KLB

YES!!! While I may be a little more convinced then you, I agree with you fully on this statement. It is the point that I am trying to get across here and elsewhere. There are so many reasons why we shouldn't pollute and waste. Global warming is only one reason. Maybe we should separate this into two groups, the GW deniers and those that aren't 100% convinced but recognize the merits in taking action to save energy and reduce our carbon footprint (since they go hand in hand). The thing is, global warming is not a new pop fad issue. People were expressing concerns about this a generation ago, heck, in his movie, Al Gore even says he first learned about it in college. The whole global warming issue has had to "swim upstream" against a river of doubters and naysayers for maybe forty years. This issue has really been through a crucible in regards to scientists trying to disprove it. This isn't one of those fad issues that suddenly popped up over night because Al Gore released a movie on it. Just like the Internet, Al Gore did not invent global warming. But we are also seeing people play loose and fast in this thread as is common in any heated topic. In this case it is necessary to really hold posts to a higher standard and require higher standards in the sources we reference.

While I can understand why the lay person may still have doubts in their mind, the over whelming preponderance of scientists do believe that global warming is a real issue and that man is a significant factor in global warming. If there is still any debate, it may be to just what degree global warming is affected by man's activities. Heck even George Bush himself who is no environmentalist and was a strong opponent of global warming in the beginning has come around on this issue within the last year or so. If George Bush has been convinced, then the evidence supporting global warming was pretty damn convincing. There is a difference between being skeptical and sticking one's head in the sand. I'm not sure just how bad things are going to get with global warming. I do believe, however, people are sticking their heads in the sand when they refuse to acknowledge that global warming is real, that man's activities play a significant roll in exasperating GW and believe that nature can neutralize man's impact. At the very least people should acknowledge that it would be prudent to work to reduce our impact as the consequences of inaction could be so dire and the costs of action is relatively low and has other great benefits (e.g. greater energy independence and less air pollution). This is as false a claim as those who claim that there is great debate over evolution. This is a nonsense claim. The evidence is overwhelming and there is overwhelming consensus among the vast majority of scientists that global warming is a real issue and that man plays a significant roll. If there is any debate over this issue, it might just be how great man's roll is and just how bad the consequences are. Even at that there is agreement that the consequences of inaction will not be good. This is sticking one's head into the sand and shows a lack of willingness to seriously consider this issue. While I would agree that editorials are written by journalists not scientists (and thus may not contribute much to this discussion), when references are made to top tier scientific research institutions (e.g. the University of Alaska Geophysical Institute), there is quite a bit of credibility to said report. Hence I felt compelled to skip the journalists when it came to the permafrost issue and search out reports by the researchers who are actually doing the most research on this issue. BTW, the permafrost resources I referenced were less about global warming and more about helping people understand permafrost better so that they could see how it fits into the bigger picture. I have learned over the years that people really don't grasp what permafrost is if they haven't had to live with it. Trust me, you do not know what frost heaves are until you experience a road built up across permafrost after spring breakup. --- Extraneous-- To add some levity to this debate, while searching for George Bush's statements on this issue, I came across this little piece of footage (Will Ferrell as Bush): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrq0LNrh-A Man, Will Ferrell has George's speech patterns down almost perfectly.

One of the things that caused me to like DS9 more than the other series, other than Dax:-p , was that it seemed more realistic with their economy. STV also seemed to deal with economics in a little more realistic fashion, its just that their currency was replicator rations. Money is nothing more than a proxy for bartering. When it was not uncommon for a trade negotiation to take place in TNG, which is a larger form of bartering and evidence that resources have value. Even the very first episode of TNG had Dr. Crusher "buying" fabric. Obviously the vendor had to be compensated in some way. While Star Trek put enough effort into real science to make their science fiction more believable, although the transporter annoyed me as too easy an escape from problems for both writers and characters, I really think the total ignoring of economic realities and not being consistent in this matter really made some episodes hard to accept and enjoy.

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about nature not being as good of a carbon sink as was previously believed. See: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0503/p01s02-wogi.html I'll work on tracking down the original research reports (although they might not be posted on the Internet).

This doesn't mean I need to take your word for what you say at face value anymore than we should take anyone else's word. This thread is getting terribly sloppy about not providing references and supporting documentation. I'll start by providing more references on permafrost, which will help people understand this better since most will never see it first hand (still seeing it first hand provides a better understanding). This is a good deal of reading, but it is really important to understand as much as possible about permafrost zones if one is to understand their potential impact on global warming. I tried to focus on primary research and sources instead of news articles by non-scientists. Of the research reports this is one of the most comprehensive I've found on permafrost: http://atoc.colorado.edu/~dcn/ATOC3600/members/projects/group3/MeltingPermafrost5-2.htm http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/highlights/methane/index.php http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/permafrost.shtml The following reports are from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute (I attended UAF as an undergraduate student and lived in Fairbanks for five years): http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF17/1791.html Flammable ice in the permafrost (ever put a lit match to ice and have the ice ignite?): http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF13/1320.html (1997) http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF5/504.html (1981) I could keep adding articles but that would just overload all of us and this is a good start. What is important to take from all of this is that the sheer quantity of organic material locked up in the permafrost is vastly beyond what any of us can comprehend and the methane and CO2 that would get released would very likely totally overwhelm the sequestering ability of new vegetation for quite some time and by the time vegetation could begin to reverse greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere the damage will have been done. What I also learned from all the reading I did is that the tundra and permafrost are some of the most important carbon sequestering mechanisms our planet has as very little organic material has a chance to decay before being frozen and sequestered. If the arctic and sub-arctic regions warm up and the permafrost begins to melt we will lose an important carbon trapping mechanism.

You could start by providing links to references for your last post before my complaint.

SkepticLance, I've noticed a trend in your posts, you make claims and attack others statements, but NEVER provide any supporting documentation. At least others are providing references. I think it is time that you provide some supporting documentation for your claims.

Maybe the problem with this is that it shortcuts the process of actually doing the research too much and one doesn't learn how to dig up these sources on their own without depending upon something like Wikipedia. Ya I like it.

A library! Oh you are so cruel.

Those plant mostly decay and/or gets used by other plants and thus is kept active in the ecosystems. Only under very specific circumstances do plants actually get buried and their carbon sequestered before decaying. As such only a very, very small percentage of plant materials actually remove carbon from the environment on a "permanent" basis. Surprisingly this is not true. A year or two ago I saw a PBS (public television) special (I think either Nova, Frontline or Now) where they were interviewing a scientist who was researching this exact thing and he had been able to carefully document just how much CO2 was getting released as the result of melting permafrost. It was extremely disturbing. I have subsequently done some reading on this subject and seen other reliable news reports on this issue by other researchers who were finding the same disturbing trend. I really don't think you appreciate the scale of the arctic and sub-arctic regions of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia. We are talking about phenomenally large masses of land. Maybe, but again too slowly to be of any aid in our lifetime or the lifetime of our children. You really can not understand the size of the arctic and sub-arctic regions or the nature and length of the cycle of permafrost melting and more robust plants colonizing the land. You need to forget everything you think you know about this region, because it isn't correct. Again because of the sheer thermal mass of the permafrost itself, and the sheer depth that it goes to, while the warming climate is able to melt the permafrost, it doesn't change the ground temperature that much. It just happens that the ground is so close to the melting point that very small changes in ground temperature can shift the ground from being frozen to melting. Even with massive temperature swings you are not going to warm the soil enough to shift from slow growing tundra type vegetation to rapidly growing temperate or tropical vegetation in our lifetime. No this warming will not stimulate a rapid increase in plant growth, at least not as measured by human lifetimes for the reasons stated above. Yes in time earth will adapt and plants will again sequester the fossil CO2 that we are releasing, but this will happen over generations, not years or decades. By the time nature can adjust to what we are doing and undo the changes we are causing the damage will have been done and human society will have been seriously harmed.

Yes I do realize that it is a developing technology. By buying a hybrid, one isn't really helping the environment today, but investing in the development of a technology that will be part of real solutions tomorrow.

Tell you what, move from warm New Zealand to the arctic/sub-arctic region for a few years and see for yourself how poorly you understand this issue and just how wrong you are. You are assuming that the ground will be warmed enough deep enough to support the more robustly growing plants, this just isn't going to happen. There is a big difference between going from simply melting the permafrost to the ground warming up enough in the summer to support the quantity of plants necessary to sequester the amount carbon that is being released by the plant matter that is decaying. Also you are assuming that the growing plants are actually sequestering the carbon and not decaying themselves. If buried organic material is decaying and releasing its carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, why would surface dying plants not also decay? Conversely, if surface living plants die and get immediately buried such that they do not decay, then why would the buried dead plants be decaying so rapidly that they pose a serious concern? Don't you see, you can't be decaying buried plants while at the same time be burying the surface plants before they decay? Even suggesting this would happen doesn't pass any type of straight face test. Do some honest to goodness reading on this subject and you will realize the permafrost carbon issue is too big for some wishful thinking. I'm not saying we would stop burning oil and gas, I'm simply saying that if we used it more efficiently (e.g. better fuel economy in vehicles) we could use more of it for purposes that coal is being used for. Don't forget that oil is an important fuel source for many electrical generation plants. In addition, many of those "other" countries are already using oil and gas more efficiently than the U.S. and a few other industrialized countries. Besides those "other" countries are going to do what they do regardless of our actions. As such our conserving oil wouldn't have any impact on how other countries use said oil. Basically saying we should waste before the others waste is a very selfish and shortsighted attitude. In fact the Chinese are shutting down 50 gigawatts of their most inefficient coal fired powerplants AND slowing their opening of new coal fired power plants. In addition they have pledged to cut their CO2 emissions per GDP unit by 80% by 2050 (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0426/p01s04-woap.html). The only way they could do this is make all of their processes more efficient and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. And what is the population difference between China and Australia? A more accurate way to look at this is CO2 produced per person per annum. I think you will find that both Australia and certainly the United States release way more CO2 per person per year than does China. In fact, China produces less than 1/4 of the CO2 per person than does the United States. Here's how I figured this: 1) The United States is the world's number one producer of CO2 and China is number two (thus China produces less CO2 than the U.S.). As the population of the United States is 300,000,000 and China's population is 1.3 billion (300 million divided by 1.3 billion equals 0.23). China is finalizing a deal to buy four third-generation nuclear power plants from Westinghouse Electric. In addition, the deal will provide China with the technological know-how to build more nuclear power plants in the future. By 2020 China plans to be producing 40 gigawatts of power. (see: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0426/p01s04-woap.html the same link as above) These are important technologies to develop, but we must not focus on one technology. Instead we need to spread our efforts across wide ranges of technologies as China is doing.

You are missing the point. Because of how cold the ground is this plant growth IS NOT going to happen quickly enough to sequester the carbon for hundreds if not thousands of years. This would be way too late to resolve the current global warming problem before our children have to suffer the consequences of our inaction. I have not glossed over anything. While coal is a significant concern, so is air travel and Humvees. You have admitted it yourself that oil is a finite resource. This means we must conserve said resource. Besides, which every gallon of oil that is not wasted in a Humvee is a gallon of oil that could be used to power a power plant or some industrial process that would otherwise be powered by coal. We need to make oil last as long as we can because we are so dependent upon it and there are some processes that simply can't easily use other sources of energy. While a car might do just fine on electric power (via batteries or fuel cells), I don't think solar powered air planes will be that viable. If we shift those processes that we can off of oil (e.g. cars/trucks) and make all oil burning processes as efficient as possible (e.g. scrap personal vehicles that get simply awful fuel economy), we can save the oil for processes that can't as easily do without oil. Even the Chinese realize this. They have been scrapping tens of thousands of their most inefficient taxis and buses and implementing some of the strictest fuel economy standards for cars and trucks in the world (Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth). Europe also understands this and their fuel efficiency standards are very strict. Quite simply, the United States has some of the most lax fuel efficiency standards in the industrialized world. Just because coal is an important thing we need to focus on, doesn't mean we don't also address oil consumption. Wasting oil needlessly in inefficient vehicles simply means we have to burn more coal to power other processes because the oil is not available for those processes.

Please provide some references. Tell you what, go move to a sub-arctic region for a few years and take some time to explore continuous and discontinuous permafrost zones. As you travel north towards the arctic, you will go from land that is completely unfrozen for part of the year (e.g. ground freezes and thaws with the seasons) to a discontinuous permafrost zone where patches of land are frozen year round and patches are only frozen in the winter per normal. From discontinuous permafrost zones you would travel to continuous permafrost zones where the land has been permanently frozen since the last major ice age. The discontinuous permafrost zone is important to your statement because land in this zone cycles through periods of being frozen year round to cycles of thawing in the summer back to being frozen year round. This is all dependent upon the vegetation. In the discontinuous zone it isn't so much that the frozen ground totally disappears as much as it the frozen layer simply recedes deep into the earth. Remember that ground temperature is a function of average temperatures, the deeper you go into the earth the longer the period of time the average is based on. Of course at some depth the warming of the mantle starts to overwhelm the affects of climate temperatures on the temperature of the ground. Because of how long the last major ice age was, this frozen zone can go to hundreds of feet beneath the earth's surface. As I said, at the surface of the earth in a discontinuous permafrost zone there is a cycle to the freeze thaw cycle, which can take hundreds of years and is dependent in part on the vegetation. In patches of land that are frozen to very close to the surface, the vegetation is true tundra with very small hardy plants that do not need deep roots and can endure very cold soil temps and very short summers. As these plants are very small they provide very little shade and the power of the sun is able penetrate to the soil. Over many years the sun will slowly make progress during the summer months and melt more of the ground than gets refrozen in the winter. In time this will create a swampy/boggy area where the darkness of the water will absorb the sun's energy even more efficiently. Eventually the frozen ground will retreat deep enough into the earth that more temperate vegetation can gain a foothold. In time the short brushes and shrubs will give way to deciduous trees like birches. As the patch becomes forested, the trees shade the earth and the frozen ground begins to work its way back to the surface over a hundred years or so. As the ground gets colder the birches can not tolerate the colder soil temperatures and give way to black spruce. The black spruce is one of the heartiest of all trees on this planet. Black spruce, however, have one weakness, they grow a central tap root and can only grow as tall as their tap root can grow into the earth. As the frozen earth comes closer and closer to the earth taller black spruce give way to shorter black spruce until the patch of land once again gives way to tundra. Now what is important about this is that at no time does the ground become warm enough to support robust vegetation growth of enough substance to sequester significant amounts of carbon. Even at the southern end of the discontinuous permafrost zones one does not see the quantities of vegetation necessary to sequester the amount of carbon that we are talking about and any sequestering would take hundreds of years. Also keep in mind that as plants die, most of the carbon gets released back into the environment as the plant decays. Most plant carbon that gets sequestered does so in environments devoid of oxygen like at the bottom of certain types of swamps or deep in the oceans. What is important to understand about the whole melting of the permafrost issue is that as the earth warms, the zone of discontinuous permafrost is pushed northward eating into pure permafrost and melting the earth deeper and deeper in the discontinuous permafrost zone. Both of these factors expose vast quantities of sequestered organic material to decay which in turn releases the locked carbon in the form of CO2. If you have not had to live with permafrost, tundra and taiga forests first hand, you really can not appreciate how delicately balanced these systems are and just how slowly more vigorous plants can take to move into areas that have melted. You also can not begin to appreciate the sheer quantity of dead organic material that is locked up in the permafrost. You are fooling yourself if you believe that more vigorous plants will move into melting permafrost zones to offset the amount of carbon that is being released by the decaying plant matter. By the time said plants begin to really soak up all the CO2 that was released, the damage will have been done and all of us and our children will be dead from old age. No I have a bit of a "downer", as you call it, on people who refuse the countless different reasons we should be conserving our energy resources as much as possible. We need to use the remaining oil and natural gas as efficiently as possible, not just to slow the release of CO2, but so that this energy source will last for as long as possible and give us a real chance to shift to new energy sources with a smooth and peaceful transition and without significant economic hardships. Right and if all of us on this planet don't take energy conservation seriously and seriously work to wean ourselves off of oil and gas, we will be in a world of hurt. We must look to the future and we must realize that some processes just won't shift from oil and gas as easily as others. We all need to use this limited resource more wisely and to stop wasting it frivolously. I'm sorry, but a Hummer is a frivolous waste of a very limited resource. What is sad is that of the industrialized nations, the United States ranks dead last for the fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks. What is even sadder is that our vehicle fuel efficiency standards are even lower than China's and as a result American car makers can not sell their cars in China because they are too inefficient (I saw this on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, but I'm sure you could verify it elsewhere). No wonder Toyota is eating GM's lunch. You are absolutely right about coal being the bigger problem of the two. And I wonder how much more total CO2 is released by oil derived from coal than from normal oil (burning the coal oil plus the energy required to convert coal into oil)? The less oil we waste and the more efficiently we use it, the slower we will release this source of CO2 into the environment and the longer this energy source will last giving us just that much more breathing space. Do you realize how much less CO2 would be released and how much non-renewable energy would be saved if everyone took the simple steps that you are talking about? I personally don't expect people to park their cars and jump on a bus tomorrow (unless you live in Oakland CA ;-) ), however, if people would simply take measures to reduce their impact they could save massive amounts of energy and save lots of money without crimping their lifestyle. This would be a significant step in the right direction. Here, here. But the way I look at it is that maybe the best way to get these types of people to change their ways is to convince them that it is good for their wallets and thus give them a selfish motivation for saving energy. Even big business is starting to realize that there is lots of money to be saved (which increases profits) by going green and making their operations as efficient as possible. I'll leave that for a different forum. Interestingly enough, the total "cradle to grave" life cycle of the Prius might actually make it more polluting than some of its more traditional brethren. A student in one of my environmental classes (community college) is actually doing a report on the life cycle of a Prius and I can't wait to see what they find and review their sources. If the paper is good enough, I'll offer to publish the article on my website. The one aspect that has interested me about hybrids is exactly what their total environmental impact is in comparison to regular cars. Don't forget you have a mess of lithium ion batteries that will have to be replaced during the car's life cycle and there are lots of other factors that drive up the environmental costs of producing hybrids compared to other cars. I share your concern. Constantly say we need to do what we can to protect the environment and reduce our impact on the environment because it is in our own long term self interest. If you don't care about polar bears or pandas, fine, but care about your children and grandchildren. Again I'll agree with you. I'm very happy to see companies like Walmart and Home Depot bringing green technologies to the consumers and actively promoting them. Home Depot even gave away 1,000,000 60 watt equivalent CFLs on Earth Day. And Walmart has been going nuts as of late promoting environmentally friendly products. Considering I've always considered Walmart to be part of the Axis of Evil, I'm really confused by their green side.

It looks right to me. That will make life easier for readers, thank you.

Of course plants grow at 1 Celsius, I never said they didn't. I lived in those climates, I saw first hand at what temperatures plants would grow, I also saw how fast they would grow. Have you ever walked on a tundra? Have you ever walked through a Taiga Forest? I have and I can tell you flora grow extremely slowly in these climates. Damage a bush and you can set its growth back ten or twenty years. The point is that now through the burning of fossil fuels we are releasing carbon that took millions of years to be sequestered by nature. Add to this the melting of the permafrost and the release of CO2 from those areas and we are talking about vast quantities of carbon that were sequestered over tens of thousands to millions of years. Maybe in a thousand years nature could sequester all of this carbon once again IF we stopped releasing new carbon into the atmosphere, but it is not going to happen quickly enough to negate our carbon impact in the short run. Also if we see temperature increases in the sub-arctic regions of 10C to simulate plant growth, all of the most extreme predictions will have come true and the damage will have already been done. We really don't want to see a 10C rise in temperatures at the sub-arctic because this would mean devastating temperature changes in the equatorial regions where so much of humanity lives. This may be true, but we still can not afford the risk of doing nothing. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas; we know that climate temperatures are rising; and we know that we are a significant contributer to the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere. Given the negative effects of global warming if we do nothing vs. the cost of doing something, prudence dictates that we do what we can to eliminate or at least reduce our release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Do we really want to wait and see if the doomsday believers are right? Do we really want to wait and see if global warming is serious concern until it is too late to do anything? Or do we start to take actions now while we can take actions and the cost of doing something is frequently outweighed by the direct economic benefit? How much fossil carbon would not be put into the atmosphere if the average fuel efficiency of personal vehicles was doubled? How much fossil carbon would not be put into the air if we reduced our consumption of electricity by 40%? How much fossil carbon would not be put into the air if we increased the energy efficiency of homes by 20%? I don't know the exact figures as to how much we would reduce carbon emissions, but it would be a heck of a lot and all of these reductions are realistic given immediately available and near term technologies. Now, what would be the other benefits of the afore mentioned energy saving measures? That is really easy to answer, a lot less non-CO2 related noxious emissions, a lot lower energy costs for the average consumer, a lot less dependence upon oil from conflict ridden regions of the world AND a lot more energy independence for nations like the U.S. In short it could help cut our dependence upon "blood oil". Just think how much extra money would be in your wallet if you could personally reduce your energy consumption by the afore mentioned amounts. Personally speaking as an American, simply being able to reduce our oil consumption enough to end our dependence on Middle Eastern oil is more than enough reason to undertake the afore mentioned energy saving measures, cutting carbon emissions to slow global warming just makes the justification that much more compelling. The direct economic costs of tackling our dependence upon fossil fuels and the amount of fossil fuels we consume is far outweighed by the economic benefit of the money we could save by improving the overall energy efficiency of our lives.

Do some research on this, I provided a starting point. You obviously are not speaking from knowledge on this. There are melting swamps in Siberia that are belching methane at such high volumes that one can actually light the gas as it bubbles to the surface (I've seen this on TV). Read more at: http://www.livescience.com/environment/060906_methane_bubbles.html Basically for plant life to grow as rapidly as would be necessary to sequester the amount of CO2 being release in sub-arctic regions would require a jungle like warm climate where plants can grow rapidly. In sub-arctic regions NOTHING grows rapidly. Remember we are talking about raising the average annual temperature a half of a degree from just below freezing to just above freezing to trigger this effect. An average year round temp of just above 32 degrees F is hardly warm enough to spark a massive plant bloom. Furthermore the plants would be doing nothing to sequester the methane that is being released, which is a much more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. For the record, I used to live in Fairbanks Alaska and attended the University of Alaska Fairbanks, whose scientists are referenced in some of the articles one will find on this subject. I have seen first hand areas of discontinuous permafrost that were melting and let me assure you there was no massive explosion of plant life from all that CO2 that was being released. There was just lots and lots of boggy, swampy tundra swarming with enough mosquitoes to suck your blood dry if you had the misfortune of getting stuck out in tundra. In time will plants eventually balance things out and sequester the CO2 that we are releasing either directly or indirectly by helping to precipitate global warming? Yes they will, but not before the damage is done. Oh and in regards to how warm it was 10,000, 100,000 or even 10,000,000 years ago; who cares? What affects human civilization is how the climate has been doing over the past few hundred years and what it will do in the next fifty years. It took human populations over 20,000 years to reach one billion persons, yet in the last one-hundred years our population has exploded to over five billion. Millions if not hundreds of millions of people live at or very near sea levels in impoverished countries like India and Bangladesh. These are peoples that depend upon oceans remaining at currently levels or at least raising slowly enough that populations can adapt without massive displacement of populations. Even the oceans raising just five feet will wipe out entire nations like Tuvalu, which is one of the lowest laying countries in the world. See the following for what climate change will mean: http://uk.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUK117673227958._CH_.242020070416 Yes there were times in our past when CO2 concentrations and ocean levels were higher, but human civilization didn't exist during those times. Again, we aren't talking about trying to head off global warming for some noble goal of protecting endangered ecosystems, we are talking about heading off global warming and at least reducing our contribution to it to protect our own civilizations. Unless we find ways to head off global warming we could very well see poorer nations descend into endless cycles ecologically driven wars and we could see millions if not hundreds of millions of ecological refugees simply looking for some place where they can survive. Given the potential ramifications of global warming when there the potential that we are partially or wholly to blame for global warming; then we must take action. This is especially true when many of those actions aren't that hard and can in the long run have significant benefits beyond the global warming issue (e.g. less dependence on Middle Eastern Oil or pollution spewing coal and saved money). Here is some further reading as to the affects of global warming on civilization: http://www.unescap.org/mced2000/pacific/background/climate.htm http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=303756&area=/insight/insight__international/

To bring you up to speed on peat moss and the melting tundra, here are two good articles: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/16/MNGKKJFD5M1.DTL http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060615-global-warming.html If you do some digging you will find countless more articles on this subject and I've seen some good PBS Nova type documentaries on TV about this issue in the last year. Obviously the peat moss and other organic material that is currently sequestered in the arctic was living at some point in the past and it is well known that millions of years ago the climate was much warmer. Man, however, has only been roaming this planet for the past what 20,000 – 50,000 years? Also it is only in the past hundred years that our population has exploded. Quite simply our civilization is dependant upon maintaining the status quo in regards to the ecosystem. We don't want a raise in global temperatures anymore than we want a cooling of global temperatures because either one would have devastating effects on our ability to sustain ourselves. I'm not sure what your comment is about me being against technology. I'm not against technology, I'm against pollution. We will depend upon new technologies to help us reduce the amount we pollute and to help us undo what we have already done. By the way, for every gallon of gas you burn in your car, you are releasing 20 lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere that had been sequestered away for hundreds of millions of years (gasoline after all comes from dead dinosaurs). See http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/co2.shtml Wrong, man has been altering nature for millennia now, but not always realizing it. Maybe we can't alter weather systems directly, but by slowing the increase in CO2 into the atmosphere we can slow global warming. Eventually we could even get to the point where we can reduce the total CO2 in the atmosphere and thus reverse global warming or at least stop it. Things are only not possible if you don't try. I'll consider this as troll bait and not give it any further comment. Good lord, if we hadn't of reduced our per car/factory pollution levels from what they were in the 40s through 60s, we'd be worse off than China is right now for forms of pollution other than CO2. How about providing some documentation to support this? I think you will find that fuel efficiency of our vehicles has not improved significantly in at least 20 years. Even China has higher fuel efficiency requirements for vehicles than the U.S. Also there were a heck of a lot less cars, trucks, factories and people in the world sixty years ago. So even if the per item pollution has gone down our net pollution has gone up tremendously. Look for all those naysayer's out there who don't think we should do anything about global warming I say this. If we don't do anything and it is a problem, we are in serious trouble. If we do take action to significantly reduce our carbon footprint and it turns out humans aren't the cause of global warming, what is the worst that happens? We have a more efficient society that is less dependant upon fossil fuels for our energy. This would mean that the Middle East would become less of a concern and we wouldn't be spending so much time fighting wars over oil. Furthermore our air would be cleaner and as such we would have fewer pollution caused health problems. We might also find that as a society we would be spending a lot less of our wealth on energy, leaving more money for other things. How much money would you save each year if your vehicle was twice as fuel efficient? How much money would you save if your house consumed 1/4 of the electricity it does today? How much money would you save if your home required half as much fuel to heat it? In the long run, going "green" saves lots of that green stuff you like to put into your wallet. The only ones who gain from us not trying to find ways to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and thus reduce our carbon footprint are those companies who make billions of dollars a year mining or pumping fossil energy out of the ground.

Jackson33, If you wrap the individual comments you want to quote in the "quote" tags you see when you quote a message, it becomes much easier to read. For instance: yada yada yada

Okay, have you been spending time reading "studies" produced by the Greening Earth Society"? As has been pointed out, minuet changes in a large and complex system can have profound effects on said system. Now it is known beyond any shadow of a doubt that CO2 along with methane and other gases are greenhouse gases and that the more abundant these gases are in the atmosphere the more energy that is trapped in our climate system and the warmer our world becomes. In climate systems like the sub-arctic regions a 1/2 degree shift in average annual temperatures is enough to shift a mostly frozen discontinuous permafrost zone into a permafrost free zone. In turn the organic material that had been trapped in frozen peat moss type conditions for hundreds of thousands of years will begin to rapidly decompose releasing vast quantities of CO2 and methane into the environment compounding the global warming situation. Think of man's contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere as a wrist cracking a bull whip. A small movement of the wrist causes a rapid movement of the knot at the end of the whip. The exact same thing is happening here. Our contribution of fossil CO2 (CO2 from carbon that had been sequestered for millions of years as fossil fuels) is flicking the wrist, that is raising temperatures in hypersensitive zones just enough to cause those zones to start to dump billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will in turn speed up global warming. The earth is warming, there is no question about that, how much man is responsible people are still debating. HOWEVER, I will contend that how much man is responsible is irrelevant. This warming WILL and IS changing weather patterns and IS raising sea levels. I have seen several articles on different news programs about how quickly how quickly some South Pacific Island nations are shrinking due to the fact they are barely above sea level. As weather patterns change, areas that historically received sufficient precipitation so support agriculture will suffer significant long term droughts, which will cause large scale crop failures and famines. As glaciers melt and disappear because of global warming the river systems they feed will cease to supply enough water for the human populations that depend upon those rivers. Raising ocean levels of even a couple of feet will displace millions of people. Failed crops will cause mass starvation creating millions more environmental refugees. Insufficient water flow in rivers will also cause the failure of crops that feed millions. Combine these together and we could see phenomenal pressures upon societies and governments, which would result in wars over arable land and water resources and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Since global warming is impart or whole caused by the increase of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and since Man is contributing vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, this is the one part of the global warming issue that we can address. Maybe we can't directly stop melting permafrost from releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases, but we can reduce and eliminate the greenhouse gases that we release. In time as technological solutions become available, we may also be able to "scrub" the atmosphere of greenhouse gases and sequester these gases in the earth permanently (or at least until we need to release them generations from now to offset some global cooling event). Our purpose for trying to stop global warming isn't because we want to save the polar bears, we need to do it to save ourselves and our civilizations. It just happens that animals like the polar bears are good indicators as to how good of a job we are doing of protecting the environment so that this planet remains hospitable for humans. If this planet is to remain hospitable to humans we must do what we can now to reduce our impact on it. This means reducing our emission of CO2 as much as possible while we also work on ways to sequester sufficient amounts of CO2 such that we can stop or reverse global warming regardless of the "true" source of said CO2.

There are some "small" problems with this, the Panama Canal is a fresh water system that is fed from the center via a large lake. The center of the canal is also at a significantly higher elevation than the two ends, hence the systems of locks at both ends of the Canal. In order to pump Pacific seawater to the Atlantic we would have to move it up hill against the flow of fresh water AND destroy a fresh water ecosystem in the process. It would be a heck of a lot easier to create a pipeline to do this. Oh and has anyone thought of the ecological impact of moving vast quantities of Pacific sea water and the organisms it contains into the Atlantic? Dealing with the bilge water of ships is bad enough.

Jackson33, would you please restate your comment. I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Agreed. It is appalling to think that professors at universities are letting this slide while adjunct faculty at a small community college are holding students accountable for their actions.

Where do you think those Sci Fi writers got their ideas? Good Sci Fi has a solid foundation in real science.

Well, yes, I did realize it is fake, but it still has a good definition of geek that a normal person could understand and it was really funny.