We're in an ice age. — frank

At least for me it's important that we aren't nowhere near the peak of glaciation: there's not a glacier where my house is now.

The Sahara will become a prairie when the glaciers come back. Human homecoming.

The climate has been changing since forever and no amount of hysteria is going to change that. Similarly, doomsday rhetoric has been around since man first saw the sun going down over the horizon, unsure whether it would rise again.

What else is going to happen, Nostradamus? Armageddon?

Open your eyes and look around you, Nosferatu. Or perhaps you shy away from the bright light of day?

I’m suspicious by default of those who cry wolf and say the sky is falling.

Are you expecting a glacier in your backyard anytime soon? Maybe within 3,000 years? More to the point, with climate change is the possibility we're no longer on the earth's regular schedule. nose4 appears to be suggesting that current climate change may deflect those far-off sheets of ice. Indeed they might! How about you? What do you think?

Baby steps, nose4. Try for coherence; you can do it! I realize the substance of any discussion is beyond you, but at least try to be coherent.

Yes, but the import of that fable is that when implausible disaster is proclaimed over and over people become complacent, and don't recognize plausible disaster when it looms.

Are you expecting a glacier in your backyard anytime soon? Maybe within 3,000 years? More to the point, with climate change is the possibility we're no longer on the earth's regular schedule. nose4 appears to be suggesting that current climate change may deflect those far-off sheets of ice. Indeed they might! How about you? What do you think? — tim wood

Computer models indicate that anthropogenic global warming will cause us to stay in the present interglacial. Most of the CO2 will be absorbed into the oceans in about 10,000 years, so after that, we're back to normal (with an acidic ocean.)

Heck, we have done just fine with repairing or at least stopping the breakdown of the ozone layer. — ssu

If we had not taken the measure of ceasing CFC production and use in 1992, the ozone depletion problem, would have continued to get worse. Peak CFC levels occurred in 2000. CFCs are cleared at about 4% a year. Ozone depletion would have continued right along, and we would be heading into a period of exposure to much higher levels of UV radiation in mid-latitude cities, well above what is now considered extreme (all that according to NASA). That isn't happening because we stopping doing something that was harmful to the environment. Even so, it will take a while to see the CFCs effects disappear (like 2070).

Switching to "renewables" and nuclear power sounds like a great idea. While we are making some progress in renewable power sources, we have a very long ways to go before we will achieve an actual reduction in yearly production of CO2, etc. No country is on track to achieve modest levels of reduced emissions any time soon which were established in the Paris Agreements.

We have all these sunk investments in coal, oil, and gas we are all loathe to abandon. We also have a tremendous investment in the existing supply of cheap power and plastic. We don't seem to be able to imagine a world without coal, oil, and gas.

Nuclear is an option, certainly, but nuclear energy isn't an over-night solution either. It takes quite a while to build nuclear power plants, from proposal to megawatts. We have not solved the problem of nuclear waste from plants. It is sometimes quite difficult to get rid of waste heat (in certain locations).

We have to reduce demand and actual usage of fuels and raw material, not merely find other sources for all the energy anybody could think of wanting.

Enviro-Pollyanna-Syndrome makes life better today, because it gets the infected temporarily off the hook. But tomorrow they wake up with a bad conscience, an uncomfortable feeling of excess warmth, and a large bill for hydrocarbons. They also find that they are closer to Dooms Day.

As you and Elvis Perkins sing, "I don't like doomsday bother me; does it bother you?"

So the scientists of the world really are conspiring against us in diabolical ways? The so called facts of approximately 50% of the planet's tropical forests having been destroyed only within the last 70 years are all bogus? Or maybe this massive loss of flora is insignificant?

So its known, there is a connection between loss of flora and climate change. According to them scientists at any rate.

No, we're definitely all going to die. Especially you.

We have all these sunk investments in coal, oil, and gas we are all loathe to abandon. — Bitter Crank

At least 6.3% of global GDP is spent on subsidizing fossil fuels (on welfare for the oil industry). And how much is spent to subsidize renewable energy?

Talk about a non-existent free market.

No, we're definitely all going to die. Especially you. — frank

Right. Facts are facts for us mortal folks. Why the "especially" part?

I fear the alarmism will lead to some form or other of tyranny before it leads to a better planet.

I think food shortages and even wars over resources are a real possibility. The people will then be rightly be alarmed, and yes, forms of tyranny often come in times of war. Prior to any of that I don't see alarmism leading to tyranny. I think it will be "business as usual" for as long as possible.

Be excellent: how ancient virtues can guide our responses to the climate crisis

66 million years ago an asteroid contributed to the extinction of the era's dominant lifeforms: non-avian dinosaurs.

This past July, a 100 meter wide rock whizzed past the earth 5 times closer to us than the moon.

Do ponder the right way to live, but recognize that you may be dead tomorrow.

Heck, we have done just fine with repairing or at least stopping the breakdown of the ozone layer. — ssu

The damage has been done. Less ozone means more UV radiation (high energy), reaching and warming the earth's surface, energy which would have been absorbed in the upper atmosphere and radiated to outer space, if the levels of ozone had been maintained. Warming at the surface, and cooling in the upper atmosphere has been observed. Further, UV is harmful to most if not all life forms.

Though some people claim that the ozone layer is "healing", differences between ozone levels in the south, and ozone levels in the north, and cycles of fluctuation, make it extremely difficult to say whether we've actually stopped the breakdown.