We should replace the term "global warming".....

...with the real problem, global pollution. As long as the polluters frame the arguement with their specious parsing of words we will never bring them to heel.

to dumb it down for the corporate types.

that might make the corporations take notice

aka, DIE.

That might wake people up.

excellent post herbster

That's why I admire Kucinich and feel our lives just might depend on a Gore Presidency becoming a reality.

The other candidates don't seem to treat the issue very seriously, imho. They give it lip service like it's just another "special interest" and talk about vague long range goals for reducing this or that...

Since there just isn't any way Kucinich is getting elected, we need Gore. Desperately.

So far I see no one changing their behavior. It's something I've tried bringing up, to great protest and denial. Everyone is looking all over the place for someone to blame. And it's US. IT IS US!

How dare anyone talk about not doing. Not having that child. Not going on that vacation. Not driving to the store three times a day. Start getting specific, and everything goes out the window. Suddenly I'm the bad guy.

I decided this morning that I was going to start ignoring the whole issue from now on out. But I just cannot do that.

In fact, if anyone really wants to know, it's no different than why we are in our present political dilemma today. America deserves Bush. See what I mean? Your alarms all went off again. And until the alarm bells stop, and people realize that it's US who are the ones making the decisions and changes, we'll stop looking outside of ourselves for the answers.

Instead of going on with examples to clarify this, I'll leave it at that. I won't talk about the 50 guys from my bicycling forum who just traveled all the way around the world to go on a wonderful bike ride together. It's not about that, is it? That was just them. That was just a thing that everyone should do. How dare I be so insensitive.

And despite Al Gore's claim that we all can make a difference, and we can of course and should, the problem will NOT be solved in time without radical and sweeping legislation and regulation of the main source of global pollution, fossil based fuel burning. Factories spewing ash and smoke into the air daily, 400 million cars for 300 million people, the continued destruction of the greatest absorber of CO2, OUR FUCKING TREES. Did I mention that hemp could save the world?

It's more of a relentless desire to control all life, as directly as possible, to fit the narrow wants of a single species.

people get really confused by the "warming" part of global warming and assume it would be hot all the time argh.

I think that the only people who are really in denial over the reality or the cause of climate change are the fundamentalists, who think that the rapture is coming and it doesn't matter, and the truly mud-dumb Freepers, who parrot whatever they're told by Fox. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the neocons and their corporate allies know full well the realities of global warming, and root it on. That Pentagon report that came out a few years ago, about the worldwide calamities that climate change will cause -- that's a wet dream for them, unstable Third World countries. Because it means (1) more places to conquer, and (2) more places to deem terrorist states and threats to the sheeple.

All the doomsday scenarios in the world of coastal flooding and displaced people mean nothing to them. Telling them they should think about their grandchildren means nothing to them. They know that they will have castles on mountaintops, with all the climate-control equipment they need, with first dibs on the food products, etc.

some parts of the globe will become warmer, others colder, some more rainy, others more dry. Ocean currents and the jet stream may change. It's going to be extremely complicated and to simply say "global warming" is a little too vague. The process, by the way, is irreversible. Fighting it is simply a waste of time. Instead, we should prepare to face the challenges presented by it and learn how to prevent further industrialization in the developing world.

Just as changes in the global heat engine changed North Africa from tropical forest to desert, just as ice ages have come and gone, whatever major climate shift we stimulate (or have stimulated) will be a genie that won't go back in the bottle. The system might settle down at some new equilibrium short of that of Venus, but it won't "go back". The question is how far it will go based on what we have ALREADY done, & how fast can we slow our continued contribution. Nobody can predict that definitively. The one unassailable fact is that if we reduce our changing of the atmospheric content, our influence will be lessened, which would be good.

Is it right to say that because the western world's contribution to greenhouse gasses has been so large they don't get the opportunity to industrialize. The developed world should bare the most significant portion of the cost associated with fighting global warming given that we are the main source of the problem.

Yeah, we screwed it up so badly that no one else gets a turn. But I doubt that we have the balls to actually make the sort of threats we'd have to make to even slow the process down even a little. If we really wanted to do anything... all industry in China would have to immediately stop. We'd have to absolutely halt all non-zero emissions petrochemical burning and so on. It's utterly pointless to pretend that we can do anything useful. We can't. No amount of recycled grocery store bags is going to save the world. The world is fucked.

Given that we do depend on certain constants and predictibility in climate and weather - agriculture and all of that . . .

Prior to An Inconvenient Truth, a lot of people ignored the issue because of the misinformation that was out there... The thought process was something like, "Oh, what's wrong with the air warming up a degree or two?" Now people realize that it's not that simple and not that benign, that the real impact of it will be ridiculously abnormal weather, since the patterns that climatologists and meteorologists have depended on are changing so dramatically.

One huge, devastating, and horribly under-reported story is the growing disaster in the Southeast. I have family there and they're in a horrific drought. Foot-deep cracks in the ground. Small-scale family farmers are having to declare bankruptcy because nothing will grow. It's so bad that a lot of people there are hoping for a hurricane strike this year. Funnily enough, gradual desertification of that region is exactly what's been predicted to happen.

that communicate the most with the fewest words. :yourock:

term, "Global Climate Change", since reading about it on DU months ago.

that needs to be discussed in an isolated fashion. While the consequences of most other forms of pollution are more local, greenhouse gasses are truly global issue. There is no additional harm done to a country if the emissions come from that country then there would be if they came from another country. In this sense private incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are almost nonexistent especially if production and consumption possibilities related to the emissions would just end up being transferred to other countries. Therefore unlike other pollution issues a global approach to reducing emissions is absolutely critical.

Another reason why climate change should be discussed separately from other forms of pollution is that the effects of greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide are not as directly detrimental to our health as other pollutants are. This means that in the absence of direct discussion of climate change, governments and individuals would probably be more inclined to ignore the problem of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. As one of the most important global issues of our time the implications that arise out of this cannot be overstated.