http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100831/sc_yblog_upshot/noted-anti-global-warming-scientist-reverses-course

About fricken time. A few more years of Greenland and Antarctica melting and a few Republican politicians might actually think something might be going on. :devil

About fricken time. A few more years of Greenland and Antarctica melting and a few Republican politicians might actually think something might be going on. :devil

LOL like they care. The moneymen in the GOP probably see those areas as resource rich areas that are about to get vastly easier to exploit. Maybe in 50-100 years there will be an Oklahoma style land rush of colonies on Antartica..or maybe a nasty war as no nation-state has claimed it. Maybe the Palestinians can have it! You can have your dirtpatch, Jews. We are going to take this recently made habitable/arable continent! Oh and we found a bazillion barrels of oil under it, millions of tons of rare earths and the sun shines every day so we can use Solar to provide our energy! LOL!

Anyway..in all seriousness:

There is no stopping global warming. Be it naturally occuring or something we as Humans perpetrated, thus all we can do is adapt to it. Several 10 thousand years ago the world was locked in an ice age at the hieght of glaciation which on the time line that is the history of the Earth, a microscopic blip. Perhaps we are helping things along a bit at the backend, but the Earth was doing a fine job of warming up on its own long before we even discovered fire, let alone figured out how to base our whole modern society on how to harness it. There have been periods, according to scientific theory (go look them up if you want) where Earth was a "Snowball" and periods where it was almost all tropical.

Mitigating global warming is important, which probably centers on even acknowledging that it is occuring. Again, considering that evidence suggests that 15k years ago half of our country was buried under a 4-5k thick sheet of ice, than yah. The planet is going through a warming cycle. More of those scientific theories also suggest that thanks to Plate Teconics: movement of continets, volcanos, shifts in ocean currents, air currents due to land masses moving around and change in topography, etc etc blah blah..cause the climate to always be variable. Then there is the changes in output of the Sun, vairations in Earths orbit around the Sun, variations in the Solar System's movement through the Galaxy..well you get the point. Its all naturally occuring stuff that goes through cycles which are in themselves unique in their severity, unless of course you are a religious flake to the degree to subscribe that the Earth is only 4000 years old, that Darwin is a fraud and that the extend of the Universe and all its forces are only what is contained in the Religious Tome of Choice. Some of those people serve in government!

So yah, not burning fossil fuels is good, but the only sure fire thing it will do is:
A) Clean up our air
B) not give money to people that hate our nation
C) Assure that we think about what we are going to use for energy after all the cheapo fossil fuels are exhausted so our global economy doesn't crash.

The rest of it, well its going to happen anyway. If we had our society come to a screeching halt today and did not burn one iota of anything or even if Humanity never got past hunter/gatherer...the damn planet would have got hot anyway. The political nitwits need to be working on civil engineering projects to mitigate the effects of it. Designs. How to pay for them. How to move the people. How to take advantage of it first and formost. The warmer periods of the Earth's history tended to also be the most lush. It is easier to deal with things being a bit more hot and sticky than frozen under a 5k thick sheet of ice. If anything Global Warming has more to do with which country/nation/tribe is going to get screwed by it while on the flip side which are going to get rich from it. No one gives a fuck about what it will do to plants and animals etc. Invariably some will adapt and some will die out. Its been that way for millions of years. Ultimately what grabs the attention of the media is the Geo-poltical scene and who is going to rule the world once things get warmer because when its all said and done, Humanity as a whole has yet to get past the whole tribal mindset and see how it can work together as a common species. Never mind that Mars colonization thing since many are probably more worried that it will be competing_rival_nation_XYZ doing it before them. Same applies with Global Warming. Such issues should not be polarizing but due to Human nature...always seem to be.

Anyway this is enough of a novel....