There is NO common sense to those who push the global warming nonsense on us, as in the past 10 years, temperatures have gone.........DOWN.

What about the dire predcitions of how many more Katrina like storms would happen as a result of the "warming trends" Just the OPPOSITE has happened.

As far as your energy efficient bulbs, if you break one, you are advised to call the haz-mat team, because they contain MERCURY................

The only effect Kyoto will have is to force the US to the level of 3rd world developing nations.

Lets see, even the site you referred to shows that the temperatures have gone DOWN. Have you even looked at it?

I guess that is one more thing that you either haven't read or are ignorant about.

ARTIC HEAT WAVE 'UNIQUE' IN HISTORY: Study
Lake sediment suggests summer temperatures have only been this warm once before in last 200,000 years


By Martin Mittelstaedt
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009 12:00AM EDT


The Canadian Arctic is experiencing a heat wave that has seldom been matched in the past 200,000 years, says a new scientific paper based on the study of sediment found at the bottom of a remote lake on Baffin Island.

Scientists looking at the remains of microscopic plants and insects preserved in the lake's crusty bottom say a comparison of flora and fauna found in the remote past and in recent decades suggest temperatures similar to those occurring now have been exceedingly rare.

Over the 200,000 years, the sediment revealed a natural ebbing and rising of various species that either favoured warmer or colder climate conditions.

But recently, there have been unprecedented increases of some algae types dependent on warmer weather that were almost never found during the preindustrial era.

"Our findings show that the last several decades have been the most ecologically unique in 200,000 years," said Neil Michelutti, a research scientist at Queen's University in Kingston and one of the members of the team that conducted the study, which is appearing this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the study, the only time that summer temperatures were similar to current readings was just after the last ice age ended about 8,000 years ago, and during a warm period before the last glaciation.

The research also extends far back into time reconstructions of previous climate conditions in the Arctic.

Up until now, past climates have been inferred from Greenland's ice cores and the 120,000 years of records they provide. But the data derived from the lake sediment predate the creation of Greenland's massive ice sheets by 800 centuries, allowing scientists to peer that much further back.

The new finding is adding to the flurry of research suggesting dramatic and far-reaching changes are under way in the Arctic, considered the part of the world most at risk from climate change.

Last week, a team of British researchers said the Arctic Ocean is undergoing a swift melting that they predicted will leave it largely free of summertime ice in as little as 20 years. Earlier this year, a report suggested global warming in the decades ahead would allow tree growth as far north as Baffin Island.

In the new research, scientists conducted a painstaking reconstruction of life at the site by looking at the fossilized remains of tiny algae and insects preserved in the sediment at the water body, located in an isolated part of the east coast of Baffin Island facing Greenland.

The algae are microscopic, with hundreds fitting onto the head of a pin, and the insects primarily midges, small two-winged gnats.

While the composition of the insect and plant communities varied over time, depending on the climate, recently the species have switched to those that thrive in ice-free conditions to a degree unlike anything previously seen.

"The lake has followed a trajectory through the 20th century toward increasingly exceptional environmental conditions with no natural analogues in the past 200,000 years," the study said.

Over the period preserved in the sediments, there were two ice ages and three warmer periods, so-called interglacial eras, highlighting the rarity of modern climate conditions.

"This historical record shows that we are dramatically affecting the ecosystems on which we depend. We have started uncontrolled experiments on this planet," said John Smol, a biologist at Queen's University.

The lake was small and unremarkable by most standards - less than a square kilometre in surface area and with a maximum depth of only 10 metres.

But scientists say it had one rare attribute that made it a major scientific find: during previous ice ages, it wasn't covered with moving glaciers, but rather frozen solid. That meant the sediments at its bottom were preserved. They weren't scoured up and deposited elsewhere, bulldozer fashion, as were lake bottoms throughout the rest of the area that was covered by the glaciers.

The study was conducted by researchers at five U.S. and Canadian universities, including the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Personally, I think a little be of warmer temps would be good. Increase the summer growing periods and all that

Seeing how over 90% of frozen ice is under the surface, when it melts, what happens to the water level???? Almost nothing