The novel state of fear has in the appendix a comprehensive list of source material used by Mr. Crichton to create the narrative. He was NOT writing based on his belief, but based on the data.

Global cooling - oops, didn't work.
Global warming - oops, didn't work, either.
Climate change - now, they'll eat it up.

It is getting warmer but due to NATURAL forces and not human activity. IMHO.

All it takes is a volcano like in 936 and it gets a bit chilly outside for a while.

The climate has always been/will always be changing.

The hoax is people trying make money/influence from it by 1. Making people afraid of it and 2. Making people feel responsible for it and guilty about it.

Pure hubris to think humans are in any way culpable.

Global cooling in the 70's, then global warming in the 90's, now climate change.

Watermelons all! Green on the outside, red on the inside.

Biggest worldwide scam in human history with the end game of total power, control and money.

Pollution - I understand that, and we do control that, but the weather?!
Try looking up in the sky at that big yellow ball, that's what controls everything with the weather.

I am shocked that so many soft minded people accept this conspiracy to enslave themelves.

I don't see climate change as a hoax or a scam. I see it as a form of control. If everyone is driving a smart electric car, the govt can enforce mandatory non driving days, or better yet, they can deactivate your car from starting for numerous reasons. The only thing I do know for sure is that the heat island effect is true. No one wants to discuss that though because it can be solved.

The climate is always changing. It is not human activity. It's that big ball of fire in the sky. And sunspots.

Human activity is nothing compared to volcanic activity. You folks in Hawaii and Washington know what a volcano can do, but are not old enough to remember the big ones.

"The mysterious eruption was almost twice as powerful as the eruption of the Tambora in 1815, one of the most powerful documented eruptions with effects recognized all over the globe. The weather in Europe following in 1816 was described as "daily rain and storms." In the fields, crops either failed to mature or rotted away, leading to widespread famine and disease. The northeastern states of the Unites States experienced snowstorms and frost in the middle of summer. The year 1816 is today famous as the year without a summer."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...ted/?sh=525eb2534923

But the current lack of sunspots may lead to dramatic cooling, similar to the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715. The Maunder Minimum occurred within the Little Ice Age, a long period of lower-than-average European temperatures. The reduced solar activity may have contributed to the climatic cooling, although the cooling began before the solar minimum and its primary cause is believed to be volcanic activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

The center of the "hoax" is the classification of CO2 as a pollutant. As any farmer knows, CO2 is plant food. Greenhouse operations here add CO2 to increase productivity. Some people think we are currently near the minimum amount of CO2 in the atmosphere necessary to sustain our forests.

I say hoax. The temperature is not rising. Even if it is, it is by a miniscule, almost infinitesimal, amount. And man is not capable of influencing it.

The planet has, as said above, been through a lot worse than us. Explain, for example, the fossils of trilobites - sea creatures - in the Canadian Rockies. Think the sea level changed a little bit? A damn sight more than the couple of feet that melting ice caps would add to it.

Why is everybody worried about the planet, anyway? Shouldn't they be worried about leaving it fit for human habitation? This would be a little more understandable, but the climate cultists never say it. They'd just as soon see humans sharply reduced in number, if not extirpated altogether (except for themselves).

The climate is doing what tge climate does. It's always changing. Cools down, warms up, gets wet, gets dry... The climate change whackos (remember when it was called global warming?) sound alarms, create fear, get more control and make a shit load of money. Money & power is what climate change is all about in my opinion.

Of course the climate is changing-always has and always will. The hoax is that we are primarily responsible, and that we have to do all the "green" things to make up for it.

I answered the poll that it is partially due to human behavior. I think it's pretty obvious that we do contribute to climate change. It's not voodoo-we cut down trees, we burn fossil fuels, etc. I'm not saying it's primarily due to our behavior, but certainly somewhat. I think solar output and volcanic activity could outweigh human influence.

I also don't know that warming is a bad thing. If we can make it warmer, maybe we should. I think a lot more people have problems with the cold than the heat. It may shift agricultural regions. Places that were good to grow certain things may get a little too warm to be as effective, but if so, other places that used to be too cold would then be just right.

I'm with George Carlin; the planet doesn't need saving. We should want a clean environment because it's nicer to live in. But I have always said that in a few million years you'll never know we were here.

Nobody can say to what extent human activity affects climate, but I do believe there are consequences. Specifically the clear cutting of tropical rain forests, and the pollution of the environment via chemicals and plastics. There's no way we put as much heat and junk into the air without some effect, but I don't believe we can begin to know what it is.

The climate is incredibly complex, every changing, and beyond our ability to control. We don't know, absent human activity, which way the climate would be moving in the next year or next century.

Climate change is itself ever changing.

The first "scare" was global cooling.

1971 some guy from NASA said the pollution in the air would outweigh the increase in CO2 we were going into an ice age.

I remember reading the article in Time magazine and thought it was nonsense.

Anytime someone brought it up I would say we are a pimple on the planet's ass and it's the sun causing this.

I later shortened this to "It's the sun, stupid.

It's getting warmer, it's the sun, stupid.

Been saying it for 51 years.

The climate cycles regardless of human activity.

Seems to me that climatic events that caused widespread human suffering were times of cold. There was a big one c. 1818, called "The Year Without a Summer," caused by a massive volcanic eruption. It caused widespread crop failures and famine, killing hundreds of thousands. That still has nothing on Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and the famines they caused by their policies.

What about the ice caps melting? The rising sea levels would suck for coastal cities at or below sea level, but an ice-free northern passage around Canada would be a boon to navigation and trade.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: egregore,

Based on what I've learned, we're in a hot spot in the beginning of the next ice age. This new ice age is business as usual, but has been apparently temporarily delayed by industrial co2 emissions. So in a way our industrial affect has temporarily delayed a mile high layer of ice covering the North American continent, so to speak, since we're talking about geologic time, not human generations timelines. But eventually we WILL be covered by ice AGAIN, and again, and again and so on. And future periods of MUCH higher co2 levels having nothing to do with industrial emissions. Mother nature doesn't give a fuck about the human race, nor their politics, nor their co2 emissions, nor this thread. Turns out global climate change is normal, and completely understood for the last 1/2 billion years, and completely predictable for now based on incredibly well understood rock and ice core data and chemistry. So enjoy the heat wave "for now", so to speak, because it's gonna get cold... again.

There used to be ice ages with massive glaciers that plowed up mountains. Those glaciers are mostly gone now so my admittedly unscientific conclusion is that the climate has warmed since then. Have humans contributed to that? Probably, but we can’t know how much because we don’t know what the climate would be without any human impact.

The politicization of this phenomenon could be called a hoax or a con job for the reasons several have explained. The underlying premise - that the Earth should stay at a temperature we humans prefer forever if we treat it nicely - is equal parts naive and arrogant.

Mother Nature is the ultimate honey badger. She don't give a fuck.

Ask anyone in Florida who just lived through a hurricane whether or not humans can control nature.

Human beings are nothing but a zit on the ass of this planet. Nothing that we do, short of a full scale nuclear war, will have any effect on our climate. That big burning fireball in the sky is in total control. To believe otherwise is utterly insane.

The Hoax is that and all the rich people crying climate change have million-dollar beach front homes. (Obama has two)

If they were really worried, they would be living in the middle of the country on a mountain.

I highly recommend the following reading if one is looking for ammo to use in conversation:

Apocolypse Never (link to famous book selling site)