Well the debate over global warming is really heating up. Notice that I said debate, but I didn't say anything about global warming itself. I have talked about global warming in the past, but things have changed a little since then. Some of these guys are really getting hot under the collar whenever global warming is even mentioned. They are taking it as some sort of a personal insult. It has to make you wonder what is going on here? One scientist in particular, is just about ready to blow his cork when you blame humanity for it. He keeps screaming that what mankind is doing amounts to less than one 1/2 of 1% of the total discharge into the atmosphere. He talks about how the Earth has gone through this before and how it is caused by the multitude of volcanoes all around the world, spewing out all types of material and gases into the air. Well I guess he has a point about this, but I would love to know how he can say that the hundreds of millions of tons of waste coming out from those chimneys around the world are not making any difference? It does seem to insult our intelligence, doesn't it? There is no doubt that the world has been in and out of global warming situations many times before. Just a few hundred years ago there was a Little Ice Age that many people either don't know about, or tend to ignore.

It is a strange thing with global warming, it ultimately results in an Ice Age.The great Ice Age was ending about 15,000 years ago and took about another 7000 years or so more to finish this process. This completely changed the entire surface of the earth from what it was before. Much of the earth had been covered by ice, but after the Ice Age, the water level had risen over 300 feet. Can you imagine what would happen to us today if this happened again? I am not a scientist as you all know, but I do not think that the ocean could rise as high again, because I do not believe we have as much ice to melt as they did all those thousands of years ago. This is not to say that the rise in the height of the ocean would not be substantial, it certainly would be and it has begun to rise already and has covered some very low lying islands forcing their populations to go elsewhere. I believe that it is time for us, the world, to put more effort into trying to solve the problem, rather than having constant debates about how the problem is being caused. Rational people have to know that it makes no sense to pollute what you breathe or to poison what you drink .No matter what the cause of the problem is, we not only have to solve it, but we also have to clean up our act. Enough of this bickering between scientists, let's get on with a solution.

It's a shame when you think about it, we have all this technology at our fingertips, so we must be able to use some of it to solve our problem. Maybe we could put something into our atmosphere on purpose, that would help to clear it up or figure out a way to filter it. That would be a switch wouldn't it, actually doing something good for our air? Our poor atmosphere has been abused by us for several hundred years now, it is just a lucky thing that it happens to be very resilient. If it wasn't for this fact we all would have been dead a long time ago, along with most of the other life on this planet. It does make you wonder if other civilizations on other planets ever existed in places where their atmospheres weren't as forgiving as ours and maybe as they were developing they actually polluted themselves to death? .I don't know how anyone else feels about this idea, but I think you would have to admit that it may not be so far-fetched? On the other hand, maybe there were civilizations that polluted their atmospheres and were able to use their technology to undo the damage that they had done. Maybe they were even able to undo damage that was caused by nature? This is about where we are now, we need to undo the damage we have caused and the damage nature has caused.

When I think of all the money that this country has spent on just the Iraq war, I feel that if we could have just applied a portion of this to our global warming problem, we might have gotten much closer to a solution by now. Just think of the research that is done on new weapons technology and in your mind substitute global warming. Do you think that with all these huge companies at our disposal, we would have a chance of solving this problem? I can't help but think that we would. We have tremendous research capabilities in this world and if even half of them were applied to the global warming problem, I am sure that we could solve it, if we could get the countries of this planet to go along with the recommendations that are made. Ah and therein lies the fly in the ointment. There are many countries that will not want to stop their growth, which might become necessary in implementing global changes. It just so happens that the emerging economies absolutely need their growing consumer industrial complex. Even though the United States has lost much of its industry, it is still the world's leading polluter. We are one of the few countries in the world that have refused to go along with the Kyoto agreements which limit the amount of contaminants that can be dumped into the air. Our argument is that even though some countries say they are going along with it, they are not reducing exhausts at all and it is more honest to admit you don't want to go along with it, than to lie. I certainly don't think this is the way to proceed, it is not going to solve any problems, that is for sure.

I think we have to be realistic about this problem. Emerging industrial economies are not going to stop growing, because they are afraid of global warming. Huge economies that are already in place are not going to close down any of their operations either, because of global warming. So what does this leave us with? I think that it leaves us with the following problem, we have to figure out how to make exhausts clean, that means collecting enough money for research from all the industrial countries of the world and putting a crack team of scientists on the problem. At the same time we also have to figure out how to modify natural emissions from volcanoes and other sources. It seems to me that filtering our atmosphere might be the olny answer. At this point in history there probably hasn't been much funding in that area, because until recently, nobody ever thought of it as a global threat. Well it turns out that whatever happens with volcanoes anywhere in the world, could affect all of us in one way or another. .It is very simple really, if enough junk gets dumped into the atmosphere it can spread around the world blocking out sunlight, or in some instances heating the surface of the earth as the sunlight is reflected back from our atmosphere. One of the main ingredients that causes this problem is carbon dioxide. A forest has been found in Canada where the floor of the woods is completely covered with carbon, that is the direct result of carbon dioxide being drawn out of the atmosphere somehow by a reaction from the forest.

We have reached the point in human development where we now will have to pull together and stop thinking about blowing each other up. If some alien race was observing us, they would have to think that we are all total idiots on this planet, because we have given up what could be a really good life for everyone and put our resources into killing devices that really serve no purpose. Think of it this way, if none of the world's countries would have developed expensive weapons and military forces, .everybody would be busy building new structures, homes and businesses and enjoying life. They would be too busy all the time to war on anyone. Unfortunately for us, this is nothing more than a pipe dream, because profit is behind all wars and even governments make a fortune during wartime, unless they are the unfortunate losers of the war. Can we stop global warming? I don't have the answer to that question, but I do know one thing and that is we must try. Sitting back and denying global warming is a fool's game. It makes you wonder why we worry about some asteroid hitting us in the distant future, when we have a crisis going on right now that needs to be solved? We have to take care of our current problems before worrying about future ones