I'm sorry for you Millet. But that is your understanding and opinion, and I respect that. No amount of facts or reasons from mathematics, physics and chemistry will convincingly change that. After all, it takes close to 10% carbon dioxide concentration in the ambient air before it becomes lethal, and we are too far from that and perhaps if we burned all the earth's biological carbon at once, it will not even come close to 1/4 that amount. So I am not trying to convince you at all.

But the fact is, that the world is undergoing climatic change at an accelerated phase with evidences everywhere, from atmospheric weather pattern changes to spread of animal and plant diseases, the massive species extinctions and melting of polar ice caps and glaciers among others. It doesn't need to be defined as global warming but no one can redefine the meaning of global climatic changes.

1.5 C per 100 years is fairly fast for temperature change on a geological scale, but the vast majority of fossil fuel that was burned happened in the past 50 years. The perdictions for change in the next 100 years range from 3 to 5 C. That rate of change is far greater than in the past and more than many plants and animals can adapt to.

Again--bottom line--what is wrong with conservation?

I would say 1.5 C over a period of 100 years is as close to nothing as your going to get. Very normal.

Before we become overly excited about global warming, let us examine some scientific findings.
We hear much about loss of glaciers. Yes, glacial shortening is occurring; however, such shortening began in the early 1800s, long before the great increase after about 1940 in fossil fuel use. More significantly, the rate of increase in shortening has remained nearly constant from early 1800 to the present. No significant rate change occurred after 1940.

The same trend is noted in sea level rise. Yes, we see some rise, the rise starting about 1800 and continuing at nearly a steady rate to the present with, again, no significant change after 1940.

Finally if we examine U.S. surface temperatures, we see a rise from about 1900 to 1940 followed by a drop until the 1970s, then another rise to the present. Yes, some temperature increase is occurring, but the temperature changes since 1900 correlate REMARKABLY with changes in solar activity.

A strong case can be made that sea level and glacier changes are not related to increase in C02 emissions and that solar activity plays an important role in temperature changes since 1900.

Glacial melting has been going on since the end of the Ice Age over 10,000 years ago, but that does not mean that we are not increasing the rate of warming.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_temperature_record

Sea level has been rising for the same period and it has been even higher in past warm periods, by more than 100 ft. Again, that doesn't mean that the rate of sea level rise will not increase even more if we increase the warming and it does not mean that those living on the coast will not be affected sooner than they would if we try to reduce CO2 emissions.

The amount of radiation we get from the sun is affected by a number of things. Changes in the orbit of the earth around the sun are what causes the warm interglacial periods--that has been known for some time and is know as the Milankovitch cycle --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycle

But one of the other factors that increases the radiation we keep is CO2 along with other greenhouse gasses. It is increasing at an exponential rate and will exceed 1000 ppm in the atmosphere by the end of this century without change in what we are putting into the atmosphere. Even before the concern over global warming CO2 was considered one of the factors that helped explain the Milankovitch cycle during periods when solar forcing did not.

For the record, here is a site with a graph of temperature over the past 2000 years reconstructed from a variety of sources including glacial legnths. As you can see a rate of 1.5 C/100 yrs is fairly fast. The predicted rate of 3 to 5 C/100 yrs will be unprecedented.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/pastcc.html#rates

Gentlemen, I am no longer going to respond to these type of postings now or in the future. By the non response to this subject from the general membership, I can tell that there is no interest. Ninety-nine percent of the participation to this thread has been Joe Real, Skeet and myself. I regret I have been apart of dragging this subject on and on and on and on. I'm sure long ago it has become quite boring to all the other members. I do not think these type of postings are beneficial to a citrus forum.

Thanks for the link to that graph Skeeter-it sure is pretty convincing IMHO. If this rapid temperature shift continues it will likely have many repercussions that we are presently unaware of.The various greenhouse gases are one of the factors that certainly contribute to this shift-especially interesting is methane.Dr.Jeff Chanton here at FSU-
http://ocean.fsu.edu/faculty/chanton/chanton.html has carried out some interesting research on this gas.

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Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, 26 times as strong as carbon dioxide. Yet its lifetime in the atmosphere is only 10 years, compared to the 100 year lifetime of CO2. I think we can attach the problem of human production of greenhouse gases by reducing methane emissions to the atmosphere. Landfills are a point source of methane. I'm working with the FSU/FAMU college of engineering to design landfill cover soils which will promote the growth of methane consuming bacteria.

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My colleagues and I are looking at permafrost decomposition in the northern boreal zone. What happens when frozen soils melts? We're finding enhanced methane production and rooting out its causes. I've also been fascinated with the way methane is transported from wetlands. Turns out that the vegetation can play a huge role in this. We also use stable isotopes and radiocarbon to examine the ways that methane is produced.

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At the high pressures found on the seafloor, methane and water form an ice-like compound called a gas hydrate. Some estimate that these deposits may be a large reservoir of fossil fuel which could be mined. With colleagues at the University of Mississippi, the University of North Carolina and Woods Hole Oceanographic, I am working to establish a sea floor observatory to monitor gas hydrate sea floor stability.

I know Dr Chanton-- mainly from some of his work in Florida Bay. I was also just reading about the influence of methane on one of the past abrupt changes in climate.

"About 55 million years ago, the earth underwent an abrupt climate change known as the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum (LPTM), recently renamed the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) (Kennett and Stott, 1991; Dickens et al., 1995; Dickens, 1999; Norris and Röhl, 1999; Bains et al., 1999). Against the backdrop of an already warm climate with reduced pole-equator temperature contrasts, bottom water temperatures increased by 4-6°C (Thomas and Shackleton, 1996), and high-latitude surface temperatures by 4-8°C, over 10-20 kyr (Norris and Röhl, 1999). Thirty to fifty per cent of benthic foraminifera went extinct (Thomas and Shackleton, 1996). The suite of dramatic global changes inferred for the LPTM includes increased aridity in subtropical latitudes and increased high-latitude precipitation (Robert and Maillot, 1990; Schmitz et al., 2001).

At the onset of the LPTM warming, marine and terrestrial carbon isotope values exhibit a negative shift of at least 2.5 per mil (Norris and Röhl, 1999). The only known sources for this quantity and composition of carbon today are the vast reserves of natural gas hydrate in oceanic, deep lake and polar sediments and the free methane gas trapped beneath hydrate deposits. Methane hydrate is a solid complex of methane and water that is stable only at low temperatures and high pressures, such as found in sediment of the mid-depth and deep ocean. The carbon isotope signature during the LPTM is indicative of massive destabilization of marine methane hydrates (Dickens et al., 1995); it is estimated that 1,200-2,000 gigatons of methane gas were released."