Sadly “loved” Jane’s poem and Joan’s last sentence pretty well sums it ALL up! Also - right ON Harper! If you lived in AZ in August - you would definitely believe in global warming!!!

I do believe the climate is changing. However, we have had such long, cold winters the past couple of years — it does make you wonder.

Keeping in mind a recent rant of Denis Leary’s, I want to be sure my carbon footprint is huge, after all I want to leave something behind when I’m gone…Just kidding. What does alarm me is that science is something in which we must believe—I believe in global warming? I believe in evolution? What ever happened to incontrovertible evidence and its relationship to knowing?

Global Warming does not mean that it’s only getting hotter. Global Warming means many things. Weather is changing drastically. Extreme heat one day and extreme cold the next. Winters are longer and harsher and summers are hotter and dryer.

I wish the question would have not been “Do you believe?” but rather “What can we do to live more sustainable lives?” This would actually make the conversation constructive and we could learn from each other as opposed to gossip about beliefs.

I’m an actress in LA and I ride my bike everywhere, from auditions to jobs to the theater and to do grocery shopping. I carry my own mug and my own utensils with me to reduce waste and plastic usage. I carry my own bag to the grocery store. When I ride my bike and I stand next to an idling car, I know that that heat affects our planet. It doesn’t disappear. When I ride my bike and I see the trash in the gutter, I know that we are distroying the planet.

Look back at ancient civilizations. When we go to their ruins, there is not much left behind. Imagine what somebody in a thousand years will find from our era? I don’t believe in Global Warming. I know that our weather has been crazy all over the world. And I believe that doing something about our carbon footprints (yes, J Boylynn, I use the word and I practice environmentally caring practices) will make a difference in our weather and in our personal and the planets health. So lets start a discussion about how we can reduce our carbon footprints as opposed to who believes what.

Yes I believe in Global Warming. It is raining and making floods where we usually do not have. It is snowing violently in places that do not get it so bad. Where we live it snowed very little and usually we get more than this year. I bet this summer will not be as hot as it gets normally. So yes I believe Mother Nature needs all the help we can give her, she is surly tired of picking up after us.

Each of you has taken a different route in framing your answer, but each of you has had excellent things to add. However - and this is just my own viewpoint - I don’t like how the question is phrased. Do we “believe” in global warming? Don’t “beliefs” seem to come from the heart? What we want to have are facts that can be proved or better still, have been proved. Personally, I am leary of self-made media pundits who spout their theories at will. So much of my life has been spent in the polar regions - north and south. There is nothing like seeing something with your own eyes. There is nothing so painful as seeing polar bears prevalent in the Canadian Arctic because they could leap from ice floe to ice floe in search of food. At one time we needed an icebreaker to ram the solid ice up there. Today the realm of the polar bear is almost completely made up of water. Far fewer are seen. What we - as humans - have done to the environment has been proven. But there may be far more to this. Thoughout the centuries, there have been regular cycles - not man-made - of warming followed by ice ages. That is fact. The glaciers I have seen are shrinking quietly over short periods. Whether this is a combination of cycles in nature AND what damages we, as people, are doing to this world is still in doubt. Frankly, I think it is going to take a catastropic occurrence of the first magnitude to scare us hard enough to get us into actually and seriously committed to environmentally caring practices.

I’m with Peggy on this one.

I don’t believe in Princeton-trained physicists. I do believe in the evidence I see every day.

I don’t “believe” in anything. I see evidence of what our behavior has produced. Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth exposes a 650,000 year old record that is pretty good evidence of a range of climate stability good for general life on earth. That said… Having read Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us, I am reminded by him, that humans are subject to the laws of nature just like every other animal on earth; that every species that outgrows it’s resources suffers a population crash. I think humans have the ability to think and project outcomes but humans haven’t learned that cooperation is key to survival, not war and fighting over the natural resources that we have outgrown. Humans can not to do what may be necessary to avoid the possibility that a population crash may be closer to affecting us before the climate change really gets into full swing. The least we can do for the future of the earth is to figure out how to turn off the nuclear lights before we exit the stage.

It’s pretty clear that we have had a very large impact on our planet. “Global warming” is a misnomer” . “Climate Change” is a much better description of our effect on the earth’s environment. I believe that we have come to a point in our environmental history where we are going to have to adapt to the changes we have wrought and move rapidly away from our petroleum addiction.

YES, Global Warming is a FACT. Here’s the US Pentagon’s Oct 2003 report, “Abrupt Climate Change”: http://www.grist.org/pdf/AbruptClimateChange2003.pdf Here’s the “Global Scientists Warming Letter to Humanity” signed by 1,500 of the world’s top scientists: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ucs-statement.txt EXCELLENT must see video “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See” on how to decide what you THINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDsIFspVzfI Finally, the Princeton physicist referred to in the question wasn’t named, but it took me two seconds on Google to identify him as 84 year-old Fred Singer, a career skeptic. It took another two seconds to draw a straight line, as I suspected, between him and drunken billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited money, never worked for anything, and is proof that beauty fades but stupid lasts forever. His notable contribution to society is funding extremist right-wing causes, books, ‘think tanks’ that go against the common good. Read a highly revealing and amusing Washington Post piece, aptly including ‘The Low Road” in the title, on Scaife here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR200710… Just as big tobacco funded ‘scientists’ to claim that smoking is harmless, big oil and car makers, etc, fund fake science to confuse facts, too. As I suspected, it took me under one minute on Google to draw a straight line from the 84-year old phsycist