Scientists blame global warming for rising hurricane intensity

Link: MiamiHerald.com | 02/01/2007

"That means the world's scientists are 90 to 99 percent certain that the burning of fossil fuels is responsible.
Worse, the study reportedly describes global warming as a runaway climatological train that already is racing down the track and will ``continue for centuries . . . even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized."

You know it really takes a lot to get people off of the mark nowadays. When I was a youngster, and the G.I.s were in charge, if a reasonable number of experts decided there was a serious problem looming on the horizon, well, then something would be done. It wasn't necessary for the train to cut your car in half before you might think about moving the car or getting out of it. When you were sitting on the track and heard a whistle, even if you couldn't see anything yet, you started getting your butt in gear.

I don't really know when that changed. It probably began picking up steam back in the Nixon days, when the Republicans and Conservatives started belittling the experts and educated people in general, claiming their book learning was somehow inferior to the "wisdom" of the common man. It certainly has been strengthened by the claim of the common man's press that the best way to extract knowledge about a subject is to listen to "experts" from the fringy, opposite ends of the subject's spectrum beat each other up with half truths and innuendos. True knowledge has no place in these discussions. The holders of true knowledge are aware of these extremes and try to filter them out of the mass of information in the center that actually holds the truth. The first thing a scientist does when he analyzes statistical data is to throw out the extreme data points, recognizing them for the oddballs that they probably are. We need to somehow get back to a point where we can react to reasonable concern when it shows it head and not argue about it until the whole monster crawls out of the hole.

We should have been on top of this 20 years ago and we might have had a chance to actually do something about it other than survive.