Arctic Meltdown

The odds of any significant effort by any governments is dismlally small and if Observer101 is any idication, then America is likely to make things worse not better! For the record, America is still by far the greates absolute contributor to Global warming, envionmental degradtion, and a host of other global isses! On a per capita basis, it is doubtful that any nation can begin to approach our greedy destruction before the end! Clearly the Homo Saps species is a seriously flawed experiment by the evolutionary forces of Nature; it may take many millions of years to recover from the destruction this species will have caused to life on this planet before it sinks into sands of time!

For billions of years the earth has had warm ups and cool downs...Its a cycle thats supposed to happen...When we find wooley mammoths imbedded deep in the ice from another period just before the "BIG FREEZE" do you think it was mammothmade cars and factories that caused the earth to heat up and cool down? No!.. Its called volcanoes..which one major eruption could put out waaaay more pollutants than our lifetimes ever could in just hours...Ofcourse we put more pollution in the air, and contribute to ozone depletion (supposedly)..but the earth WILL regulate itself...No amount of fines, political ramblings and nobel peace prizes will stop it. The earth will refreeze, heat up , refreeze for billions of more years with or without our help.

To all skeptics, the issue is not whether climate change is happening. It is, period. The matter is how fast it is and whether human populations around the world are ready to cope with it. As Dr Robert Corell explains, the more climate changes, the faster extraordinary climate events are likely to happen. And as usual, the poorer and less developped a country is, the more unprepared it is to cope with such dramatic tragedies. If one Katrina every ten year is seen as an awful vision for the US, then just try to imagine how you will react if there were 2 or 3 EVERY year around the country.
This is to alleviate such risks that climate change issues must be dealt forcefully with. And because there has been considerable input from human activities (industrial burning) from the past 200 years into hastening cyclical natural climate change, there is is even more moral obligations from industrialised developped countries to take the lead in mitigating these consequences.
Finally, this why from any sensible reasonable people in the world, any more foot-dragging from skeptical chauvinistic american citizens, is just seen as what it is, moronic self-indulgence irresponsible blindness.

Best regards,

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate "models" ??? elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave ??? with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere ???1 to 6 miles above the Earth's surface ??? would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

"Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no," said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester.

The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

"The last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations, and more realistic modeling efforts," said Dr. Fred Singer from the University of Virginia. "Nonetheless, the models are seen to disagree with the observations. We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models should be viewed with much caution."

I understand the huge concerns involved, but how much of this is climate change and how much of it is due to the depletion of our ozone layer. I feel there is some confusion over what could be a natural occurance, (just like the ice age that brought the ice caps here) and an environmental concern. In one instance, we may be able to slow this change, in the other instance, it's not in our hands.