods that do not need refrigeration.

I’d prefer to address a more basic point than the politics or legislation. Global warming/climate change is happening, and humans have accelerated a process that if it is natural, normally takes eons to proceed. We are currently decimating the bio diversity of the planet on many fronts. This isn’t stuff Al Gore or any politician or liberal invented. Despite political and pundit machinations, this stuff has been known to be happening for decades. Geez if you think it is natural go north. The effects are most pronounced near the poles. Talk to the people who have lived up there for generations. The attack on the planet is coming from many fronts. The Amazon rain forest (lungs of the planet is being decimated -so there goes one of your biggest carbon sinks). The oceans are growing in acidity, because they are absorbing ever more carbon. Look up ocean acidification if you are interested. Read some James Lovelock. The idea that scientists are in some sort of conspiracy over this stuff is utterly ridiculous. I studied evolutionary biology in college -long before anyone even discussed these things except on PBS specials these facts were known and discussed. You folks can deny it all you want, but you are being manipulated surely as you claim others are, and the people on TV are fools, turn that box off. You are adopting opinions that are stupid and uninformed. I have no idea what the public policy should be on this stuff, but to come up with simplistic answers like I’ve read on this forum (the plants will just absorb it all) really lowers my hope for the future of humanity. If you want to contribute to making the planet unlivable and think we can keep consuming and polluting the way we do, please go on as usual. I’m sure you can convince yourself of anything. I know I can.

Those of you who debate the existence of climate change, is it that you think there is no climate change, or that it’s not man-made? Because clearly the climate is changing. The ice shelf in the Antarctic is melting. The Ward Hunt ice shelf in the Arctic had been around for 30,000 years before it started melting in the year 2000 and cracking off. These are facts that cannot be denied.

A simple undeniable fact in this debate is that sea level is rising. This rising is due to the warming of the oceans (thermal expansion) and more snow and ice melting than water freezing. If the climate were cooling then sea level would be falling.

I am glad that you are discussing two topics that have, of late, been of interest to me. Climate Change and Astrology.
Scientists who are pushing the idea that climate change is caused by human emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide are claiming that the world’s temperature will warm by 0.17C in the next five years (2014). That is, if the world average for this period is around 14.80C, then my personal opinion is that these scientists are consistent with their predictions. If this is not the case by 2014, then the hell with them. I think that it’s as simple as that.
The average world temperature for the period 2000-2009 was 14.63C. I examined monthly figures, which are issued by NASA, for this decade and created a chart with monthly, 8-month running averages.
Temperatures move very nicely in oscillating patterns, from high’s (maximums) to lows (minimums).
Here is what happened in the past decade
December, 2000 14.38 (minimum)
July, 2002 14.75 (maximum)
March, 2003 14.59 (minimum)
March, 2004 14.71 (maximum)
December, 2004 14.54 (minimum)
May+June, 2005 14.76 (maximum)
August, 2006 14.60 (minimum)
May, 2007 14.80 (record maximum)
August, 2008 14.48 (minimum)
And currently through October, 2009 (14,73), the planet is again approaching a new maximum. Who knows how long before records get broken again. Wait and see.

Analysa, exactly why do you recommend people buy silver and/or gold, and store up on whole grains, pulses (beans), sea salt and other healthy foods that do not need refrigeration?

Lynn, re: “Those of you who debate the existence of climate change, is it that you think there is no climate change, or that it’s not man-made? ”
No, Lynn… the debate is that the climate is ALWAYS changing, has been changing for billions of years without human interference, that ice shelfs routinely melt and then build up again. Did you know that there are photos of a US submarine on the surface in WATER at the North Pole 50 years ago? The USS Skate surfaced at the True North Pole March 17, 1959. So the claim that loss of ice in the Arctic is somehow “unprecedented” is completely bogus.
The ice at the poles is shaped and reshaped more by water currents than by air temperature… which never gets below 32F deg., by the way, so how could it melt because of air temperature?
No, we don’t claim the climate isn’t changing. It is always changing… and THAT is our claim, that there is nothing unusual about it, and therefore socially and economically ruinous actions should not be taken.