" Yes, there is no industry taking place in the United States. Interesting premise. Good to see you putting your phD in environmental sciences to good work, Mr. Snyder. "

" While this letter is an imperfect articulation of the mix of science and politics at work in this field, the letter does point out the obvious to any citizen who will read and do some basic research. The earch has warmed and cooled in the past eons, producing glaciers in Ohio and Yosemite Valley, somehow, the earth has returned to balance points. While the earth is apparently warming now, and has been since the end of the "little ice age" ending about 1860, the human contribution percentage is so small as to fail the logic of the reasonable person. "

" Down with the Wikipedia HIVEMIND! "

" Mr. Snyder said it all. Wake up people. Most of you were "educated" in public schools. It's time for you to start THINKING on your own! Most of you won't. Considering how few of you read this, the less chance we have of surviving. Those who are elected have no idea of what they swore to Protect, Preserve and Defend. Why? Well, they came from the 60s comrade. They, as well as you, never learned our real history as a nation. "

" Nothing turns the leftist world sideways like the consequences of their own policy failures. Those who follow this religion of hate towards everything they cannot themselves claim credit for, gainful employment, business enterprise, inventions or even providing jobs for fellow citizens are forever switching from one sort of falling sky theory to the next. If they had any foresight to speak of they’d not killed off Nuclear Power which is the only abundant source of C02 free energy and could alone reduce US man made C02 by 50%. Neither should they have blocked the accessing of oil reserves on the North Slope in Alaska the combination of just these two policy failures accounts for the importing an additional 3 to 4 million barrels of oil daily upon none other than gross polluting super tankers burning thousands of tons of diesel fuel daily just to get the fuel here. The stupidity of the far left is beyond disgust, just the importation of this oil accounts for an additional 90 to 120 tankers on the seas every single day burning tons of oil every hour 24/7. Of course it’s ok for Pelosi, Clintons and Gore to fly about in big old jets burning hundreds of thousands of gallons more fuel in a couple flights than any of us in an entire lifetime…. Yes sir, they really do indeed care about us, our country and our environment, as in 'we can careless you simpleton suckers.' "

" Mr. Snyder said it all. Wake up people. Most of you were "educated" in public schools. It's time for you to start THINKING on your own! Most of you won't. Considering how few of you read this, the less chance we have of surviving. Those who are elected have no idea of what they swore to Protect, Preserve and Defend. Why? Well, they came from the 60s comrade. They, as well as you, never learned our real history as a nation. "

" To quote former President Reagan: "Now there you go again..." More Neo-Con conspiracy theories (eg. "look behind the curtain and see who is pulling the strings"); scare tactics (eg. "a dependent nation to the Communist world"); name-calling (eg. "Freaks" & "Alarmists"). Mr. Snyder and his six disciples of misinformation are so afraid of change they cannot see a future of productivity and capitalism in America without their precious CO2. I can see why they are nostalgiac for the ice-age and Cretaceous periods - they must remember them well. Those of us who have learned to use tools are moving forward. So long dinosaurs! "

" U.S. without industry? You don't think that's sky is falling fear mongering sort of talk? Well I do. Most of the world is now what Snyder would call "global warming freaks". Barely anyone, outside U.S. rugged individualists who have taken it upon themselves to dictate the fate of the earth against the better judgment of scientists and a concerned world, is oblivious to the effects of runaway consumption and self-serving opportunism. Regulating carbon emissions is in part a preventive measure, which can be taken without a "sentence of life without industry." I'm sure glad that, when I was a kid, I had that innoculation against polio, even though I had never seen anyone who had died of polio, had no reason to trust the scientists who had developed the vaccine, and thought my mother was just a silly worrier who wanted to sentence me to a dirt-free life of continual hand washing. "

" Hmmm...carbon tax the U.S.....That's the plan all right. Wait and see... Observe how many countries The U.N/Kyoto proticol exempt from this tax and who they are. Good letter Don. "

" What about the huge amount of CO2 given off with wine fermentation? "

" Paragraph #2. Fact: CO2 is NOT a concern for it's properties of toxicity, but for it's properties as a greenhouse gas. "

" Little pockets of high CO2 have little to do with the argument at hand, which has been decided by the scientific community already. "

" Undeniably there is a strong statistical correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperature, but correlation does not prove cause and effect. We know that recent human activities have released enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and we know the Earth is warming up (it's hard to deny that glaciers are melting), thus it is easy to infer a link. However, we also know the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age were well documented natural climatic oscillations unrelated to human activities. Given the uncertainty of the cause(s) of current global warming, I find it amusing how so many people are smugly certain that humans either are or are not the cause. We simply cannot be 100% certain. But if we truly care about our environment more than our own self-centered desires (as opposed to our needs, which we often confuse), I believe it is prudent to minimize our carbon footprint NOW as a precaution. "

" If we keep building coal power plant in America we will never reduce our "footprint" even a little bit. The CO2 from cars and cows and humans and fermentation is tiny compared to the emissions from even "clean burning coal". Coal burning is the dirtiest thing we do. Nuclear power is far safer, kills no miners and emits no CO2. "

" Global warming? Global cooling? Why not Global Wobbling(r)? Been here way longer than algore. "

" Industry Don? What industry? Most of the coal and oil causing carbon emissions comes from power provided to heat and cool us or power our automobiles not manufacture goods or produce basic products like steel and power factories. Get a grip on life and try focusing on a topic you can be coherent about. "

" That’s “Dr. Decker” to we unwashed, non Piled High and Deep (PhD) commoner rabble. And, how DARE you question our credentials! We KNOW what is right, what is a THEORY, and what you SHOULD believe. We should stop questioning the good Mr. Al Gore, and like the lemmings we should be, jump off the cliff of Man Made Global Warming, because, hey, we know what’s good for you all. That’s what centralized socialist thinking is all about, Comrade! "

" Let me just address something here. By the way, I find flaws in Mr. Snyder's arguments, particularly the one about CO2's direct effect on health. The concern is not its toxicity but its effect on the atmosphere in regards to its greenhouse effect. His flaws aside, there are really two issues here with global warming. One of them is the bureacracy involved, and the second is the idea of global warming itself. The first issue of bureacracy has to do with politicians using the idea of global warming for their political agendas. They want to regulate everything to the extreme. They go to the media claiming to be experts on the issue. Yet as hypocrates, they don't practice what they preach. The best example is Al Gore. He cannot be trusted. Very few politicians can. There's always a slant to butter them up. He touts his solutions but yet he is responsible for a large amount of greenhouse emissions. After a while you learn to read between the lines and know who's feeding you a line of crap and who isn't. Anyone who wants to take over and will do whatever possible to do so which includes lying to you about what's happening and what solutions they propose, can't be trusted. And I think that's why so many people are quick to shoot down the idea of global warming and that humankind is responsible. We've become jaded by our politician's lies and games. We should however be listening to our scientists and experts who have the credentials and good track records, which leads me to the second issue: Global Warming itself. The consensus among our scientists is that there is warming and there is an increase in CO2 levels. The debate however lies in how much is man-made, and whether the warming is a cyclical event, and what effect on this earth it will have. Unfortunately this debate is tangled up in political garbage, which prevents some of us from seeing the real issue. A logical and common sense individual would agree that it is better to take what action we can NOW to stop what we can. Reduce emissions, etc. For more reasons than just global warming. Cutting our dependence on foreign oil, seeking alternative fuels (which we will have to do anyway when the fossil fuels run out). And one would logically agree that coal-burning is dirty. Consider its direct effect on your health. Nuclear is becoming the better way to go. Now here's my opinion on all this: I realize that there are eco-nuts out there who blow this issue out of proportion. I realize that there are politicians who slant the issue for their own gain which include scare tactics. But I also realize that we have a potential problem on our hands with global warming. I realize that the way things are going now, we are slowly destroying the earth. I do believe that global warming is occuring and that industry is at least partially responsible for it. The extent of all this we cannot know for sure. I'm all for alternative energy, but I see problems with overregulation too. I believe Al Gore is an eco-fraud based on his track record. There are a lot of wary individuals and the government has to be careful how it regulates them. So in a nutshell I think we are faced with a problem, but it has also been blown out of proportion as a political tool by the extremists. "

" And, I used the word "industry" in my last post a little too loosely. I meant to include power generation, automobiles and air-traffic as significant sources of pollution and CO2. "

" It's really cliamate change folks, for the politically adept. "

" What a great analysis. I agree with most everything you say... yet am not clear about whether we should be taking some kind of action, and if so, what??? But great arguments all around and I am generally pro-government, however, these days it seems you can't trust electeds to do much of anything that doesn't have some personal payoff. "

" I think most people don't understand: mankind's emissions will trigger runaway global warming, where the earth will release it's gigantic store of methane from ice in permafrost and under the ocean. There is TWICE the carbon in that hydrate than in all fossil fuel combined! It has substancially melted multiple times in the past with catastropic results (for instance 55 million years ago ushering in the age of mammals, and 250 million years ago, killing most life on earth). Without CO2 in the air, the earth would be a chilly minus 18 degrees C. Imagine what doubling the CO2 in the air will mean. Furthermore, there is 400 billion tons of methane in permafrost hydrate, and 50% of surface permafrost is expected to melt by 2050 (less than 30 billion tons of methane would be like DOUBLING the CO2 in the air!). Finally, there is an incredible 10,000 billion tons of methane in hydrate under the ocean, and some fraction is in shallow water deposits that are vulnerable to the current warming trend. LEARN FROM HISTORY, OR BE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT. "

" Ice cores are derived from compacted snow with air bubbles within, not from sea ice. However, even if CO2 did permeate into surrounding ice....they would know that, and the folks at Byrd Polar can also look at the chemistry of ice. "

" Yes, it was very hot in the Cretaceous, and there were many plants. The earth has been through other warming periods, yes. However, the climate has been changed many times by biological activity. Plants can change the atmosphere, microbes are thought to have oxygenated the earth in the Paleozoic, etc. Why is it hard to believe that 6 billion humans can also make such a change? When those changes are rapid they create extinctions. Yes, the earth will survive and change. But tht doesn't change the fact that there will be an effect on the earth's inhabitants. "

" accounts for a very small proportion of plant metabolism. It isn't the answer "

" The problem is that the scientists are not policy makers. Rather, elected officials are. At some point, it IS APPROPRIATE for elected officials to take action based on established science. Otherwise, we would have no vaccines, no health policy, no FDA regulation, etc. So I cannot fault the policy makers for trying to do their job. "

" I'm not faulting our politicians for doing their job. Obviously nothing would happen without them. I fault the ones that knowingly mislead the public. I support the ones that make decisions based on reputable science. And the science is in; some amount of warming is occuring. The action we and policy makers need to take is mainly preventative action, before it's too late. Al Gore has some good points, but unfortunately he's a bit of an extremist and violates his own rules. "