Globe Cooled 0.7C in 2007

[kengs333]

Sure there was a point. You are being excessively alarmist without rational reasoning. You claimed the ice was receding and breaking up at an alarming rate. Currently, not only is it not receding, it's actually increasing. Not only that, even after last year's record thaw, it all came back quickly.

What? I'm being "excessively alarmist" for stating the fact that the ice cap is breaking apart. This is something captured on satellite images over the course of the last year or so.

And did you even read the article that I posted a link? If you did, you clearly didn't understand it.

Polar scientists have been predicting that warming is driving the region into a more watery state. With further warming, they say, broad open-water expanses will prevail in the summer followed by the formation of ice in the winter. But such ice will generally be too thin to last through the next summer.

Also:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...17-sea-ice.html

[Bryan]

What? I'm being "excessively alarmist" for stating the fact that the ice cap is breaking apart.

No it isn't.

[kengs333]

No it isn't.

No it isn't, what?

[Bryan]

No it isn't, what?

It isn't breaking apart. It's getting bigger and thicker. It's increased 9.4% over this time last year, and even after last years so called record melt, it recovered almost completely within a few months.

The sky is not falling, and the earth is not "globally warming". Climate changes all the time, that's what it does. Gets warmer, then gets cooler. Rinse and repeat. Business as usual.

[stignasty]

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/stor...hub=CTVNewsAt11

Satellite observations indicate the ice remaining at the poles is melting faster than last year's rate, which was already a record year for Arctic ice loss. Scientists say whether or not the ice melts completely, this year's northern melt is yet another example of the impact that global warming is having on the planet's environment.

"There were some people who were saying last year was a rogue year. If the same thing happens again a lot more people are going to be persuaded about the consequences of global warming," Mahoney said.

"A lot of people think it's a very small change in temperature. This shows that the change in sea ice is quite a dramatic consequence."

[mcrobert]

1)Global warming is a sham.. The sun had been flaring (solar flares) for the past 10 years or so = Warming

2)Scientists now say Global warming will delay for 10 years?

Its just the cycle of things and becames an excuse to tax.

[stignasty]

1)Global warming is a sham.. The sun had been flaring (solar flares) for the past 10 years or so = Warming

2)Scientists now say Global warming will delay for 10 years?

Its just the cycle of things and becames an excuse to tax.

1) Wrong

2) See 1)

[Riverwind]

Satellite observations indicate the ice remaining at the poles is melting faster than last year's rate, which was already a record year for Arctic ice loss.

A record year since 1979 - whoopie. Did a similar melt happen in 1940 or 1040? We don't know cause the data does not exist.

Scientists say whether or not the ice melts completely, this year's northern melt is yet another example of the impact that global warming is having on the planet's environment.

The planet's climate is always changing. Greenland was warmer than it is to day 1000 years ago and we have no idea whether this particular warming phase is something unusual.

"There were some people who were saying last year was a rogue year. If the same thing happens again a lot more people are going to be persuaded about the consequences of global warming," Mahoney said.

Pure propoganda. Melting ice provides absolutely no evidence for CO2 as the primary cause of the warming and people who claim it does are deliberately misrepresenting the facts.

[Riverwind]

1)Global warming is a sham.. The sun had been flaring (solar flares) for the past 10 years or so = Warming

The opposite is true - the number of spots is lower than average over the last 10 years. The effect of the sun on climate is poorly understood and most scientists believe it is insignificant. However, some do feel that the cooling trend since 2001 is the result of the sun.

2)Scientists now say Global warming will delay for 10 years?

This is correct. A couple scientists in German recently released the results of a new climate model that includes the effect of the oceans. This model predicts 10-15 years of cooling followed by rapid warming. The have probably got the part about the ocean being responsible for the current cooling correct but it has hard to take a claim seriously that adds in a factor which cancels out the effect of CO2 for 20+ years but then claims that the discovery of the previously unknown factor has no impact on the long term trend.

[mcrobert]

Research solar flares and the activity of them over the past century. You could start here http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0609...ctivity.htmland go on...and on....and on...

A flare is a burst of heat energy and will travel to earth. My logic dictates that if the sun his sending out more heat the Earth would be forced to absorb it.. I dont know anything though. Dont take my word for it.

-Regards

[Riverwind]

You could start here

From your link:

The rise in solar activity at the beginning of the last century through the 1950s or so matches with the increase in global temperatures, Usoskin said. But the link doesn't hold up from about the 1970s to present.

There is little evidence that changes in solar energy output are large enough to explain the warming. However, there is some evidence for an indirect effect via changes in cloud cover or the oceans but we don't have enough data to conclusively show one way or another.

A flare is a burst of heat energy and will travel to earth. My logic dictates that if the sun his sending out more heat the Earth would be forced to absorb it.

The question is not whether the increase in energy has an effect on temperature. The question is whether this increase in temperature is significant. Unfortunately, the evidence to date suggests that the changes in energy are too small and any connection between the sun and climate is not necessarily related to its energy output. Edited October 1, 2008 by Riverwind

[ReeferMadness]

We can't be absolutely sure of anything. Most of the people out there with PhD behind their names, however, seem to think that global warming is real and caused by humans. That's got to count for something.

Regardless, I think the steps being advocated by global warming activists (pollute less, burn less fossil fuels) are good ideas in and of themselves.

[Riverwind]

We can't be absolutely sure of anything. Most of the people out there with PhD behind their names, however, seem to think that global warming is real and caused by humans. That's got to count for something.

3 years ago the "consensus" amoung the financial geniuses on Wall Street was that property prices would continue to rise forever with only minor corrections and few loan defaults. They also used computer models to "prove" their theories. We know how that story ended. Scientists may be smart people but they are human and subject to peer pressure and group think-like everyone else. That is why it is important to listen to what the skeptical minority are saying and include that in any decision making. I bet a lot of people in Washington are wishing they listened to a minority opinion produced by Warren Buffett in 2002 that predicted the current financial chaos.

Regardless, I think the steps being advocated by global warming activists (pollute less, burn less fossil fuels) are good ideas in and of themselves.

Sure. But the problem is not the objective but the speed in which these objectives are being forced on us. A lot of people will be hurt if governments give into the panic and introduce the draconian policies required to limit CO2 in the timeframes demanded by the activists. Policies that focus on technology rather than hard CO2 targets would provide the benefits without the risks to the economy.

[PoliticalCitizen]

You mean that Arctic ice that has increased 9% over last year?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/16/arti...year/#more-3085

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

How about this:

The Arctic sea ice coverage is shrinking at a far faster rate than anticipated. In 2007 the extent of the Arctic ice was 23% lower than the previous record in 2005.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3650625,00.html

[ReeferMadness]

3 years ago the "consensus" amoung the financial geniuses on Wall Street was that property prices would continue to rise forever with only minor corrections and few loan defaults. They also used computer models to "prove" their theories. We know how that story ended. Scientists may be smart people but they are human and subject to peer pressure and group think-like everyone else. That is why it is important to listen to what the skeptical minority are saying and include that in any decision making. I bet a lot of people in Washington are wishing they listened to a minority opinion produced by Warren Buffett in 2002 that predicted the current financial chaos.

Are you seriously comparing the major scientific organizations (all of which have endorsed the premise that global warming is happening and is human-caused) with a bunch of greedy thugs on Wall Street? Give me a break!!

Climate science is a real science, based on provable theories. It's just extremely complex. Economics is at best a pseudo-science based on human behavior. If anyone ever figured it out, it would all change because everyone is using it to beat the system. There is no comparison.

[Riverwind]

Are you seriously comparing the major scientific organizations (all of which have endorsed the premise that global warming is happening and is human-caused) with a bunch of greedy thugs on Wall Street? Give me a break!!

The IPCC and numerous influential climate scientists have been caught peddling junk science as the "truth" in order to promote the GW political agenda. Given that context I see no reason to trust scientists as a group more than I would trust wall street bankers as a group. Obviously, individuals from both groups are upstanding and honest but it is rediculous to use the "consensus" among science as an excuse to ignore the numerous flaws in the GW hypothesis. After all, there was a "consensus" on wall street too and look where trusting those experts got us.

Climate science is a real science, based on provable theories.

There is a huge difference between climate science and the catastrophic global warming hypthesis. The latter cannot be proved and is better described as an unfalsifiable psuedo-science. Virtually all of the important elements of the catastrophic GW hypothesis can only be demonstrated with computer models - computer models which have so many fudge factors and made up data that they cannot be called a proofs of anything other than the preconceptions of the modellers. Climate science would have a lot more credibility if it was a hard science like the theory of relativity that have extremely rigourous mathemical foundations. Climate science is probably best compared to drug research - there are some basic principals that explain why things happen but it is virtually impossible to predict how a drug will affect humans until it is tested on humans in controlled experiments.

Economics is at best a pseudo-science based on human behavior. If anyone ever figured it out, it would all change because everyone is using it to beat the system. There is no comparison.

All of the predictions for future warming that are being used to justify radical action are based on ECONOMIC assumptions. In fact, there are economists who start off by assuming that the IPCC predictions for warming are correct (a big assumption) and then show adapting to climate change is more cost effective than trying to limit CO2 emissions. If you accept the IPCC claims then you are placing your trust in the IPCC economic models - it not clear to me why one would think the IPCC economic models are better than wall street's. Edited October 6, 2008 by Riverwind

[Murray B.]

Most of the people out there with PhD behind their names, however, seem to think that global warming is real and caused by humans. That's got to count for something.

Real science is not about majority rule and a doctorate in an unrelated field is irrelevant. Would you ask your dentist if you should have your appendix removed? How about a hundred dentists? Actually, I expect they would all tell you to see your medical doctor.

The people who study climate are the Climatologists and that is a branch of Physics. From what I can tell the vast majority of Climatologists do not agree that man is the major cause of climate change. Yet for some reason these Climatologists have been and are being excluded from this debate.

This exclusion is a political act and is anti-science at its core. Reminds of how the Nazis did things. The party gave the "scientists" a conclusion to prove. Who can forget the "Institute of Tobacco Hazards Research? I think that was at Jena sometime around 1943. Note that the name also means "The Institute of the Foregone Conclusion".

Now, of those PhDs that are jumping on this bandwagon, how many will receive research funds from government action on climate change? In other words, how many of them are actually pseudo-scientific funding whores?

[WIP]

I agree. One inconsistency does not mean the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is false and if the growing antarctic ice sheet was the only inconsistency then it would not mean much. However, it is not. We have the slower than expected tropospheric warming, the flat line in ocean heat content, the lack of warming for 10 years. All of which happened while CO2 levels are increasing at rates faster than predicted. These inconsistencies should enough to make any reasonable person question the hypothesis.

Of course, the appeal to lack of data and uncertainty which conveniently ignores the fact that we really have no reliable climate data from more than 50 years ago. We really don't know if the current warming is unprecedented nor do we have any idea whether the current ice melts are unprecedented. That is why it is not reasonable to claim that melting ice is "evidence" for catastrophic AGW.

Decreasing by a tiny amount even if one assumes the that GRACE experiment provides the more reliable data.

Of course we are told that rising sea levels is one of the reasons why we have to panic about global warming. If global warming actually causes ice to thicken then risings seas are not much of a concern. It is also worth noting that the calculations of the amount of ice being lost are not real measurements - the are estimates based on computer models which means they could be completely wrong.

A rediculous statement because we don't have any reliable data prior to 1950 so we don't know if the melt has happened before.

That said, these kinds of discussions are generally not useful because they mix up too many questions which need to be answered seperately. For example, we know that CO2 is a GHG and does cause the planet to warm. We also know that the majority of the extra CO2 is coming from humans. However, we don't know how much of the past warming is due to CO2 and how much warming is likely to occur in the future. And even we agree that there will be enough warming to be worried we don't know whether mitigation is actually more cost effective than adaptation.

In fact, the last question is really an economic question and I don't really have much confidence in economic predictions a year from now - nevermind a century from now. So I don't see how we can justify economically damaging cuts to CO2 based on these dubious economic projections. Especially when the real data suggests that warming is proceding a slower rate than predicted.

The Earth's climate seems too complicated to make reliable near future predictions of what we should expect, but In all of the oil and gas-company funded disinformation, I don't see anything where they are able to deny that CO2 and methane gas levels are increasing in the atmosphere -- now, are you trying to make a case that the six billion people on this planet can just keep pumping up greenhouse gas levels endlessly without causing a future catastrophe?

The climate change skeptic argument revolves around "nothing bad as happened yet," even though we may already we have already started mass extinctions of insects, amphibians and mammals. How do we determine how much of the extinction cycle that we are now living in is caused by natural earth changes, human encroachment and habitat destruction, pollution or rising greenhouse gas levels? It's more than likely that our decreasing biodiversity has many causes, and the climate change skeptics who make the don't-worry-be-happy case are trying to encourage us to do nothing to prevent a slow rolling catastrophe that will likely take out the human race as well, if nothing is done.

[Riverwind]

I don't see anything where they are able to deny that CO2 and methane gas levels are increasing in the atmosphere -- now, are you trying to make a case that the six billion people on this planet can just keep pumping up greenhouse gas levels endlessly without causing a future catastrophe?

Don't have a clue. But I do know that emitting CO2 is an unavoidable concesquence of the our society and that eliminating it will be next to impossible. I also have a lot of faith in our ability to adapt to whatever changes might come and think that even if there is some merit to the claims that adaptation is a more sensible approach.

The climate change skeptic argument revolves around "nothing bad as happened yet,"

So? I could give you scientific evidence that should you could be killed if drive a car. Does that mean you stop driving your car? The onus is on the people predicting disaster to show that the allegeded disaster is probable enough to justify the cost involved in preventing it. When it comes to GW there is no evidence that a disaster is coming or even likely. All we have are computer models which are as reliable as the horoscopes in the sunday paper.

[Kitch]

Is Dion reading this as he prepares to increase the cost of energy ...for what reason?

Full Article

Why does the media jump all over a tornado in witchita or hurricane on the gulf coast (wow - what a revelation) as an example of "wild wacky weather" and evidence of global warming, yet they completely ignore a report from NASA clearly showing the planet cooled and hasn't warmed at all in more than 10 years? Just wondering.

I mean, regardless of whether or not you've already drunk Al Gore's kool-aid, shouldn't this at least be the headline on every major network for at least one night? Given the panic we're being fed, why can't this FACT be on my evening news on TV?

The same reason that the president of Iran's words were mistranslated to mean "wipe Israel off the map" and still published. The same reason why it wasn't published when he was in NY this year and was asked if he would agree to a two state Israel if Palestine did and he agreed... indicating an acceptance of Israel's existence.

The same reason why the U.S. navy admitted that no Iranian boat approached them saying "you will explode in minutes" (or whatever it was), but that was never a headline.

I'm sure you can find more examples.

Are you up on your solar physics though? I'm not really, but I'd like to be in order to understand what was said/observed rather than trusting a newspaper. Given their selective publishing record, wouldn't you?

[WIP]

Don't have a clue. But I do know that emitting CO2 is an unavoidable concesquence of the our society and that eliminating it will be next to impossible.

Then eliminating the human race is inevitable because a never-ending increase in CO2 levels is going to throw us into an extinction cycle like ones experienced in the past when CO2 and methane levels were too high. If we can't control greenhouse gas emissions voluntarily, it will happen one way or another.

I also have a lot of faith in our ability to adapt to whatever changes might come and think that even if there is some merit to the claims that adaptation is a more sensible approach.

Oh! And after the Ice Caps melt and the ocean conveyor cycle starts shutting down and creating anoxic ocean conditions like those that existed during the Permian/Triassic Extinction, how well do you think future generations will adapt to that? Over the last four years, there have been a number of surveys reporting dramatic declines in insect, reptile, amphibian and mammal populations all around the world. The evidence would indicate that the planet is already undergoing an extinction cycle; it's just that it happens so gradually in comparison to our brief timeframes that no action will be taken until we are on our way to extinction also.

There's that old truism about boiling frogs: throw one in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump out immediately. But if you throw him in lukewarm water and slowly increase the temperature, you'll cook him! Judging from how easily people forget about the environment because stock markets declined last week, I'm thinking that we are cooking away in that pot!

So? I could give you scientific evidence that should you could be killed if drive a car. Does that mean you stop driving your car? The onus is on the people predicting disaster to show that the allegeded disaster is probable enough to justify the cost involved in preventing it. When it comes to GW there is no evidence that a disaster is coming or even likely. All we have are computer models which are as reliable as the horoscopes in the sunday paper.

I don't pay attention to computer climate models, but you should consider that their poor performance as predictive tools is further evidence that the Earth's climate is still too complex to determine how all of the variables work together. You are assuming that this is automatically good news for everyone who wants to do nothing other than what we are presently doing, but what if things get worse than IPCC has forecast? There may be nasty unforeseen consequences to increasing CO2 levels, increasing population and decreasing biodiversity that haven't appeared on the radar yet.

[Riverwind]

Then eliminating the human race is inevitable because a never-ending increase in CO2 levels is going to throw us into an extinction cycle like ones experienced in the past when CO2 and methane levels were too high.

BS. Live thrived on the planet with CO2 levels 20x what they are today. Humans can and will adapt to whatever changes come .

Oh! And after the Ice Caps melt and the ocean conveyor cycle starts shutting down and creating anoxic ocean conditions like those that existed during the Permian/Triassic Extinction, how well do you think future generations will adapt to that?

Can future generations adapt to a catastrophic meteor strike or a nuclear war? Maybe. Maybe not. But I can guarantee that a wealthy society with access to the energy provided by fossil fuels will be in a better position to adapt than a society that tries to deny themselves access to this energy in a futile attempt to stop the inevitable.

There's that old truism about boiling frogs: throw one in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump out immediately.

An urban myth (like most of the stories you peddle).

You are assuming that this is automatically good news for everyone who wants to do nothing other than what we are presently doing, but what if things get worse than IPCC has forecast? There may be nasty unforeseen consequences to increasing CO2 levels, increasing population and decreasing biodiversity that haven't appeared on the radar yet.

It is also possible that an alien invasion could start at any time. Should we invest trillions to protect ourselves from an alien invasion?

We can't predict the future and trying to pretend we can is a waste of time. We can identify possible risks and take prudent actions to deal with them, however, when we really have no information about the real probability for a given risk we cannot justify spending trillions to deal with it. The only thing we can do in invest in more R&D to monitor the hypothetical risk and to promote actions that would make sense if even if the hypothetical risk turns out to be a non-issue.

[WIP]

BS. Live thrived on the planet with CO2 levels 20x what they are today. Humans can and will adapt to whatever changes come .

Can future generations adapt to a catastrophic meteor strike or a nuclear war? Maybe. Maybe not. But I can guarantee that a wealthy society with access to the energy provided by fossil fuels will be in a better position to adapt than a society that tries to deny themselves access to this energy in a futile attempt to stop the inevitable.

20 times present CO2 levels? Even if I accept those numbers as accurate, it doesn't explain that disregarding the spikes, CO2 levels have gradually decreased over the last 60 to 70 million years, and so have average temperatures! The first Ice Age was recorded 2.5 million years ago, and some geologists believe that the present interglacial period would have already ended if it wasn't for human impact that started with slash and burn agriculture and really took off when the Industrial Revolution began.

The plants and animals that were living on Earth 60 million years ago, were much different than today's flora and fauna. At the present time, atmospheric CO2 levels are closing in on the 400 ppm mark, and this is the highest that CO2 levels have been in over 650,000 years! Where were we 650,000 years ago? Well, actually we weren''t here! That was before the first modern homo sapiens had appeared, and long before 6 billion people populated the Earth and became dependent on intensive agriculture to feed this large population.

So making comparisons with earlier periods in the planet's history is pointless, unless you also want to consider that they accompanied several mass extinctions that wiped out most of the plants and animals that were living at the time. The callous disregard of the consequences of continuing the course we are presently on only makes sense if the average skeptic is only planning ahead 30 or 40 years at most, and figures that anything after that is someone else's problem.

[Riverwind]

20 times present CO2 levels? Even if I accept those numbers as accurate, it doesn't explain that disregarding the spikes, CO2 levels have gradually decreased over the last 60 to 70 million years, and so have average temperatures!

Why don't you take a look at some historical data:

http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/g..._op_927x695.jpg

As you can see there is *NO* relationship between CO2 and temperatures and it is clear that something else has caused the temperature swings in the past. If you look carefully at the CO2 spike at the end of the Certeceous you will see that temperatures rose several million years *before* the CO2 levels spiked. You should also see that the temperatures fell thousands of years *before* CO2 levels dropped 1.6 million years ago.

That was before the first modern homo sapiens had appeared, and long before 6 billion people populated the Earth and became dependent on intensive agriculture to feed this large population.

Warmer climates and more CO2 is good for agriculture and good for humans. Greenhouse operators keep the CO2 levels at 1500ppm because they have established this is the ideal level for plant growth. I fail to see why 400ppm or even 600ppm is a concern given that context.

The callous disregard of the consequences of continuing the course we are presently on only makes sense if the average skeptic is only planning ahead 30 or 40 years at most, and figures that anything after that is someone else's problem.

So how many people are you willing to let starve to death in order to fix a purely hypothetical problem? Those will be the consequences of artifically increasing the price of energy whether you want to admit it or not. Edited October 14, 2008 by Riverwind

[WIP]

Why don't you take a look at some historical data:

http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/g..._op_927x695.jpg

As you can see there is *NO* relationship between CO2 and temperatures and it is clear that something else has caused the temperature swings in the past. If you look carefully at the CO2 spike at the end of the Certeceous you will see that temperatures rose several million years *before* the CO2 levels spiked. You should also see that the temperatures fell thousands of years *before* CO2 levels dropped 1.6 million years ago.

I've seen that chart a number of times before used by other people trying to make a case against anthropogenic climate change! I suspect that the source is one of the oil and gas company-funded "skeptic" sites who figure that the average person who doesn't read statistical charts, and doesn't know the methods used to determine ancient CO2 and global temperature methods, will just take a look at it and throw up their hands and agree that it proves no connection between CO2 and the greenhouse effect -- something we learned was real 35 years ago in high school science class - and long before there was a global warming controversy.

Maybe it is just another example of "skeptics" carefully managing the information they give out to lead followers to the desired conclusions without giving them any real information! I don't have a Science subscription, so I can't access the full text of the report that accompanied that chart. They declare that determining CO2 pressures is poorly resolved, but conclude that the gradual decline in CO2 was likely very important in the cooling trend that allowed for the expansion of Anarctic ice -- and their commentaries are the likely reason why skeptics don't want to reveal more about their research than showing that chart!

Marked Decline in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the PaleogeneMark Pagani,1 James C. Zachos,2 Katherine H. Freeman,3 Brett Tipple,1 Stephen Bohaty2

The relation between the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide (pCO2) and Paleogene climate is poorly resolved. We used stable carbon isotopic values of di-unsaturated alkenones extracted from deep sea cores to reconstruct pCO2 fromthe middle Eocene to the late Oligocene (~45 to 25 million years ago). Our results demonstrate that pCO2 ranged between 1000 to 1500 parts per million by volume in the middle to late Eocene, then decreased in several steps during the Oligocene, and reached modern levels by the latest Oligocene. The fall in pCO2 likely allowed for a critical expansion of ice sheets on Antarctica and promoted conditions that forced the onset of terrestrial C4 photosynthesis.

1 Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, 210 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

2 Earth Sciences Department, University of California, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.

3 Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.

Published online 16 June 2005

And that report may be an outlier anyway, since there are other studies, such as this one by Dana Royer, published in PNAS, which used a different method to determine CO2 levels, and their charts show a lot closer relationship between climate and atmospheric CO2 levels, as would be expected:

The Miocene is characterized by a series of key climatic events that led to the founding of the late Cenozoic icehouse mode and the dawn of modern biota. The processes that caused these developments, and particularly the role of atmospheric CO2 as a forcing factor, are poorly understood. Here we present a CO2 record based on stomatal frequency data from multiple tree species. Our data show striking CO2 fluctuations of ≈600–300 parts per million by volume (ppmv). Periods of low CO2 are contemporaneous with major glaciations, whereas elevated CO2 of 500 ppmv coincides with the climatic optimum in the Miocene. Our data point to a long-term coupling between atmospheric CO2 and climate. Major changes in Miocene terrestrial ecosystems, such as the expansion of grasslands and radiations among terrestrial herbivores such as horses, can be linked to these marked fluctuations in CO2.

Warmer climates and more CO2 is good for agriculture and good for humans. Greenhouse operators keep the CO2 levels at 1500ppm because they have established this is the ideal level for plant growth. I fail to see why 400ppm or even 600ppm is a concern given that context.

Did it ever occur to you that climate is a very complex interactive system, and one factor such as 1.5% CO2 levels that may benefit some plants will have catastrophic effects elsewhere?

I'll give you one example that it being widely discussed already: the increasing acidification of the world's oceans. There is an inverse relationship between the amount of oxygen sea water can absorbe when it increases the amount of absorption of carbon dioxide, and this leads to greater acidification that is wiping out coral reefs all around the world already.

The warming caused by higher CO2 levels is melting the Polar Ice Caps -- I don't think you skeptics can deny this effect any longer, now that the Russians and the U.S. Navy and commercial vessels want to send their ships through newly ice-free waters along our Arctic Coast! As the poles warm, there is less energy to feed the ocean current conveyor system that replenishes the oceans with oxygen, and this anoxic ocean effect is being considered by many paleontologists and geologists as the main contributing factor in causing the die off in marine organisms that occurred during many of the previous mass extinctions.

A narrow-focused and short-sighted approach by people who are only looking at one possible advantage of higher carbon dioxide levels never seem to get the point that there are many other harmful consequences that would knock out any advantage gained temporarily for agribusiness! I worked for a commercial nursery when I was young, and greenhouse operators can just open the windows, if it gets too warm inside, or the air starts getting foul -- we don't have that same luxury if we turn our planet into a greenhouse!

So how many people are you willing to let starve to death in order to fix a purely hypothetical problem? Those will be the consequences of artifically increasing the price of energy whether you want to admit it or not.

A hypothetical problem? Our world will be thrown into a catastrophe if we keep blindly following the same course we're on now, and the people who are living on the margins, are already suffering real effects of climate change since they are the ones least able to afford the rising costs of food caused by increasing floods and droughts; and they are in a disadvantaged position to be able to afford to build homes that can withstand hurricanes and cyclones, and also have fewer options of moving to safer areas away from coastal flood plains.