Heat?!?
 

Are these numbers real? If so, why isn't this an international emergency?

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/Jef...s/article.html

I did my part by enjoying the unseasonably nice weather while walking the dog.

Global warming is old news, and is an international emergency.

Yeah, it's unseasonable. It's march and some people are already using their air conditioning.

One spell of freak hot weather doesn't have any empirical link with global warming.

Yes. One spell of warm weather does not prove global warming, nor does a spell of cool weather disprove it.

That said, global warming is old news, and is an international emergency that we are absolutely failing to address sufficiently.

True, Plugsy, but if the USGS and other scientists are correct in their warnings, things are getting hotter. Average earth temps are rising, manmade or not, and we're overdue for an ice age, which could possibly occur after the salinity of the Gulf Stream and the ocean loop through the Atlantic change, bringing less warm water to the north. Heck, you've already read about all that stuff, sorry. I was a disbeliever in global warming for many years, but now I'm not so sure. Certainly the beginning of 2012 and the heat records don't make it a surefire calamity right around the corner, but the preponderance of rougher hurricane seasons and tornadic winds scare me a little.

One spell of hot weather? The western hemisphere has been dowsed in record heat for as long as I can remember. Remember summer 2011? Hottest on record. 2010? Second hottest on record. Hell, the hottest years in recorded history have been the last ten.

Why people still play this little game of "it's not happening" is beyond me.

I still haven't seen any convincing evidence for global warming.

Thing is, I also think that "Is global warming happening?" is the wrong question to ask.

The right question is, "Should we do something about it?" No matter how sure you are about your answer to the first question, you could be wrong, and you have to factor that possibility into your answer to the second question. So consider the matrix of possibilities:

	It's not happening	It's happening
We do something	Wasted money*	Averted catastrophe (hopefully)
We do nothing	No problems	Global devastation

Yes, I know that oversimplifies things. The weighting on each column isn't necessarily the same, depending on whether you think it's happening or not. But you'll need incredibly strong evidence against global warming before you can ignore that bottom right cell, because its consequences are so grave. It outweighs the other cells entirely.

* Also we have to spend the money sooner or later anyway because fossil fuels are nonrenewable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming has enough credible sources

If you are looking for a simple experiment => evidence => conclusions story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm