http://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoonview.asp?start=6&search=main&catref=pknn668&MA_Artist=&MA_Category=&ANDkeyword=science&ORkeyword=&TITLEkeyword=&NEGATIVEkeyword=

Oh no! Look!!! Look!!! When I was a boy the water was thirty five feet from the house and now that I’m 90, it’s raged up to thirty three feet! Run for you lives!!!

Or, uh, hey, grandpa, why not build the next house back a few feet since this old piece of crap needs to come down anyways…

And let’s be realistic, IF the polar ice caps melt, there might be fifty times the arable land under it than there is on the Earth now…

I know here in the corn belt “global warming” has bumped up crop production a few percent…

Farmers get their crops in earlier and they stay in the fields later reducing the cost of drying the grain.

Not to mention that though my air conditioning costs have risen slightly, my heating costs have plummeted…

Just sayin…

There could be a MILLION reasons the Earth is warming. Why did you pick the human race as the culprit?

The answer can ONLY be that you have an ulterior motive…

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Our species is effecting the landscape and the environment. There is little doubt about that. the Great Lakes were a poison pot up until the mid 80′s because humans dumped chemicals and sewage into them. Now? Through legislation and clean up efforts and the NATURAL ABILITY OF THE PLANET TO CLEANSE ITSELF these lakes are far cleaner. Areas that were once toxic and abandoned have been taken over by nature (Chernobyl). In other cases the oceans are being polluted at an extraordinary rate causing issues with zeoplankton populations, Bluefin Tuna are near to the point of collapse due to overharvest, certain parts of the planet especially urban centers have horrific air quality that are causing birth defects in newborns like asthma, and the population of humans is growing at incredible rates in areas of the world that have the least resources to provide for these new humans.

Those are real issues that will have an impact on local as well as global populations eventually. There will be a pandemic or two that will take the lives of many, along with droughts and starvation, conflict and war, and most importantly the imbalance of dispersal for drinking water across the planet. These are the things that will doom the human race if it does go extinct.

Global Warming? Man has sped up the process of the earths natural cycle of warming and cooling, of this there cannot be denial, however it would also be foolish to dismiss the geological evidence of such warming and cooling trends occurring throughout the planets history. Everywhere around the world there is evidence of seas and oceans drying up then re-forming, deserts turn into wetlands and then become deserts again, mountains rising out of nowhere, glaciers expanding and contracting, and whole ice sheets form and disband. Sometimes these events take millenia and at other times they happen very rapidly, as the article states, within a thousand years.

People tend to get in a panic about things. It’s almost part of our collective nature to take something and make it bigger or smaller than it actually is. Global warming will not cause humanity to become extinct. There may be animals that become extinct and plants that become extinct but this has also happened very often in the past as well. They can’t adapt to the changes so they die off. Other species proliferate in the new environments and succeed. It’s evolution people, it’s how we came to existence and it’s how things will continue whether we are here or not.

A few comments about the posts here. If you want people to take your posts and comments seriously do not quote fictional books written by quasi sci-fi writers like Crichton and then claim they are based on scientific reality. That’s like saying you can learn a lot about the Catholic Church by reading Dan Brown novels. For those who are running around like chicken little’s saying we have to stop using gas and petroleum products and plastic and yadda yadda yadda … I’m sorry, but I like driving my car to my air conditioned/heated home, then to my boat, and drive my boat on the lake of choice, and drink from plastic cups. Know what? We CAN do more to protect our environment. I’m all for environmental protection and making our planet a cleaner greener place to live, but I am not all for sending us back to the stone age and singing Kumbaya around a camp fire while we eat yeast cookies and grule.

Someone said it best. Don’t poop in your own backyard and if you do clean it, which is what Global Warming alarmists fail to do. they paint this gigantic picture of gloom and doom without looking at the simple impact of planting a garden or a tree can do to help the environment. This gives Global Warming Opponents fodder to say “It isn’t that bad, the planet isn’t dying, we don’t have to do anything at all and keep the status quo”. That doesn’t work either because the status quo is really not good for our health and longevity. So keep it simple stupids and quit overusing and overpackaging products for sale, find alternative resources and renewable resources that can be slowly phased in and improved so that one day we may be able to lift our need for petrol, do your part in your home to re-use/recycle, and quit panicking everytime a survey or statistic is thrown out by some scientist or university that had a survey or experiment.

@ 39, Can’t defeat my logic and it renders most of your holy cows hamburger, so you lash out. I get that. You are of course invited to come and try to remove me. Now THAT would be an education for ya…

Don’t elude to an event you have neither the stomach nor the mental fortitude. It makes you look shallow and petty, in my humble opinion…

So, unless you plan an “intervention”, I’m here to stay, dude…

From the article: “…they can push the system past a “critical threshold,” and then the change can become extremely fast (in relation to geological timescales)…”

Not just thousands of years, but hundreds of thousand of years. We aren’t even able to make educated guesses about those changes, let alone how to effect/affect them. Only idiots and arrogant ones at that, suffer such delusions…

If you haven’t no only stopped driving but stopped using any product that uses gas to get to you, stopped using electricity altogether, stopped eating any modern food and stopped taking advantage of modern medicine and such, please do not delude yourself any further by thinking any of us don’t see your blatant hypocrisy when you ask us to do so…

So essentially what the author says is even WITHOUT HUMANS DRIVING HUMMERS and filling the oceans with plastic, and all the other nefarious things we bipeds have done, the planet essentially cleaned house. So we puny mortals AREN’T the cause of climate change, yes? And as a forest that is allowed to live without human intervention cleans house regularly with a fire, the planet may very well clean house with any number of natural disasters – including volcanoes, Yosemite’s geysers exploding over 3/4 of the US, another icelandic unpronounceable volcano erupting, another Indonesian volcano and resulting tsunami over the pacific.

ANYTHING can happen. Black Swan events happen more often than people realize. The “bread and circuses crowd” who think History is only that which happened 20 years before I was born will be surprised. But perhaps they live happier lives not sitting around contemplating the end of all things. As the “this day in history” pages of every Scientific American magazine show – predictions from a century ago are wrong about today. A good reminder that no one on this blog has a freaking clue how things will shake out.

All the Prius-driving, newspaper-recycling, carbon-footprint-reducing, self-conscious liberal-self-flagellating angst did NOTHING to prevent the Iceland volcano or the Japan Tsunami. Both of which were NOT caused by humans. And both of which contributed more pollution and more crap to our oceans and our air than 800 generations of 7 billion people could ever have done. We need to stop giving ourselves so much credit. Humans are usually a pain in the ass. But we aren’t the sole cause of the changes in the weather or the ozone layer. Re-read my first paragraph. This would be happening with us or without us. The guys wrote that article to get attention. And it worked!

My solution? Be mindful of my footprint. Don’t believe everything every “Publish or Perish” professor, scientist, or Scientific magazine puts out there. Live a balanced life. Be happy. Make Love not War. Or at least Make Love After War. Eat healthy. Die happy.

This message thread is evidence of why both prevention, and planning for a tipping point, will both be inadequate. We will end up reacting to changes, and it won’t be on our timeline or under our control. There are far too many people who are playing the “I’m with Stupid” game and will prevent much effective action. Unfortunately the weak and the poor will pay the greatest price, as always.

Low lying coastal cities are where the largest price will be paid in my opinion. They are also the place where strong interventionist action, could make a positive difference. London and Antwerp have already taken major steps. However it needs to be said that these cities have geography that make it practical to defend them; some cities may be too exposed on too wide a front to make geoengineering solutions affordable.