For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. AKA, we don't know exactly what would happen, but on average, nothing too extreme will happen. Take your home in the bay area. Last march it got alot of rain. Take my city (Austin, TX). Last march, it was going through a drought, that lasted until january of this year. Now we are having above-average rainfall.

Is this because of global warming? Probably not. There have been droughts and floods for millions of years. Remember, the entire "warming" argument is only over ~2 degrees of change in the past 50 years or so, on average. I mean really, that isn't much, guys.

" if the world heats up the icecaps melt. "

You do know that every year, the North pole loses about half of its ice, right? And in the winter, it freezes back in. I would think England would have already felt this "cold surge" or whatever.

FYI, Sydney has (over the last few days) been in a grip of a "150 year storm". The worst has happened a couple of hours north of Sydney (near Newcastle) - in an area called Maitland. The river has risen to 10m above the normal river level (never before happened). About 15(?) people have been killed, and the entire town evacuated. One section of our national highway has even been washed away.

This is following the worst drought  on record (Australia in general), which has been running for 3-4 years now.

Melbourne (where I live) has recently recorded several spates of the "highest temperate on record" (for a given month). In fact, considering that we are renouned to be 'pretty cold' (by Australian standards), the last few days have been lovely - Tshirt weather - which is extremely unusual, considering we are 2 weeks into winter.

To top all of this off, the entire of Australia is running out of drinking water. The below average rainfall that has been occuring for a few years now, has gradually built up - and is now having a significant effect on the life of everyone who lives in Australia.

Brisbane (the worst hit?) is aiming to restrict water to 140L / person / day, and is on stage-5 water restrictions. Its a bit of a shock for the locals, who have never experienced anything like this before.

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As these events become more regular, and more severe - across the world - more people will start to realise exactly what is going on - and demand action.

Oh, now I know why this discusson now starts. It's the Documention 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' from british TV. Yesterday it was showed on german TV (but edited to remove some of the biggest mistakes). The biggest claim of this documentation is, that the global warming is caused by increased sun-activity. The sun is without any doubt very important for our climate. There is the energy from, that our climate needs. Around 1950 was an increase of sunspots, that would explain a global warming. But some time ago the sunspot-activity is reducing, so the climate should cool down again. But that is in discrepance to the measured temperatures. Here is the link to the graph with sunspot-activity: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers.png

I don't know enough about Austrailia to comment about it but ...

In the world there are so many distinct climate zones that extremely rare weather conditions should be expected in multiple zones every year. The probability of having the warmest or coldest spring, summer, winter or fall in 150 years (assuming a probability of 1/150 for each) is 5.2% for any given weather region; if you have 20 weather regions in a region you have a probability of 65% to see one of these "rare" weather paterns in any given year. When you start adding extreme rain or drought, high and low numbers of storms and forest fires and countless other extreme weather patterns it becomes extremely likely that you will see dozens of these weather paterns in a year.

Yes, but these are NOT isolated events. That is exactly the point.

Even in the 10 years that I have lived in Melbourne, I have noticed a very distinct shift weather patterns. I remember being here 15 or so years ago - very wet/unstable, and very cold (middle winter). There is absolutely no question that there has been a gradual increase in the average temperature, gradual decrease in rainfall (etc..) over the last 10-20 years. I would be ecstatic if this or next year we had a cold winter (back to normal), and a more wet summer - but I don't have my hopes up.

The Earth is (unless I am VERY mistaken?) a closed system. This system has been self-regulating itself for billions of years. There is definitely a large variation in normal amount of CO2 generally produced (volcanos, bush fires & other events), but I don't have ANY doubt that human activity has unbalanced this closed system.

Remember that its a double effect - not only have we been pumping (increasingly) massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere at a regular basis - we have massively degraded the planets natural ability to absorb and process CO2 by destroying/clearing large amounts of natural forest and plantlife.

Surely its common sense? Take a closed system, regularly inject increasing amounts of a gas that warms the system, while regularly weaken the tool that removes this gas from the system.  What do you get? A build up of this gas, and a slow - but steady - increase of the temperature within the system.

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<ahh.. so much to say... :( >

There is a difference, and skepticism is healthy, especially when dealing with a massively chaotic system with a poorly recorded history. What I was trying to refer to are the far left Earth Worshippers, and the far right Global Warming is a Left Wing Hoax Designed to Push A Radical Left Agenda crowd.

There is a difference, and skepticism is healthy, especially when dealing with a massively chaotic system with a poorly recorded history. What I was trying to refer to are the far left Earth Worshippers, and the far right Global Warming is a Left Wing Hoax Designed to Push A Radical Left Agenda crowd.

Well Sweden is having fucked up weather to, year after year is a new record year in warmth. Each year the snow line is further and further up in the north. We are getting more and more floodings. At my home village the river rose 5 meter above normal. The lack was up 5 meter too, and took some of the road with it. I can't prove that this is because of global warming but the truth is that it doesn't matter. Mankind have to change anyway, because honestly we do not own this world we are borrowing it from our children.

 I do belive in global warming because of the simple fact that sweden is getting warmer for each year, is it bad for Sweden? Most possible not, is is bad for the majority of the people yes. Is mankind responsible, how should I know? But we should react anyway by the simple fact that if we don't and it ends up even worse we can get some serious war over resources (see Irak).

Now even more important might be that like someone pointed out before one of the most important Green House gases is water. What happens if we increase the overall temperature? More H20 gas. Then we have runaway process and we might end up as Venus number two!

 you understand how the world works, but unfortunately that isnt what is happening with global warming.  we are affecting the world faster than it can be balanced.  that means that when the ice caps melt, more of it melts.  with more water melting it then interupts the flow of the atlantic current.   Same thing with the weather.  there is such thing as averages for a reason.  they are there to check if something is wrong.  when averages are completely off for tons of places there is a problem like there is now.

Do you have any idea what 2 degrees means?  it is huge.  it could mean the difference between having enough water and being dehydrated for some species.  but guess what is happening,  2 degrees becomes 3 and eventually 5 and maybe more.  that would absolutely drastic. 

Just another point of view... 

For the record, I believe in global warming- average temperatures have been climbing and there's not much debate to be had about that. I simply don't believe that humans are the main cause of it. I believe the most overlooked possible cause for global warming is also the most obvious. Our sun is the heat source for our planet, and thus should be the first thing we look at when heat levels rise. Compare the two graphs below, the first is the global temperature graphed from 1880 to 2004.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Temp/TempSmall.gif

The second is a graph of solar activity from the 1400s to present times. (Data obviously extrapolated back using chemical evidence left behind by solar activity)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_Activity_Proxies.png

To further back up this point, Neptune's largest moon has shown signs of warming since it was last visited by the voyager space probe in 1989. This shows the possibility that warming could be caused by something outside of our closed-planet system (that something being the sun). This is an article from MIT about the warming trend on Neptune's largest moon, Triton.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/triton.html

In addition to this, Mars has also been warming. This clearly shows that something more than CO2 emissions is to blame for global warming. This is an article from National Geographic about the warming on Mars.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

Another point about 'Greenhouse gasses: The way the operate is that they reflect heat- this reflection works both ways, reflecting heat that is inside the earth's atmosphere back to the earth and reflecting the same amount of heat back into space before it ever reaches the atmosphere. This would result in smaller temperature differences between day and night, not necessarily greater high temperatures. A perfect example of this is a cloudy 24-48 hour period. This almost always results in a cooler day and a warmer night, no change in the 'average' for that period of time.

I don't want to close my eyes and pretend the temperature hasn't gone up, but I'm not going to swallow the line from the far left that tries to blame the 'inevitable' demise of the world on progressive nations. Our CO2 emissions may have a minute impact on temperature, but that pales in comparison to the effect the sun has. Why spend trillions of dollars and risk the world's economy to effect premature changes that may not have any measurable impact on climate? The fact is, we don't know for sure, and looking at only one possible cause for something as complex as climate change is pretty narrow minded. That's not to say that we shouldn't use more and more renewable energy sources, that's just being responsible with the earth. I believe we should find ways to reduce emissions, use renewable energy, and do whatever we can to create a cleaner future. I'm just sick of the fear mongering and panic that we see from our politicians and citizens. This subject has unfortunately turned into an overblown panic attack designed to get votes for politicians and billions of dollars for scientists.

As for the people who say anyone who debates human caused global warming are fools, stupid, believe 'fantasy', etc, that's not a scientific perspective at all. Galileo was arrested because he said the earth revolved around the sun when the "consensus" from the scientific community was that the sun went around the earth. Science is all about debate, not writing someone off because they disagree with you.