Speaking of Iceland, perhaps the CO2 belching from their longships was what warmed the world of the Vikings enough to allow them to settle and prosper on the shores of Greenland a thousand years ago.
Somebody noted that Long Island is a [terminal] glacial moraine. Ten or so thousand years ago, native Americans could see a wall of ice a mile high at the Island's north shore. I don't believe that Shinnecock SUVs made that melt all the way back to the arctic ice cap.
Ah, the old "climate changed in the past, so what's different now?" argument. What is definitely different now is the vastly accelerated
rate of change. There are natural cycles of cold and warm periods, but nothing in the records (ice cores, tree rings, fossil deposits etc.) indicates anything like the pace of change we've seen in a single century or even 50 years. You don't need SUVs to explain the changes millennia ago to Long Island or Iceland, but you do need SUVs (and everything else we do) to explain what's going on now.
I am a scientist by profession; not a climate scientist but an astronomer. I cannot claim personal expertise on this topic but here's what I do claim: the scientific method works. If tens of thousands of scientists around the globe studying this area have formulated a consensus backed up by data, while a few hundred take the opposing view, I will trust the majority, because I trust the scientific method. And so should the citizenry of the world, because it is the only objective process they can trust in a matter like this.
This issue is most definitely a matter of politics. People like myself don't deny that the temperature is changing; we simply don't believe that giving more money to the government and allowing them to curtail our liberty will make the temperature stop changing.
Your liberty is curtailed in all sorts of ways already, for good reasons. You do not have liberty to murder your neighbour, or rape his wife, or poison his children's food and water. All that's changing now is a realisation that we don't have liberty to pollute the atmosphere that we all must share, any more than we have liberty to pollute the municipal water supply that we all must share.
"Government" has nothing to do with it. What you perceive as inalienable "liberties" are not being curtailed to appease some leftist lobby in Washington (I am assuming you are American by the clues you've left); they are being curtailed so that statistically, over time, fewer people will suffer and die in a climate characterised by extreme weather like the present Pakistani floods. Or maybe you don't care about
their lives and liberties?
