Will have to look this stuff up. With global warming, sufficient fresh water enters the oceans that the normal current global circulation is affected increasing the climate change that we are noting.

If one looks to what is already known, this circulation upset is the mechanism for bringing on the next ice age. According to history, we are about due for the next one.

We, collectively, may be in for a rough ride.

A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.

Anne Hathaway: 1556-1623

The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.

Thanks for posting this Di. With an impending reversal of the magnetic poles, and the threat of another massive asteroid stike, global warming seems to be the self-inflicted icing on our ecological cake.

How do we know who has the real answers and more important how will congress know?

Common sense tells me that cutting down hundreds of millions of acres of native trees in our most wild areas and replacing them with crops, cattle and oil rigs, will at some point become an over burden on the ecosystem. Where is that point, have we already reached it?

Numerous websites, blogs and articles in the media have claimed that the climate is no longer warming, and is now cooling. Here we show that periods of no trend or even cooling of the globally averaged surface air temperature are found in the last 34 years of the observed record, and in climate model simulations of the 20th and 21st century forced with increasing greenhouse gases. We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer‐term warming.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037810.shtml NOA PAPERS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

And to think of the legions of RWingers who are adamantly proclaiming that
" there is no man made global warming" to this day!

Unfortunately, Dana Rohrabacher, my congress critter
is one of them.

:-(

Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

In The Medea Hypothesis, renowned paleontologist Dr. Peter Ward proposes a revolutionary and provocative vision of life’s relationship with the Earth’s biosphere, one that has frightening implications for our future — yet also offers hope. Using the latest discoveries from the geological record, he argues that life might be its own worst enemy. This stands in stark contrast to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis — the idea that life sustains habitable conditions on earth. In answer to Gaia, which draws on the idea of the “good mother” who nurtures life, Ward invokes Medea, the mythical mother who killed her own children. Could life by its very nature threaten its own existence? Ward demonstrates that all but one of the mass extinctions that have struck Earth were caused by life itself. He looks at our planet’s history in a new way, revealing an Earth that is witnessing an alarming decline of diversity and biomass — a decline brought on by life’s own “biocidal” tendencies. And the Medea hypothesis applies not just to our planet — its dire prognosis extends to all potential life in the universe. Breathtaking in scope, The Medea Hypothesis is certain to arouse fierce debate and radically transform our worldview.

http://www.skeptic.com/past-lectures (scroll down to find article)

Of course with a razor thin atmosphere I'm not sure why folks are so cavalier in their treatment of it.