[Renegade 13]

NullAshton said:
Possible that there is no global warming? One theory is that it's just a regular up-down cycle of the earth, and that the warming is normal.

That's the thing, we just don't have enough data to know whether or not it's natural or if it's caused by humanity.

From what I recall reading somewhere, there's two possible ways the future will go. One, we keep heating up and heating up until we have massive and radical climatic shifts. Two, we heat up until we reach a certain point, at which a sudden and sharp reversal begins. I think there's some geological evidence supporting both sides. Personally, I tend to favor number two. The Earth has a very delicately balanced set of climate parameters. If one of these parameters messes up too badly, the others often compensate. I bet the Earth has some mechanism for cooling down the Earth when it gets too hot (ie: another ice age if we get too hot) and a mechanism for heating up if we get too cold.

From what I can remember, summer's have been hotter, and winters haven't had as much snow in recent times where I live. However, two years ago, we had the coldest day I've ever seen and I think it was the coldest day my parents had ever seen as well. It was -49°C when I got up one morning. Previously, the coldest I'd experienced was about -44°C a few years before that.

Who really knows what's happening? It's all just speculation based upon unprovable initial assumptions.

As for deforestation, well there's some other factors as well. Where I live, in Central BC, almost all the pine trees have been killed by a massive infestation of the Mountain Pine Beetle, a bug that eats the layer of a tree just beneath the bark, killing it. We have hundreds of thousands of acres of dead, lifeless, red trees. In essence, it isn't just mankind who causes deforestation; nature does it once in a while as well.