More and more information is coming to light that the warming trends are coming to an end, and that rather than being man made, they are actually cycles of stellar activities that have been documented in the past.

As Nigel Weiss – professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, explains to writer Lawrence Solomon, sunspots flare up and settle down in cycles. Right now, the world is experiencing the latter stages of a hyperactive period that lasts "perhaps 50 to 100 years, then you get a crash," Mr. Weiss says. "It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon."

When a crash occurs, as it did for 70 years during the 17th century -- known as the "Little Ice Age" -- and for 30 years during the 19th century, the Earth cools dramatically. It got so cold during one crash, Mr. Solomon writes, that New York's harbor froze solid, "allowing walkers to journey from Manhattan to Staten Island."

Perhaps this can go a long way toward explaining why global temperatures 2,000 years ago were apparently several degrees warmer than we are now experiencing.

It wasn't very long ago that scientists were in a tizzy about the inevitability of the coming ice age.

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"Esse est percipii."

Yep, you're right. And the problem is that they STILL don't know. There just isn't enough data, and what data there is, we still don't understand. I suspect that there are quite a few cycles we have no clue about yet. Man tends to be egotistical and believing of their own importance...but I still believe that nature is far more powerful (and I'm including the Earth and the Sun).

Where is this information coming to light?

I, personally, profess no expertise on climate science. What little I have read from scientists is that the level of consensus within the scientific community is very high, and the consensus is that global climate is (on average) warming and that humans are having an effect.

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-Scott

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. -- Bertrand Russell

Yup, and so was the coming ice age. Hysteria is contagious and nothing new.

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"Esse est percipii."

That is what the media want you to believe. It just doesn't happen to be the truth, but that isn't really that unusual. Science journals are filled with varying viewpoints, but we (the public) very seldom hear any of that, because it doesn't fit the current agenda. Almost every single scientist who is a proponent of global warming is among those who get all or most of their funding from that viewpoint. In short, it all comes down to money. Right now, if a scientist says that there is global warming and it is caused by man, they are almost assured of getting very hefty research grants. The ones who are less worried about making money and more worried about scientific truth are the ones that seldom ever make it into the news. You can sell more newspapers by convincing people that the world is about to end because man is causing a global warming that is killing the world, than you can by telling the truth...eg., that there is lots of data, which is nowhere near complete, and which we honestly don't understand.

Heck, consider this: NOAA has more weather stations than any other weather or climate based group in the world. NOAA has been collecting weather and climate data longer than any other group in the world. NOAA has better, larger, and faster computers for weather data collection and forecasting than any other group in the world (and more of them). NOAA employs more people for data collection and forecasting than any other group in the world. NOAA gets (and spends) more money than any other similar group in the world. Yet for all of that, even just looking at the last 5 years, Old Farmer's Almanac has been more accurate at forecasting the weather than NOAA has been! Being a weatherman is the only profession I know of where you can be wrong 80% of the time and STILL get paid!

I find this pretty telling, too. Gore (and others) have claimed a few times, including on FoxNews, that there are "2,400 Climatologists" who believe that man is causing global warming. Now, not only do they not say what criteria that they use to classify one as a climatologist (weatherman? data collector? private observer), according to NOAA and a couple other science agencies, there are approximately 900,000 climatologists in the US and around the world (again, they don't say what criteria is used exactly, though they do tend to be a little clearer on this point). So the question one might ask is, if the contention of Gore and others is correct, and 2,400 climatologists believe that man is causing global warming...what about the other 897,600 climatologists? 2,400 only amounts to less that three tenths of a percent of the climatologists. I'd hardly call that "most" climatologists. Again, though, this is something that we, as the public, aren't supposed to know or figure out.

Hi Rev Rex.

Would you be able to show me the distortion in the balance of viewpoints between the science literature and the media?

How did you discover this, and where can I discover this for myself?

I will.

Anyway, as I said earlier, I am no expert. Once I've performed research that satisfies me and given it thorough thought I'll return and we can discuss my findings.

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-Scott

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. -- Bertrand Russell

Look into the various sites that display science journals, such as the the various scientific sites, and you will be able to find these. They aren't hard to find, at all...they are just hard to hear about in the media.

I discovered it first by being overly cynical of the media hype. I then got to checking, and looked at the background of every "scientist" those media reports cited. Many of them weren't scientists at all, but in every single case, they were receiving money due to the "doomsday scenario". The money trail is so obvious that it is sickening. The media won't pick up on that, though, which bothers me more. They USED to be objective journalists, at least they tried to be. Not any more.

The statements made by A. Gore, regarding the number of supporting climatologists can be found in the archives at foxnews.com, I believe, as well as other sources. (If I'm not mistaken, they are also stated in his movie.) The number of true climatologists can be found by contacting NOAA. (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association) Your nightly weather news, if you are in the US (and many times in other places) comes from NOAA.

It seems to me that we're wasting a lot of energy on the wrong thing. Who cares if it's part of a natural cycle, or whether it's man-made? It's happening, and what we should be talking about is how we're gonna deal with it.

It's the same thing with oil: we are approaching the point where over 1/2 of the world's known oil reserves will be gone. It is a finite resource. Nobody questions this.

But what are the "experts" doing about it? Instead of getting together and saying, "We should be planning for what we're gonna do when it's all gone," they're arguing back and forth over whether it's going to happen in 10 years or 200 years.

Again, who cares exactly when it's going to happen? The point is, what steps are we taking now to deal with it when it does happen?

But then again, who cares? I'm not going to be around when it happens, so I'm not going to worry about it.

I'l just sit here and play my fiddle....

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Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson

That is exactly why the US government is pouring billions of dollars into alternate energy research, and many of these show tremendous promise. The price of hybrid cars is also coming down quickly, and every major US manufacturer now has a line of them. The big problem is that most of the world is doing absolutely nothing about it.

The reason that the cause is important is that only that will get the focus to pollution instead of man caused global warming, which doesn't exist. Again, it would be great if other countries would follow the lead in the pollution thing, too. I don't think that they will unless they have no choice. Hong Kong is still dumping the sewage of over 4 million people directly into the sea, for instance.

Also, if it really IS natural and comes from phases of the sun, there is likely very little we can do about it. The good part is that the temperature increase in the past 100 years has been 7 tenths of a degree. 2,000 years ago, the global climate was between 4 and 5 degrees hotter than it is today. People then didn't have a great deal of difficulty surviving, so at that rate, if anything really CAN be done about it, we have about 600 years to figure it out, just if it gets as hot as it was 2,000 years ago. That is assuming that we don't slip back into another ice age, as many scientists think is beginning to happen now.