Ultimately the climate was going to change one way or another, it is going up now because it was going down for the previous 500 years. "The Little Ice Age" as it is being called now had a huge impact on Western history, it was part of the reasons the Vikings swept down from the north, it was part of the reason that the plague was so terrible and wiped out so many, it was a part of every day life all across the world and with the exception of those killed by the plague its effects were relatively minor. HOWEVER, human waste is definitely a very powerful contributor to the current trend, if 90% of all scientists are telling you something you need to sit up and listen because odds are they know what they are talking about. If 90% of the scientists who study this issue say that man is having a massive effect we have to listen. I do believe that global warming is an issue, but it is a slow growing, slow moving, slow dying issue two or three years of delay on the part of the United States will not have that much of an effect in the long run. Right now the US has not necessarilly bigger but more pressing issues, we need to come up with a viable plan to get our troops out of Iraq and leave Iraq with a stable democracy, we also need to fix our southern and northern borders, then we should start working on global warming. The other two should be solvable within a couple years, the latter one is something for which a couple years is meaningless. But another important note is that nations such as China and India should not be given a free hand to polute as they will just because they have a "developing nation" status. There are over two billion people in those two countries, even the smallest change there will send shockwaves around the world.
Show me this 90% statistic....
Even NASA says that one could not be certian with the evidence given that humans are a factor....
Think of the millions of years this planet has supposedly existed....And then think that the climate has been exactly the same...riiight
Furthermore have a look at this
http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/land/global/pollen.html This depicts 18,000 years of plant distribution in North America...Now I'm not saying we all go out an pollute that is obviously dumb...Let's also not forget that China has had far more serious "environmental accidents" in the past few years then in the US...
Every true scientific document (not main stream news media garbage) has stated that we can not guarantee HUMAN INTERACTION is the true cause of our current climate change...If anything it may not be our pollution but our allowing of the deforestation of the rain forest which is causing the rise in CO2 emissions since the rain forest along with the ocean is a HUGE filter of this gas....
-edit
A nice little animation created by The Illinois State Museum which shows the retreat of ice in North America in past 18,000 years, remember that the last glaciation was 20,000 years ago....
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/images/laurentide.mpg
(Note: "kya" means Thousand Years Ago)
And I really think this should make everyone ponder a little bit and play some devils advocate
Complications - for those who like such things
The situation is not simple since there are other factors involved. For example, water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas. You might think that if it is warmer the ocean would evaporate more, putting more vapor into the air, which would make it still warmer. However, a warmer and moister climate might make more plants grow, and these tend to remove carbon dioxide. Moreover, if the water vapor condenses into clouds (which are not vapor but liquid water drops of ice crystals) the white clouds reflect sunlight back into space (an effect called albedo) before it can warm the Earth. You can see that the Earth's atmosphere is part of a complicated system.
Source:
http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/land/global/greenhou.html
An interesting article again from NASA but this time the Jet Propulsion Laboratory about the effects of earthquakes on the earth
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005-009
This again like the moon changes our orbit, tilt, and rotational speed all which would affect our exposure to the sun thus being another piece in the puzzle that makes earth's climate work and change.....
Again remind me why this is a "no brainer"...hehehe...
Whose ready for the ride down the rabbit hole :cheers: