Jim Morin for May 12, 2014

I have lived on the coast for almost 50 yeas. The seas have not gone up one inch. I have seen many glaciers recede over the years. I would expect the water to rise, but no. It has not. We are at the peak of another 50,000 year cycle. Just like all the others.

We knew folks in Alaska that had a small SUV that ran crooked down the road after an accident. The dealer told them they had an expert coming the next week that could fix the SUV as nobody in Alaska could fix it. A farm boy came the next week, put the SUV up on a rack, ran a string around the tires, loosened the bolts holding the axles, tapped a few times with a maul and presto their SUV ran straight. Kinda like anecdotal evidence. Ex spurts know best.

Leaving it all and leaving nothing at all, all at once.

For the last ten years, weather events have occurred that evoked the words, “Once in a hundred years event” several times a year. In the last three years, the line has changed to “Once in 200 years”, and in the case of the recent floods in Pensacola, “Once in 500 years”.Tornados, firestorms, floods, droughts, blizzards, hail, and hurricanes are doing increasingly more expensive and more devastating amounts of damage. Ignoring this and refusing to do things to alleviate the damage, particularly the damage done to food sources by drought and flood is not just foolish, it is stupid. In the name of jobs and saving money, narrow minded people are refusing to look at the job creating actions we should be taking to protect our food, water, and infrastructure.Pipelines carrying water from floods to droughts are much more worthwhile than oil pipelines. Seawalls, levees, and dikes would protect lives and property from high winds and storm surges. New construction techniques have created buildings that are more easily able to survive intense tornados and as new homes and buildings are build, these techniques, like earthquake resistant homes in California, need to be required, not just suggested.And to those who have written that the sea hasn’t risen, read reports from the island nations of the Phillipines, Samoa, and other places where they are seeing entire islands beginning to vanish at high tide, with only homes and trees rising out of the waters.Just because an individual is not experiencing a disaster does not mean that others are equally safe and secure. If you wait for the disaster to strike, then you will be standing in shock wondering how this all happened and why didn’t anyone do anything about it when they could.We are a great people with amazing talents. We are also petty and selfish. We must be our better selves, not only for our nation, but for all the nations of this planet. We need to be the example we have often been.And time IS running out.Respectfully,C.

Good to see you’re carrying on the good fight. And evenhandedly! Just picked you up on GoComics. Used to be your vending lady. B

Are you serious? Your basis of comparison is a culture that ended sometime during 15th Century BC. .Global climate change is mostly a product of the industrial age and the pollutions it created via car exhaust and factories. .Do you really think the smog choking Beijing and other industrial cities isn’t going to have an effect to global weather patterns?.El Nino, a large pocket of unusually warm water of the pacfic rim, has been credited with strong weather changed from North America to Antarctica..

Any “news” source that has a strong political is a terrible source for science news.

“The sea level has been 20 feet higher then it is now and over 300 feet lower.this happened without humans driving SUV’s and burning fossil fuel.”-By this reckoning, since fires happen by lightning strikes, composting heat, geological events, etc, there can be no such thing as human-caused fires. Therefore, laws against and prosecution of arson shouldn’t exist…..What a silly conclusion. Just because something happens naturally doesn’t mean that humans can’t do the same thing to a greater degree. People alter their environments purposefully (ever looked at the landscape while flying?) and accidentally (like accidentally setting the earth under your town on fire). To ignore the power of humanity pumping vast volumes of carbon into our atmosphere is simple hubris.

For those who want to learn something about the climate, I recommend David Archer’s book “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast.” It has some math in it, and the first chapter I thought could have been shorter, but once you get into the book it’s very informative. He also wrote “The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate” and “The Carbon Cycle.”

Look at a picture of Earth from space, look how large the round mass if rock and water is, think how much plate tectonics has moved that land since Pangea existed, and just think about how much mass was moved! It only took millions of years!

Take a look in that photo of how thin the atmosphere is. Think of the 7 plus billions and their machines pumping wast into that thin atmosphere. Think of them poisoning the vast reaches of the oceans, so that you find evidence of Man’s activities everywhere. Think of how much of that land mass has been altered by massive engineered machines consuming fuels that took billions of years to form.

Think of that fact that all the Man caused changes have occurred in the last 200 years.

Funny how often this happens: I was thinking about a response to a comment on another site, to the opinion that even if Climate Change is happening, there’s nothing people can do except “Adapt or die.”.That night just on impulse I picked a book out of my shelves, TIME’S EYE, by Clarke/ Baxter. I haven’t read it in several years, and forgot this poem by Kipling appears at the beginning : .“Cities and Thrones and PowersStand in Time’s eye,Almost as long as flowers,Which daily die:But, as new buds put forthTo glad new men,Out of the spent and unconsidered EarthThe Cities rise again.”.And this is the first paragraph of the first chapter:.“For thirty million years the planet had cooled and dried, until, in the north, ice sheets gouged at the continents. The belt of forest that had once stretched across Africa and Eurasia, nearly continuous from the Atlantic coast to the Far East, had broken into dwindling pockets. The creatures who had once inhabited that timeless green had been forced to adapt, or move.”.Those two quotes express rather well the despair and hope for the future of human civilizations..This time, if the climate changes drastically, it’s not trilobites or dinosaurs or forest apes at risk, but billions of humans. We might think of humans as flexible and mobile, but very few human societies can still just pick up to move. They are increasingly urbanized in coastal areas or along inland waterways. In a series of sudden disasters hundreds of millions of people will be on the run at one time, crossing national boundaries into places that already have populations under stress..Some Western countries are already investing in solutions, but it seems big U.S. business interests are now trying as hard as possible to deny there will be problems at all. It would be a disgrace if we decided to not even try because we were too damned stubborn and cheap. When climate change situations become really bad toward the end of the twenty-first century, they will have been made even worse by the present delay of positive action. .Otherwise, whatever sentience eventually comes after us will marvel at the abundance of human skeletal fossils, as we now marvel at the fossils of trilobites.

For about 4.1 billion of the 4.5 billion years the planet’s been around most of the US for example was under water….

No, it is Not a hoax…my mother used to play on a certain NJ Bay beach when she was young. Now, one can no longer see the beach (and this was Before Hurricane Sandy) as it is all covered with ocean water (which is now mixing with the Bay water). ;)

Time ran out for each person who died in tornadoes, floods, and fires. Time is running out for farmers who can’t pay their bills because drought is killing their crops.You continue to measure the quality of life of the world’s peoples by how well you are doing.This is an error.Sincerely,C.

Please keep up your educational posts. As a reader of Stephen Jay Gould (and science essays in general) for many years, I learned there is a lot more to Evolution than “survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw.” Unfortunately, those two cliches are what are remembered most. .“Darwinism” has been misinterpreted and misapplied ever since “On the Origin of Species” was published. If one thinks the comments on these sites are sometimes abusive and ignorant, I am sure you aware the ones that Darwin received in his own time were much worse. However, those people had the excuse of honest ignorance..The basic concepts of Darwinism continue to be modified and enlarged by modern genetics and paleontology but they have not been disproved. Gould has advanced “punctuated equilibria” as his own contribution to evolution studies.