One can say these things, "ice comes and goes", and it is true.
One could then be brave enough to say it happens for reasons.
The data seems to plainly show that human release of 300 million years worth of solar power in the form of fixed carbon utilization in a mere 100 years is having an impact.
There are the environmental types that speak almost of a self-hate for humanity. I am not one of those. Similarly, I am not embarrassed of human action (something it seems the environmental left and the conservative right seem to be, the left through abhorrence, the right through denial).
This change is real, and we are causing it. Life causes change, that my life and those like me have caused changed is not the moral problem to me that it is for those on the far left(some sort of guilt) or the far right (some sort of denial, seems like the same guilt in the end).
I consider myself a member of a highly successful species, bloody hell, its hard to imagine I do not cause change.
I believe the mission is to adapt to, understand, and ultimately accommodate change.
It is what we have been doing for 6 million, or 6 thousand years, depending on ones interpretation of the evidence.
I don't fear change, I simply believe it should be seen for what it is and responded to accordingly.
Personally, I think big efforts to cut CO2 (e.g.) by 1% or 5% or 10% or whatever are a huge waste of resources. This is trying to push back against 300 million years of solar fixed carbon we have already released.
It seems to me it would be a better use of resources to focus on what the change is, what it will mean, and how to best adapt to and accommodate it.
It is at once tragic that the right so busy arguing there is no such thing and the left is so busy thinking if cars got a little cleaner we could roll back the clock.
It is there. It is real. There are precipices of change that are catastrophic, so if there are such things that we can understand and reasonably avert, well then, by all means, do so. Stalling of the Atlantic treadmill, e.g, would be stunning to say the least, biblical scale change in a remarkably short period of time. It seems to me the money is best spent determining if such a thing will happen, what the criteria are, what the result would be, and what one might reasonably be able to do to either prevent or accommodate such a circumstance. My understanding is that it would make walking from Scotland to Norway easy, albeit on ice, that oddly as modeled, global warming would drop that neck of the woods into a deep freeze.
While you are running a tad amok with the Iceland Greenland thing, the fact is that global currents and such definitely make those place warmer than one would expect (and have varied in that respect over time).
When it gets to crazy things like cap and trade (which is crazy), I'm o.k. with it because of the innovation and development of sustainable use that would come of it. Mostly for the wrong reasons (or at least for different reasons than the global carbon counters claim), but innovation nevertheless.
There are only so many ways to push a rock up a hill, and of those ways we have only well developed one of them.
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