It seems to be a widely held and undisputed view that global warming is meltin our ice caps, rising our sea levels, increasing the risk of skin cancer, and generally doing a lot of bad things.
I never really believed in it, however, and recently, I started reading Michael Crichton's State of Fear. True, it is a fiction book, but within the book, Crichton makes many scientific claims that are backed up by research he includse in footnotes.
The book, so far (I haven't finished it) essentially debunks global warming. What do you all think about this?

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You are behind the times. There was a rather lengthy and in-depth discussion covering all of this in the 'State of the Union' thread which can be found in this very forum. Sadly the debate involved only two members but it was still decent.

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True but "State of the Union" thread isn't only about global warming. I assume it would be some about it. Oh well. I just wanted to start a new thread to discuss this in more depth. Hopefully we'll get some lively discussion.

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True global warming isn't a big threat yet,but it is growing and soon will be a big problem,now i admit some of the plans the government has that involve spending billions just to merely hold it off are at best lacking and rather uneeded especially when the world has some many other problems that need to be sorted now eg:staving countries,etc,but global warming is still a threat and must be faced and resolved sometime,the sooner we start planning the sooner we can combat this threat in the future.

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Actually, statistically, the planet is on cycles, growing colder, then warmer, then colder, then warmer. Juding by graphs from around the world, we are either less than a degree higher, or less than a degree lower, in the past 150 years. I don't think this is much of a concern.

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I remember having seen a documentary where they tell that there is a global FRESHENING as well, due to pollution (pollution particles in clouds, reflecting the sunlight back in space, this is supposed to be responsible of the absence of some monsoon-like rains - the necessary water could not evaporate from the oceans, evaporation being tied to the impact of the sunlight or something - and (if we have to believe those searchers) may cause in future in lands like india a real absence of monsoon. I have no idea if these people are nuts or if there is something true in that story. Somebody else has heard about that?

So we get global warming AND global freezing? How nuts is that?

Global Warming is definately a problem. What do you think is causing all these natural disasters such as the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and Rita and so on. It's a really big problem that the politicians are doing nothing about. It really irritates me.

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I'm wondering if all Aussies spell this word wrong...

Anyways, Global Warming is happening. Take the hurricanes for example. The Gulf of Mexico has gotten warmer increasingly over the past 10 or so years, and is seen by the increasing power of the hurricanes. If it doesn't get any better, they might have to add a Category 6 to the hurricane list.

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Global warming, is of course, happening, but not nearly to the disastrous effect that people claim it is. When one looks at charts from around the world we see either a miniscule percentage of rising, a miniscule percentage of going down, or about the same.

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And you don't think that has an effect on climate? Go learn some meteorology if you don't think a small change has an effect.

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I'm talking even on the basis of meterological changes, these changes are miniscule. And besides, as I stated earlier, global weather has been fluctuating rather than steadily rising.

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