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Originally Posted by Ramona_A_Stone
Like I've said before, we should consider that there's a parallel to the 'conclusion' of Pascal's Wager, and I firmly believe we should heed it.
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So in other words, in the battle between you and the universe, bet on the universe.
Not that I think there really is a battle between humanity and mother nature, but I agree that we are the stewards of this planet and we should take care of it for future generations. That makes it our responsibility to understand the inner workings of the geological, meteorological, and ecological systems of the Earth while understanding that we are an inextricable part of all those systems. Until we fully understand those things the least we can do is try not to make things worse and leave this world at least as livable as we found it.
As of yet the scientific data we have doesn't really support or oppose the theory of global warming. Meterologists have been collecting local temperature data for a little more than a century now, and the earth has had an atmosphere for what, three billion years? One hundred years is not a large enough sample to understand what's really going on. We have some records of past weather cycles going back hundreds of thousands of years, depending on where the samples are taken (tree rings, peat bogs, ice sheets, etc.), and there's geologic evidence of major volcanic and asteroid impact events that have had worldwide effects. It's taking a long time to piece the data together to form a complete picture of historical weather patterns, and we've only been trying to do it for a few decades. More time is needed before solid conclusions can be drawn.
Most of the time the politicians who talk about science have jumped to conclusions, so most of what you hear in the national media is junk. The fact is that real science is usually very dull and, with the exceptions of Nova and the Discovery channel, it doesn't make very good television. And since your average citizen doesn't read Nature or Scientific American you shouldn't be surpirsed when some people think global warming is a major catastrophe that requires swift political action to be fixed. The truth, of course, is far too boring to get national attention.
In the March 2005 issue of Scientific American an article was published about the effects humans may have been having on the global climate for the past 8,000 years, long before we started buring fossil fuels for electricity and transportation. I found a PDF of the article
here (1.5 MB). It's just a theory, but still very interesting.