Clay Bennett for May 07, 2015

It’s the deniers that make up “facts” to make things look like they are not happening.But nature is changing all by itslef according to the client. Within the next 5 years, the Baltimore Oriole, the Maryland state bird, will no longer breed in Maruyland because it’s territory is moving further north. with the climate.You’ll just run your airconditioner longer in the spring and fall and won’t give a &%#@.

Again, man does not control climate change, but with time, he has strongly influenced it.

Note the complete lack of evidence supplied by any of the climate deniers here on “cooked evidence.” Every single observation made by every single thermometer in one hundred years is incorrect. No evidence required, because it’s not a scientific argument.

I don’t believe there has been any global warming for the 21st Century, but regardless of that quibble, the science of global warming is indisputable. Any rise in yearly temperatures is demonstrably a good thing for the environment and for humanity. I repeat, global warming has more good than bad to offer us. Some areas might be adversely effected, but on a whole, more areas will be positively effected. People just need to move where the water is.

I can’t tell whether some of you here are using satire or not. I have been reading about the environment, pollution, and the possibility of global warming since the late 1960s, and some of the comments written here are such incredible nonsense as surely to be intentional comedy. I knew more about basic science when I was a teenager. Sheesh. Honestly, are you paid to say that stuff?

whoever doesn’t believe in this, also believes that we didn’t go to the moon, vaccines causes autism, and aliens created the pyramids. Maybe we should remove all their bodily fluids.

it’s not nice to try to fool Mother Nature: it’s even dumber to keep raping her and not expect to get STDs.

According to denier facts and math, Pi is 5.56- try closing the circle with that.

The GOP has a Solution: They’ve introduced a New Budget for NASA that eliminates Funding for the Scientists who Study Climate..[Snark On].No More Studies of Climate Change.Problem Solved..[Snark Off].

No offense, and nice try, but that just proves my point. Coral reef bleaching in one area, moderately, with new arable land in another area. The article even mentions adaptation, a common theme in all evolutionary sciences. In other words….things change. I just don’t find anything in the literature that is seriously alarming.

Martens, you are consistently a rational, careful commenter. I always appreciate your calm, reasoned analysis. Thanks for that.

The truth is we will not break the planet before God is done using it – so either you are a Christian and can take peace in that, or you can point fingers and live in fear.

Might I respectfully suggest you look at a dictionary to learn what the words mean?So far all I see is skewed data scotch taped onto a theory trying to prove a point. Prove your theory with irrefutable FACT…. without falling back onto another questionable THEORY! And really, do I have to spell out the definitions of simple words to you? Proof is not somebody’s unproven THEORY. Find the smoking gun proving your theory. I concede that climate change is real. The climate on this planet as been changing and evolving for millions of years. But, there are forces far greater than mankind affecting climate.

If you want to solve problems, worry about the giant (naturally occurring) Methane cloud covering the Southwestern United States. That’s a FACT… not somebody’s half thought out THEORY! That cloud causes more so called Greenhouse Gas warming than any other source you can identify. Maybe you should be worrying about that giant slug of hot water in the Pacific Ocean that is probably a contributory factor in El Nino and La Nina weather patterns. Those two patterns have more affect on worldwide weather than any other single known event. It is known how the patterns emerge yet, nobody knows why.

The clock is running on your fifteen seconds… but then, I don’t have a theory. I just don’t believe yours and it will take hard and cold PROOF to change my mind.

Is it so hard to put the political party bullflop aside and just stick to scientific FACT. Yelling “He did it!” isn’t proving anything.

So, believe that the sky is falling if that is your choice.

The rate of rise for sea level is less than 1mm per year. The sky is falling, the sky is falling.

I’m not a scientist, so I go to what look like reputable scientific sites for information about temperatures and ice and such. For global average temperatures, I use the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201503)which says, for instance, “The average temperature across global land and ocean surface temperatures combined for March 2015 was 0.85°C (1.53°F) higher than the 20th century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F). This marks the highest March temperature in the 136-year period of record, surpassing the previous record of 2010 by 0.05°C (0.09°F)” and “Seven of the past eleven months (May, June, August, September, October, and December 2014, along with March 2015) have tied or set new record high monthly temperatures.” Doesn’t sound like things are getting cooler.For ice I use the National Snow and Ice Data Center (http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/)which says, for example, “Arctic sea ice extent for April 2015 averaged 14.0 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), the second lowest April ice extent in the satellite record. It is 810,000 square kilometers (313,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average of 15.0 million square kilometers (6.0 million square miles) and 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) above the previous record low for the month observed in 2007.”

@Baslim, @Martens @Hiram, @LonecatBut none of you are experts in this field and are just being arrogant and condescending, flaunting about your PhDs in other areas.

So I have heard.

So, if you don’t mind, I will go stand behind the guy standing up to the experts. His opinion counts for far more since he stands for the little guy.

I fear that the proof he would accept would also be “too late to do anything about it now.”

Well, tastes do differ. Catullus was tremendously important in the history of European lyric poetry, because he added a kind of emotional intensity which was quite new. (He is also interesting for technical reasons, because he wrote in a variety of metrical forms.) Propertius is my personal favorite, but I’m not sure I can say quite why. He just wrote a lot of poems that I really like. Maybe it’s that simple. But his poems are not so immediately attractive as Catullus’ poems are. They take a while to sink in. Tibullus is okay, but the weakest of the bunch, I think by general agreement. Ovid’s elegies are spectacular, but shallow; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is dactylic rather than elegaic, is just great.

But back to the climate, as I understand things, one of the reasons the argument is robust is that it’s not just one science that supports it. The physics makes sense, but so do the biology and the ecology and the chemistry. So you have a number of different measures all of which are saying the same thing. And all contributions are valuable.

Thanks, I will check it out. As I said, I’ve read several books on the topic; I have found the following informative and interesting:David Archer:The Global Carbon CycleThe Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s ClimateGlobal Warming: Understanding the Forecast

Tim FlanneryThe Weather Makers

Michael MannThe Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

I try to educate myself, as much as I have time.

@Baslim, @Martens @Hiram, @Lonecat – Since you all consider yourselves experts in the field, I will be anxiously awaiting the publication of your scientific study on the subject as opposed to your current practice of throwing other people’s numbers around. I don’t question any of your numbers you have supplied but they are only symptoms, not conclusive FACTS!

Whether the rate of rise of ocean level is 1mm or three mm depends on whose numbers you selectively choose to follow. Unfortunately, Southern California, New Orleans, Florida, and Venice have a bigger problem than 1 foot of sea level rise in 100 years. Each location has a subsidence problem working against them. The extraction of ground water is causing California’s San Joaquin Valley to gradually sink. I’m going from memory but I remember that Mendota, California had sunk more than 28 feet. The fresh water aquifer under Florida is dissolving the salt strata the land mass rests on causing it to gradually drop. Have you heard of the salt water intrusion into the Everglades and of all the sinkholes that keep magically appearing? New Orleans is just sinking into the Mississippi Delta mud upon which it was built. Venice, Italy is sinking into the muddy bottom of The Mediterranean. At the rate they all are sinking, a sea level rise of one foot in a hundred years isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference in my humble opinion. But, if you’re going to claim that the 1 to 3 mm rise is going to displace millions worldwide, I’m going to ask you to prove it. If you’re going to claim that gigantic temperature increases are going to spell doom, gloom, and destruction over the foreseeable future, I’m going to say PROVE IT because current temperatures are not following that scenario.

As far as solar influences on Earth’s climate, I prefer to believe Dr. Willie Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who states that the variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent so called global warming.” I would think he is infinitely more qualified than you.

I would love to do nothing more than continue this debate but I have a real life that doesn’t need validation of pseudo experts in a comic editorial forum. I don’t question anything you have provided but I do question the giant leap to blame everything on Carbon Dioxide. By the way, do you know who determined that 400 PPM is a DANGEROUS CO2 level and how did they make that determination? I can save you some research time and clue you in that it is a derivative of the news media and not based on any scientific FACT. It is a symptom and exactly what that level actually means, nobody knows. It could just mean a threshold at which all things green and growing will have a fantastic burst of growth. Changing climate is a given fact. The disappointing part of your entire argument is the total dismissal of any causal factors other than the miniscule percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere.

One final observation: I become more and more skeptical every time the left-wing political radicals mouth off because to me (and a large group of non believers) it smells like a pile of bullflop. The dooms dayers have been making bogus predictions for at least 25 years about all the possible bad things that are going to happen. Yet, the anticipated event slides right through it’s predicted doomsday…. and nothing happens. They should learn the basic fact that you can only cry “wolf” so many times before it all gets blown off as just more bullflop. The other premise they need to learn is that the definition of insanity is repetition of the same actions over and over and the expectation of different results. The “doom ’n gloom” message isn’t working any more according to the latest Gallup Poll, More and more Americans just don’t believe it and aren’t really concerned. The biggest group of non believers: The youth – the group most attracted to a liberal political agenda.

Uh huh, thanks for the constructive input Greggy/ Phoenix/ JulieGreenEco/ Cheri Sun.

I know, you just want to let us know you’re w a t c h i n g. :-|

You go, girl!Or Mother.