Your Thoughts on this Issue

I dont think we can wait for the Federal Gov. to get off their collective butts. Many states and cities are initiating their own long and short term efforts. We should all get involved from our own homes to city hall and state houses. It can be done and if so it must begin with the individual.

I find that hard to believe. In our town it was the coldest. People had water lines breaking all over our town this winter.

i must say we had record snows and wind chill were I am.
I have never heard of schools closing because of temperature, but over 600 were closed for 2 days.
So, i don't know if I can really believe that it was record high when I was freezing my britches off:)

Carol - with technology advancing the way it is I don't think much can be done. Living in the Middle East we had the freakiest winter after 45 years!! Planting more trees is a small step that some communities are attempting and I think that is a small but very positive step.

While I believe human activity may contribute to global warming, I am inclined to think that attempt to place all or most of the blame on humans is based on human desire to be able to control the environment, and I tend to doubt that eliminating or vastly reducing the use of fossil fuels will produce as much of an effect as some hope or anticipate it will.

For one thing I suspect the mere increase in global population combined with technological advances the make it possible to keep more people warm for longer periods of time and to provide hot water and the heat to cook their food is also responsible for a large part of the increase in global temperatures during the past century. On top of that is heat being produced to operate refrigerators and to provide air conditioning when the temperatures rise above human comfort levels. This heat will still be generated regardless of the source of energy being used to produce it.

That said, I firmly believe we should be developing alternative, clean and renewable energy sources simply because we are using fossil fuels faster than we can replenish them, and the fact that the carbon emissions also affect the quality of the air we breathe.

In the long run I think the only solution to global warming on planet Earth will be for the more adventurous member of our species to leave it, so the planet's population may stabilize without the draconian measures that would otherwise be required to affect such stabilization.

To do that we must also apply our ingenuity to the challenges of space exploration and colonization.

"""A US government agency reported a record warm January worldwide pushed average temperatures to 0.72C above normal for the 20th Century."""

There is no such thing as normal when it comes to weather. Its just an average of all the extremes and moderate periods. Crying wolf every time there is a high average during a 3 month period has relegated environmentalists to those wide eyed ufologists who think every funny light in the sky is a UFO.

Either way, I find it funny that NASA has just produced a scientific study that took years to produce, that showed ALL the planets in our solar system are experiencing warming trends. Here is a clue. Solar system......SOLAR....

For you being you, and taking the time to publish this piece you are getting a lovely ten star rating. Yea For you!!!! :)

Historical experts say it is too be expected.

While I agree that we need to be more environmentally aware and accept that we can't control mother nature, how do scientists explain the "global warming" that ended the ice age and caused the glaciers to retreat? I don't think humans were around to cause that.

If you look at weather and climate trends over long periods of time, you'll see similar patterns of warming. However, to flat-out claim that upsetting the balance of nature as we are doing eliminating trees and spewing emissions does NOTHING to impact the environment is preposterous. Additionally, there is nothing negative to be gained by doing our part to reduce greenhouse emissions, using cleaner alternative fuel. protecting threatened forests and changing our habits to be more earth-friendly.

To Jeff and Brooklyn--Weather(day to day) and Climate are 2 separate animals.

I do believe that, as a nation we could strengthen our laws and fiines to make it worth the time for businesses to clean up thier act. As it stands, shrub & co. have allowed variances or weakened laws and we need to stop that. We cleaned up many of the nation's lakes and rivers when we got serious about pollution in the 70's, we can do this again.
What is also disturbing? I was listening to Thom Hartmann show last week. One of his guests said that global warming would be much worse but for the pollution in China and one other country(Asian country, but I don't remember which). Since China has become the greed capitalist's dream, they've done it without a thought to pollution standards. This in turn has caused a pollution cloud which has actually helped bring down the warming, but at the cost of health problems of the populace and environmental concerns.
As of August, I will be looking for a job that is close enough to home to ride my bike or walk for part of the year(I live in northern Illinois--it ain't happenin' in January). We changed out our old central air for the more efficient type in '05 and use radient heating. We can all do something.

you can rationalize this to pieces and it probably wont affect most of us but what legacy are we leaving for our grandchilden

Lets look at present effects I am 63 when I was a child allergies/asthma and the like in kids was rare. How prevalent is it now????

Carol, ther are so many things that need to be done -- I don't know where to begin. Maybe the best place to begin is with ourselves, but that means realizing there is a problem and not sweeping it under the rug. We had an unusually cold winter where I live and unusual weather is the result of global warming whether it is cold or warm. Walking instead of driving is a good way to get started. If you have to drive try finding people to car pool with -- it will save gas money for everyone in the carpool and reduce emissions. I don't think the
government is acting fast enough to do much help.

Lisa, I like your ideas, too. I started using environmentally safe cleaners in our home and guess what --- my allergies improved big time!!

They were talking about the whole planet not just certain regions. Global Warming can bring about ice ages or mini ice ages. What I think they are saying is that for the first time in the history of this planet a species is capable of compounding the weather cycles earth goes through. Barb I have done much either but I have started with the energy star rated light bulbs. Everything someone can do big or small makes a difference. Just changing 8 light bulbs has shown up on my electric bill. My next project is an energy star rated air conditioner with a heat strip

anything is good ok all

OK let me take a bit further look at the melting glaciers. All that fresh water into the salt oceans changes things. Then you would in the Atlantic through the cooling effects of these melting glaciers shut down the northern part of the gulf stream. That is a huge conveyor belt for the weather and that is one way it affects all of us

Hmm Carol has a good point. My asthma has been acting up lately..... I wouldn't blame it on CO2 but the real toxins emitted by vehicles might have an effect. Lets all thank the politicians who voted in all those tax hikes on gas in the 90's for making government even MORE dependent on revenues generated from fuel consumption...... It's no coincidence that the SUV boom coincided with it.

excellent point jeff

""Global Warming can bring about ice ages or mini ice ages.""

That came way out of left field. What ice age was because of global warming? The truth remains that global cooling is so deadly it makes warming trends look like a blessing from God.

Still nobody wants to admit that the sun determines our planets climate if it interferes with their religious belief that America is at fault.

I do think energy conservation should be stressed for a lot more reasons that "global warming". The science has no credibility and people will go on consuming with-out seriously caring about the impact. Government doesn't want to end oil consumption but they are more than willing to use fear based theories to get people to give them more control and more money.

gg lisa

Jeff we all seem to be stuck in an either or mode. Global warming and Ice Ages do normally occur in our planets history but for the first time a species on this planet has the ability to exacerbate the process. We need to be responsible for the effects of our activities on the weather and climate.

Here's how it works.



If you look at a globe, you'll see that the latitude of much of Europe and Scandinavia is the same as that of Alaska and permafrost-locked parts of northern Canada and central Siberia. Yet Europe has a climate more similar to that of the United States than northern Canada or Siberia. Why?



It turns out that our warmth is the result of ocean currents that bring warm surface water up from the equator into northern regions that would otherwise be so cold that even in summer they'd be covered with ice. The current of greatest concern is often referred to as "The Great Conveyor Belt," which includes what we call the Gulf Stream.



The Great Conveyor Belt, while shaped by the Coriolis effect of the Earth's rotation, is mostly driven by the greater force created by differences in water temperatures and salinity. The North Atlantic Ocean is saltier and colder than the Pacific, the result of it being so much smaller and locked into place by the Northern and Southern American Hemispheres on the west and Europe and Africa on the east.



As a result, the warm water of the Great Conveyor Belt evaporates out of the North Atlantic leaving behind saltier waters, and the cold continental winds off the northern parts of North America cool the waters. Salty, cool waters settle to the bottom of the sea, most at a point a few hundred kilometers south of the southern tip of Greenland, producing a whirlpool of falling water that's 5 to 10 miles across. While the whirlpool rarely breaks the surface, during certain times of year it does produce an indentation and current in the ocean that can tilt ships and be seen from space (and may be what we see on the maps of ancient mariners).



This falling column of cold, salt-laden water pours itself to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it forms an undersea river forty times larger than all the rivers on land combined, flowing south down to and around the southern tip of Africa, where it finally reaches the Pacific. Amazingly, the water is so deep and so dense (because of its cold and salinity) that it often doesn't surface in the Pacific for as much as a thousand years after it first sank in the North Atlantic off the coast of Greenland.



The out-flowing undersea river of cold, salty water makes the level of the Atlantic slightly lower than that of the Pacific, drawing in a strong surface current of warm, fresher water from the Pacific to replace the outflow of the undersea river. This warmer, fresher water slides up through the South Atlantic, loops around North America where it's known as the Gulf Stream, and ends up off the coast of Europe. By the time it arrives near Greenland, it's cooled off and evaporated enough water to become cold and salty and sink to the ocean floor, providing a continuous feed for that deep-sea river flowing to the Pacific.



These two flows - warm, fresher water in from the Pacific, which then grows salty and cools and sinks to form an exiting deep sea river - are known as the Great Conveyor Belt.



Amazingly, the Great Conveyor Belt is only thing between comfortable summers and a permanent ice age for Europe and the eastern coast of North America.



Much of this science was unknown as recently as twenty years ago. Then an international group of scientists went to Greenland and used newly developed drilling and sensing equipment to drill into some of the world's most ancient accessible glaciers. Their instruments were so sensitive that when they analyzed the ice core samples they brought up, they were able to look at individual years of snow. The results were shocking.



Prior to the last decades, it was thought that the periods between glaciations and warmer times in North America, Europe, and North Asia were gradual. We knew from the fossil record that the Great Ice Age period began a few million years ago, and during those years there were times where for hundreds or thousands of years North America, Europe, and Siberia were covered with thick sheets of ice year-round. In between these icy times, there were periods when the glaciers thawed, bare land was exposed, forests grew, and land animals (including early humans) moved into these northern regions.



Most scientists figured the transition time from icy to warm was gradual, lasting dozens to hundreds of years, and nobody was sure exactly what had caused it. (Variations in solar radiation were suspected, as were volcanic activity, along with early theories about the Great Conveyor Belt, which, until recently, was a poorly understood phenomenon.)



Looking at the ice cores, however, scientists were shocked to discover that the transitions from ice age-like weather to contemporary-type weather usually took only two or three years. Something was flipping the weather of the planet back and forth with a rapidity that was startling.



It turns out that the ice age versus temperate weather patterns weren't part of a smooth and linear process, like a dimmer slider for an overhead light bulb. They are part of a delicately balanced teeter-totter, which can exist in one state or the other, but transits through the middle stage almost overnight. They more resemble a light switch, which is off as you gradually and slowly lift it, until it hits a mid-point threshold or "breakover point" where suddenly the state is flipped from off to on and the light comes on.



It appears that small (less that .1 percent) variations in solar energy happen in roughly 1500-year cycles. This cycle, for example, is what brought us the "Little Ice Age" that started around the year 1400 and dramatically cooled North America and Europe (we're now in the warming phase, recovering from that). When the ice in the Arctic Ocean is frozen solid and locked up, and the glaciers on Greenland are relatively stable, this variation warms and cools the Earth in a very small way, but doesn't affect the operation of the Great Conveyor Belt that brings moderating warm water into the North Atlantic.



In millennia past, however, before the Arctic totally froze and locked up, and before some critical threshold amount of fresh water was locked up in the Greenland and other glaciers, these 1500-year variations in solar energy didn't just slightly warm up or cool down the weather for the landmasses bracketing the North Atlantic. They flipped on and off periods of total glaciation and periods of temperate weather.

Weather experts say the earth is going through another warming cycle.

Its a complex process Jeff hope this help you a bit.

I agree Adele but when you add to the normal process the effect mankind has then it is not so normal anymore.