The ski is falling...really!

I actually agree, except that by contributing greenhouse gases we speed the process along.

Maybe we should be outlawing beans.

First it gets hot, then it gets cold, then Republicans drive Hummers to Florida to go skiing. Then we all die. Capice?

Nobody said this GW stuff was easy.

This reminds me of a friend of mine who smokes.  Whenever any body questions him about smoking he always says "Its proven that 100% of all non-smokers die". 

Doesn't mean I'm going to start smoking because of a defeatist attitude, or driving a gas guzzling SUV for that matter.

BRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

would that include the refried kind? 

excuse me, I'm going to go watch   The Day After Tomorrow

i've seen that before.  I don't completely agree with the conclusions drawn in the article though.

They seem to imply that there are a large amount of positive feedback loops but not a lot of negative loops.  Positive loops are loops where the feedback builds the loop to infinity.  IE warm temps releasing more methane which increases temps more and on and on.  Negative loops are loops where the feedback counters the source.  IE increaseing CO2 level increases temperature, which increases plant life, which in turn drops CO2 levels.  They also imply that we are soley at fault.

The problem is that the earth system is chaotic.  Chaotic systems are strange in that they can stay stable for a long time, damping out very large changes (ie, recovering from the meteor hit several million years ago) or they can converge to a different stable state from a very small perterbence.  This change in the climate could either be the beginning of a change that is going to be damped back out with a cooling trend later down the road, it could be the earth returning to a previous state or it could be converging to a new state.  If we are converging to a new state, and we are at fault for the trigger mechanism, it's impossible to say whether or not this trigger mechanism was small enough that it wouldn't have happend eventually by some other process.  The thing is, the earth atmosphere system is nonlinear so there is no way we could accurately simulate it to determine these things, and even if we could and we had the exact inital conditions, there is the issue that nonlinear chotic systems involve some measure of probablility. 

Agreed.  That's basically what I was getting at with my "defeatist attitude" comment. 

Nice to have you in CoJ, Mr. President.

What you aren't reading are the 700+ other articles that show evidence to the contrary of global warming.  The papers that indicate that the antarctic ice shelf is actually growing.  The articles that indicate that current patterns are matching up to previously observed patterns that preceded massive cooling. 

The thing that pisses me off the most about arm chair scientists is that they go spouting off about "papers" and "studies" and try to validate their point with a couple of charts and graphs without an actual understanding of the science.  I've tried to explain to people to problems with having a position on global climate change, but I realized that to actually do that, I would need to fill them in on the last 6 years of my education.

I am a meteorologist.  I read the journals.  I do have understanding of the processes involved.  I have an understanding of the data being used to promote these "findings" and of all the inherrent errors within them that never make it to the media.  The one thing I can tell you is, the scientific community as a whole has not agreed that global warming exists and we are at fault.  What we have decided is that we are undergoing a global climate change and that there may be a correlation between human activities and the observed changes.  There is a BIG difference between those two statements. 

In short, the earth is changing.  Humans are pumping large amounts of CO2 into the air.  There is believed to be a connection, that still remains to be proven, between increasing global mean temperature and increasing CO2 levels.  Right now global climate change is something that deserves the attention of the scientific community and deserves much study, but does not deserve the mass panic we are seeing now.  I'm not saying global "warming" isn't happening.  I'm not saying that it is.  I'm not saying that we as humans are or are not responsible for it.  What I am saying is that we don't know enough to be drawing the kind of conclusions politicians and actors seem to be making.

Wow. Cool!