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Originally Posted by a700hitter

I read and I listen and I don't hear anything that compels me to believe that there will be dire consequences. There will be more drought? more hurricanes? more famine...in Africa? Oceans rising at the rate of at most 1/15 to 1/4 inch per year for the next 100 years (predicted by the IPCC). After experts predicted that Florida would be going through a 20 year cycle of extreme hurricanes, they remained unscathed the last two hurricane seasons.

BTW: The stats about the last 13 years in the link you provided conveniently ignored that after the hottest year 1998, the temperatures declined and stabilized. With the exception of 2005, temperature has trended down in 2004, 2006 and 2007 with lower temperatures each year.

Also, throughout history, man has found ways to cope with drought and flooding. The Hoover Dam completed in 1935 reclaimed 1/12 of the U.S. that had been previously uninhabitable due to regular flooding (that had nothing to do with CO2). The amount of land that was reclaimed was enormous.

This would require enormous federal spending, in order to protect, say, all of Miami and New Orleans, low-lying areas of Texas etc., What makes you think that people will come together to ensure that those protections are taken in time? Why would you wait to make the necessary adjustments, fighting me tooth and nail instead of just saying "you know what, one way or another, this is going to be a problem... we should address it intelligently now, while there is still time, rather than waiting until we have 5 years to build levees to protect large American cities"? Even if the answer only IS building levees then let's get started. If we can't STOP global warming then what can we do to mitigate it's effects?

As for drought, man has had technology to overcome that for a long time. You need only look to the Aqueducts in Ancient Rome. The earth's water will not disappear. As you pointed out, this is a closed system. It may move. Some places may have less and others will have more, but man has been finding and transporting water for thousands of years. We also have the technolgy to tame flooding rivers and to live in cities below sea level.

But do we have the desire to undertake massive federally funded projects? I don't see how buildling walls around all of our threatened cities/waterways is in any way less of a significant project than going to the moon or developing the nuclear bomb. It sounds like you are saying that we can throw a lot of technology at the problem and ensure that we are okay. If that's the case then what are we waiting for? I agree with you, whether it is ultimately an investment in technology answers (walls, aqueducts, etc.,) or conservation answers (slowing down the warming) I don't know, but in either case it will require some attention.

I don't doubt that man has some impact on these trends, but apparently so do flatulent cows and lots of other things.

The 1.5 billion cows on earth are not wild cows. They exist for our consumption in the form of hamburgers and steaks. We choose how many cows there are.

The biggest causes are probably the evidence that the sun is getting hotter and the elliptical orbit around the sun. Other planets have experienced warming and an increase in CO2.

I hope you're right, I hope that natural processes just happen to coincide with a tremendous increase in our CO2 production, as a species by thousands and thousands of time. I hope that the ice melt of 50% just coincidentally coincides with the superadvancement in CO2 production starting roughly in the 1950s.

Only man could be arrogant enough to believe so strongly that what we do while inhabiting 4% of the earth's surface could effect global climate more than the heat of the sun or the earth's orbit around the sun. It would be a tragic mistake to wreck economies around the world based on the scientific theories regarding climate. Economic crisis will most assuredly cause hunger and death.

I won't get into a discussion with you about whether it is arrogant to believe that humans can make massive changes to how the earth is. We have directly contributed to the extinction of species, we have been able to conquor each piece of land, we are able to survive on any of the land in this world. We have a significant impact. We go to great lengths to clean up after ourselves, for good reason. The world would be a much grosser place if we did not. The lack of effects you see is at least due in part to the great social investment we have made to clean up after ourselves. It's not because we can't impact the environment. That's the kind of naive view point people had before rivers caught on fire and before we got rid of coal plants in major American cities.

The belief that we cause global climate change is no more arrogant than the view that we don't simply because it would be inconvenient. If you have proof to the contrary, that's fine. But simply because it would seem arrogant is not a good enough reason.