“Imagine melting polar icecaps and rising sea levels, threatening highly developed coastal areas...?

Question

Imagine a warmer and wetter world in which infectious diseases such as malaria and yellow fever spread more easily…(this is not) science fiction; it is sober prediction, based on the best science available” (UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan).

Do statements like these make YOU for the planet?

Why don't we care enough to care personally?

Why don't we feel a parental responsibility to mother nature?

I think we should be worried ...

Answer 1

Imagine, now, that it is a cyclic event that happens every 125,000 years and, as such, there is nothing you can do about it. Doesn't a data-verified statement like that anwer all of your questions? I think you should be worried, too.

You people crack me up.

Answer 2

What's that you say, Kofi Annan just bought a bunch of Ciba-Geigy.?

Answer 3

Well we won't have to imagine it for to much longer, I saw a report today that said the Antarctic ice is melting much faster than the scientists thought.

Answer 4

OMG!  how many days do I have to get ready, I hope this won't happen this week because I only live 13ft above sea level! Oh wait, that's right this will take hundreds or thousands of years.  Thank God! now I have time to move if necessary. The rates of heating we will go through, even at the most extreme will allow for even the slowest land creature to move out of the way of the impending floods. Biff on the coast of Cali may have to move to a new multimillion dollar mansion, I don't feel too bad for him, that is the risk of building on the coast. Some poor guy in a little hut on some third world rock may have to remind his grandchildren how to build a new one ten feet away, but they will probably be a industrialized resort nation by then and his country will probably have taken his land for a new resort.  As far as wetter world, there are many folks in the Sahara and Arizona that will not mind that so much. I hope we can adjust, after all we only have several hundred years to get ready.

Answer 5

No, I imagine the earth locked in the frozen grip of death of the next ice age for 100,000 years.  I don't understand why anyone is concerned about global warming, when based on the earth's history an ice age is more likely and more devastating to our civilization.

Answer 6

Worried about what?  It sounds like mother nature will have her sweet revenge.

Answer 7

Its about a CARBON TAX  on YOU Higer Gas Higher Food and Electric so they can build Nuclear a clean carbon foot print  

   January 2008  

   News   Politics   Business   Science   Culture   Sports   Environment   Weather  

Ice returns as Greenland temps plummet



  

Residents insist Greenland's freezing temperatures don't mean global warming has been called off



While the rest of Europe is debating the prospects of global warming during an unseasonably mild winter, a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland.

On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade.

'The ice is up to 50cm thick,' said Henrik Matthiesen, an employee at Denmark's Meteorological Institute who has also sailed the Greenlandic coastline for the Royal Arctic Line. 'We've had loads of northerly winds since Christmas which has made the area miserably cold.'

Matthiesen suggested the cold weather marked a return to the frigid temperatures common a decade ago.

Temperatures plunged to -25°C earlier this month, clogging the bay with ice and making shipping impossible for small crafts, according to Anthon Frederiksen, the mayor of the town of Ilulissat, where Disko Bay is located.

'On the other hand, it's an advantage for fishermen who rely on dogsleds for transportation,' Frederiksen said.

The mayor cautioned against thinking that the freezing temperature indicated that global warming claims were overblown. He noted that a nearby glacier had retracted more in the past two decades than in recorded history.

'We Greenlanders have acclimated to changing conditions over the past 1100 years,' said Frederiksen. 'Temperatures change at regular intervals.'

Although Greenland's capital, Nuuk, and much of the island saw temperatures drop below -25° C yesterday, milder temperatures appeared to be on the way in the near future.

Answer 8

life's too short, it not up to me to worry, i pay my taxes and the gov do the worrying!!

Answer 9

According to the IPCC reports we must reduce the world wide output of Carbon Dioxide to less than one tenth of what they are today if we are to have any chance at all of stopping Global Warming.

That is an enormous reduction.

We would have to stop the use of fossil fuel world wide to generate electricity, with no exceptions for developing countries.. That will cut our carbon dioxide emissions by half.

Next we would have to ban the use of fossil fuels for all transportation.

Next we would have to ban the use of fossil fuels for heating homes, offices and factories.

Next we would have to ban the use of fossil fuels for all cooking and heating of hot water.

That still will not get us all the way to one tenth but it will get us to about one fifth of what the world wide. carbon dioxide emissions are today.  

The big challenge will be getting all of the nations of the world including the poor and developing nations to go along with this.

Answer 10

Icecaps melting?  It's appears the sea ice (ice forming over oceans) is melting from warmer waters - not warmer air.

Ice in water will NOT increase sea levels!!  The water comes from the oceans in storms and deposits as ice & snow on the oceans.

Hasn't your teachers taught you that ice (expanded frozen water) is 90% underwater and will not increase water levels?

Diseases will come from major cooling - as in the Wolfe Minimum - where over 25 million died:

http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaun...

"Wolfe Minimum  1280 A.D. to 1350 A.D.

This period of low sunspot activity was the first following the Medieval Warming Period. This was also a time of disease, and the Bubonic plague which killed more than 25,000,000 people. The spread of the plague was worsened by people staying in their homes due to the cold. Rats, whose fleas carried the bacteria, were attracted to the warm homes."

So be more concerned about a 'blank sun' creating another ice age!!   http://www.spaceweather.com/

Sea levels are increasing about 6" per century because we are still coming out of an ice age  and the glaciers have been slowly melting for thousands of years.

The real statistics!:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index....

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index....

Answer 11

i agree. the ice caps is the one thing that is trying to maintain a suitable climate by absorbing heat in its mealting process. after that is gone. the climate of earth will flungtuate violantely untill a new ballance is obtain. how does that ballance look? we shall see only after the destain 3 years have past. drought will be one of them for sure.............

Answer 12

You and the rest of us are right to be worried. Make no mistake, global warming is the biggest thing since sliced bread! Yeah, sure its happened before, but humans were around the last time. The effect on 5 or 6 billion people is going to be huge if we all don't do more to reduce producing greenhouse gasses. Some major changes in lifestyle are going to be required over the coming decades, starting NOW!!

Good luck - we're going to need it!!

Answer 13

some people have other things to worry about. think about it, others are too busy with their lives because theyre desperate for money. do u actually think they'll hav time to think of the planet?

we're all pretty much too caught up with our lives.

but i am worried for the planet and do my best in saving it

Answer 14

The planet is not in any danger. It has been warm and wet, cold and dry, completely frozen and mostly molten many times before, and will be again. It's only our way of life that is threatened!

There is no 'Mother nature'!!

No cosmic balance, no earth spirit, just us!

Answer 15

Imagine a question that is not a poorly disguised rant.

Answer 16

We don't feel a parental responsibility to Mother Nature because she is OUR mother. And people often abuse the love they have for their parents.

I am very much for the planet. It's the only one we have like this, and I highly doubt we'll find another before we leech the nutrients out of this one. I think that people who believe that we have no effect on the earth are ignorant. Everything that will ever be done will have an effect on something, or someone.

I hate it when people don't stop and think that we are not the only ones who inhabit this world. What about animals? Animals are important to keeping this world in a careful balance, and not just domesticated ones. We can't pick and choose on the animals we allow to live or die. We need them for food, and the ones we eat for food need food, sometimes other animals. If we think we can survive in any situation, what about other living organisms?

Some people do care enough personally. Some people do act on their beliefs. But we ALL need to work together to make a difference. And if there are people who refuse to acknowledge the FACTS that we DO have an effect on our environment, then we may never reverse what we have begun.

I'm not saying that global warming is proven fact, that is still theory. The cause and effect of pollution can however be proven. Pollution releases things into the atmosphere that are bad, and we breathe them in, and they affect our breathing. How hard is that to realize?

We should be very worried. And it is unbelievably sick and disgusting how many people brush such articles off so quickly.

The Earth is more than our dumpster, it is a home with other living beings in it. We have to learn to take care of it and share it.

Answer 17

My suit will protect me!

Answer 18

yea, me too

Answer 19

there was record amount of snow and ice at the south pole last year

Answer 20

Yes!!! These statement make me for the planet!!!

We should care enough to care personally.

We should take responsibility for our home, mother earth.

Yes, we should be very concerned!!!

Now that we know we are effecting global change on our tiny planet, we have to work quickly to see what, if anything we can do. Scientists have stated recently that there is a good chance it may be too late to do anything, that we were merely the catalyst to the changes we are beginning to see now. Others who study the sun have said that recent and projected activity on the sun could actually lead to a cooler planet in the near future, so global warming might just be a welcome thing. So with several very different factors at work in the world, it can become less clear exactly what we need to do. Since scientists and engineers have invented so many gadgets over the past few centuries, you would think a simple device could be created that filters out the right amount of carbon in the machines that burn fossil fuel, so that the carbon could be prevented from going into the atmosphere. Imagine, just another gadget to stick on our vehicles and factories to save the planet to prevent overheating our little home in space. Does this sound like a plan?

I think you are right, we should try to preserve our planet, if we can. Taking responsibility for our polluting actions would be would be no more difficult and no greater an endeavor than anything we have created so far.

And we should have a healthy concern for our environment, since, planet earth is the first and only home we have, and our houses can exist only because there is a planet for them to be built on.

Answer 21

To the people who say this has happened before dont pay attention to what has happened before. Example as the ice ages have come and gone the oxygen levels have diminshed, proof of this is the species size at the time, 100,000,000 years ago creatures were gargantuan due to heavy oxygen levels, creatures needed huge diaphrams to process these levels and as oxygen levels have been depleting over time so have the species size to the point organisms will be eradicated by the earth and eventually become a barren waste land. So to you people who say we can not do anything about it your wrong we can and we must to survive otherwise we will be living in a bubble, trying to manufacture our own oxygen levels, but without tress we will die like everything else. Every creature has its role in the cycle of life by depleting one we destroy a part of the cycle. Plant a hard wood tree, as they are the main source of oxygen.

Why is there no concern about the wealthfair of the planet? simply because people are to worried about the next buck, only the minority care. The deserts of the world are growing at a tremendous rate, increasing the temperature continuosly. How can we stop this? planting hard wood trees, saying no to private transport and yes to public transport, saying no to fossil fuels and yes to solar power, there are so many alternatives that corporate bodies shun because it is in direct competition with them. Oil cartels are the biggest culprits, backed by government politics on a world wide scale. That industry alone is worth in the trillions so an alternative fuel to oil would cripple there local economies even though we are doing right by the earth and our future children. Money is the bain of our existance and always will be until the point governments acknowledge this.