How stupid people can elect someone like Imhofe to be a senator is beyond me. I guess the whole state of Oklahoma is ignorant and stupid.

Another question is why does Oklahoma have two Senators, when states like California, Texas, and New York have two? Inhofe is just another loony right winger from the hinterland. Anyone wonder why climate legislation is being held up despite the similar predictions of thousands of scientists worldwide?

Average global temperature, along with average global atmospheric CO2 levels, are at historic lows. Of course they're increasing... these things are cyclical.

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/ClimateChange/images/temp_co2_hist.jpg

Erich,

"Historic" refers to recorded history, so your statement is obviously wrong. The important question is: what would the world be like with a 10 deg C rise in average global temperature? There is no question that much of the presently-populated areas would become uninhabitable.

Two questions for you: 1) If you had splitting headaches and seizures, would you call a radio repairman or a neurologist with lots of letters after his name?
If the latter, maybe you had better listen to what the vast majority of climate scientists are trying to tell you, instead of to the hacks in the pay of Exxon-Mobile et al.

2) What would it take to convince you to accept the global warming paradigm? If the answer is (as I suspect) "nothing", then you are just another ignorant ideologue.

Man-made "global warming" and man-made "climate change" are hoaxes used to institute cap and trade taxes, which are already being collected in Ireland. It is nothing but fraud that politicians and bureaucrats use to stuff their bank accounts with. If you believe that you should pay a tax to help "prevent" something that's completely natural, then you are their victim.

It may not be obvious from here, but the Sun is one million times bigger than Earth. There's your source of global warming and climate change, all wrapped up into one package. Problem is, politicians can't tax the Sun. They can't tax volcanoes either, which release vast amounts of CO2, much more than man ever has.

Cap & trade has nothing to do with climate change anymore than Obamacare has anything to do with our health. It has everything to do with governments growing bigger, more powerful, and collecting more and more money to support their corrupt operations with, while bankrupting and eliminating the middle class at the same time.

If we refuse to get serious about global warming, then redesigning urban areas and public health programs to accommodate it is like putting a bandage on a cancer. At the rate we're going, the graph of human population growth will soon look like a bell curve as a large scale die-off of humans and other animals occurs. And you can bet that any Republicans among the survivors will still be blaming Democrats for the disaster.

There's nothing to be frightened of, True Patriot. The Sun is simply more active now, but also, Earth does not go around it in a perfectly circular orbit.

I don't know what the Southern Hemisphere's summer was like six months ago, but I suspect it was cooler than usual because our winter here was, too. Most likely Earth was further away from the Sun six months ago than it is now, resulting in cooler weather.

We are going through another warming phase which will continue until the Sun becomes less active again. Much of it also depends upon Earth's distance from the Sun. If Earth is far away while the Sun is less active, we can expect cool summers and blisteringly cold winters, but still well within the norms for life.

It's got nothing to do with what we're doing, and we cannot change what Mother Nature does. Global warming and cooling are natural events. We're just in another warming phase right now, part of the warming and cooling phases that Earth has gone through for untold millions of years. Don't worry, we'll be fine.

Normally I'd say screw Sen. Jim Inhofe AND his grandchildren. But it's hot here in Iowa and I am miserable! I turned down a gig in FLA a few years ago because I hate oppressive heat/humidity. Now it's here, too.

to the "Man-Made Global Warming" post: nice try, except to fail to note that what is happening ISN'T 'natural' ~ but JUST to entertain your 'argument', even if it IS natural, everything we've ever known about how to grow crops, produce food, etc. WILL go right out the window, and most of mankind is BY NO FEASIBLE MEANS prepared to live in the kind of world we're helping to create NOW. If you don't care about your kids, and you REALLY don't care about your grandkids, then ignore this thread...

Nice try yourself (Anon post @ 22:28) but I see you fail to attempt to explain why it isn't natural.

What is happening now *is* completely natural. Global warming and cooling has been happening for hundreds of millions of years, and you can't mess with Mother Nature.

You're just too pigheaded to understand that politicians, bureaucrats and scientists are lying to you in their obviously successful attempt to extract more money from you.

If Earth grows warmer, so be it. Earth will grow cooler again, too, and then you ignorants will start screaming about how we have to "do" something about global cooling, when there's nothing to be done about it!

There's nothing we can do about it except learn how to grow food again, whatever nature throws at us.

Hmm no doubt MikeUK is one among the 144,000

Amazing that some folks can be so willfully ignorant about the mechanics of climate change, a phenomenon that has been understood and predicted for decades. And the predictions are coming true. Yes, there have been natural cycles of warming a cooling but this time is different because human population and activity (the industrial age) has increased to the point where it can and does drastically affect the environment and atmosphere. The mechanism is quite simple to understand, actually, and has nothing to do with politicians trying to sell us snake oil. Climate change disbelievers will be going along for the ride whether they believe it or not.

Sun, 08/15/2010 - 21:03 — Anonymous (not verified)

>It is Congressmen that are apportioned according to population. The House of Representatives has 435 Congressmen. This number may have changed since the taking of the 2010 Census. The presiding officer is the Speaker of the House.<

The membership of the House was fixed at 435 members in 1911.

There are so many things wrong with the deniers' dogma that global warming isn't happening or isn't man made. I have room for only a couple.

The argument that it is "cyclical" shows absolute ignorance of how the world works. They use the word as if it were somehow magical. But in the real world, things happen for a reason and if they repeat, there is something driving that repetition such as a feedback. In this case it is only "cyclical" if you look at hundreds of thousands of years, but we are looking at a few decades, quite a difference.

To try to explain that it is "completely natural" without actually having any data to back that up is also indicative of ignorance. We're talking decades, not hundreds of thousands of years. And to claim that you can't mess with Mother Nature is equally foolish because there are so many instances of people actually doing that. Here are just a few: erosion from poor farming practices, ocean dead zones from over fertilization, catastrophic floods from levees breaking, dead forests from acid rain, extinction of countless species of plants and animals from numerous man made causes, catastrophic forest fires from fire suppression that allows fuel buildup, hormonal effects from the dissemination of estrogenic compounds in the environment, increased cancer rates from pollution and increased radioactivity (DU), destruction of marshes from dredging and channeling, ...

Against stupidity, even the gods contend in vain. - early Greek observation

The main reason we are stuck with Coburn and Inhoff here in Oklahoma is the conservative owned media does not have any memory, investigate anything or question anything he/they do.

Inhoff has long been owned by big oil and big pharma who fund his "Aw Shucks" good-ol-boy campaigns to super saturate the air waves. When he was Mayor of Tulsa he "Privatized" the street department: now we have over 2 billion $ of accumulated deferred maintenance since.

No one follows thru his voting record; as all good Republicans we know what he's against - and he doesn't make a point to say what hes for beyond God, family and country. Football, baseball, and golf have much more coverage and analysis.

In the land of the 900ft Jesus, the Mammon worshipers rule: Jesus forgives - the state doesn't. Nothing short of Inhoff killing kittens, running a grade school prostitution ring and selling meth out of his office would prevent that demon from being re-elected and if he was caught he would just blame the democrats.

If the Ku Kluxer Inhofe and his repulsive family (subhuman filth that they are) were wrong about the cold spell's proving global cooling, can we really take a heat wave as proof of global warming?

Global phenomena are validated by global data. If there is some reason why the current heat wave (as opposed to last winter's cold snap) has global implications, this should be laid out in a scientifically respectable manner, preferably by 1) an actual scientist who has conducted 2) peer-reviewed, published research that 3) bears on the points under discussion (your neighborhood nuclear physicist won't do).

Otherwise, it's just weather, which--as everyone knows--is bound to fluctuate, leading to a lot of pointless pseudo-debate about nothing.

It's amazing how so many people learn a little bit about what affects the earth's climate and then think they know more than the scientists who have been investigating it full time for many years! Where does that arrogance come from?

For example, solar activity does affect global temperature, but not that much compared to greenhouse gases, not even nearly as much as El Nino. And orbital cycles last many thousands of years, not a few years.

Listen, you might have very good reasons for not trusting the federal government, but this isn't coming from the federal government. In fact, the Bush administration did everything it could to suppress what the scientists were discovering. But scientists all over the world are all coming to the same general conclusion, when testing it in many different ways.

This is real, there is really no doubt about that now, except among people who have irrational reasons for doubting. The only uncertainty now is how bad it will get and how quickly. But uncertainty goes both ways, so it is just as likely to be worse than the scientists are saying as better.

If you really care about the world, about life, about your descendants, then you have an obligation to either learn the science, so that you can intelligently debate the facts and their implications, or stop spreading your ignorance. Really! You may not realize it, but you are doing great harm to the entire world. By spreading misinformation from the fossil fuel companies and their allies, you are guaranteeing your descendants will live in a world with much more suffering, if they live at all.

Sun, 08/15/2010 - 20:40 — RCoats (not verified) "Erich, 'Historic' refers to recorded history, so your statement is obviously wrong."
historic - adjective
1. well-known or important in history: a historic building; historic occasions.
2. of, pertaining to, treating, or characteristic of history or past events: historical records; historical research.
3. based on or reconstructed from an event, custom, style, etc., in the past: a historical reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg.
4. having once existed or lived in the real world, as opposed to being part of legend or fiction or as distinguished from religious belief: to doubt that a historical Camelot ever existed; a theologian's study of the historical Jesus.
5. narrated or mentioned in history; belonging to the past.
6. noting or pertaining to analysis based on a comparison among several periods of development of a phenomenon, as in language or economics.

and
"What would it take to convince you to accept the global warming paradigm?"

Why should I accept what I know is not true? Every bit of evidence that man is causing global warming is equally valid as evidence of natural warming. You can't look at a shrinking glacier and derive from the it the root cause of the shrinkage. And don't get me started on the climate models... I've got 30 years' experience in software development.

In order to model a physical system, you need, at a bare minimum, the following:
1) Knowledge of every variable that contributes to the system (we don't have this regarding the climate).
2) Knowledge of EXACTLY how every variable affects every other variable, and EXACTLY how every combination of variables affects every other combination of variables (we don't have this regarding the climate).
3) The EXACT initial state of each variable (we don't have this regarding the climate).

Climate models are pointless, as we will never have all the above info. To take a useless model, then claim that every bit of evidence that the Earth is warming (it has to be either cooling or warming... climate never stays the same) proves AGW because the models say that man's activity will
produce that result, is nothing short of fraud, especially when the models are created specifically to show warming trends.
Google: cargo cult science