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despite your continued picking apart of every line of my posts, you seem to miss some of the fundamental things that I've been saying. Let me restate a couple of them.

My original post in this thread said that my thoughts on this had shifted over 25 years of following these stories and that I saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel and didn't think it was necessarily an express train. This fairly basic imagery was intended to convey that I have moved from a defeatist doom-and-gloom attitude to very cautious optimism. I reinforced that in my subsequent post.

The reality is that on a global scale, it's extremely unlikely that in 5-15 years we will see a major environmental collapse.

(and enjoy what life has to offer)

but rather situational, with many different communities unable to access reliable sources of food because of transportation problems,

BOULDER, Colo. - Arctic sea ice is melting three times faster than many scientists project, U.S. researchers reported Monday, just days ahead of the next major international report on climate change. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado in Boulder concluded, using actual measurements, that Arctic sea ice has declined at an average rate of about 7.8 percent per decade between 1953 and 2006.

By contrast, 18 computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored climate research group, estimated an average rate of decline of 2.5 percent per decade over the same period, the researchers said. International delegates are meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, this week to hammer out the final wording of the third IPCC report.

Both the observations cited in the new study and projections from the IPCC computer models are for September, when Arctic sea ice is typically at its low point for the year. For March, when the ice is typically at its most extensive, the new study found the rate of decline was 1.8 percent per decade, about three times larger than the mean from the computer models.

The researchers said their observations indicate the retreat of summertime Arctic sea ice is about 30 years ahead of the pace projected by climate models.

"While the ice is disappearing faster than the computer models indicate, both observations and the models point in the same direction: the Arctic is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace and the impact of greenhouse gases is growing," said NCAR scientist Marika Holland, one of the study's co-authors.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies who wasn't involved in the study, said the study is "a good reminder that uncertainty in model projections cuts both ways." Critics of some global warming scenarios say the models exaggerate the potential problems. "My feeling (along with the authors) is that it is likely that the models are insufficiently sensitive," Schmidt said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. He said the reasons for the lack of sensitivity are unclear. "Overall, the models have a track record of getting large scale changes right, particularly in temperatures, but at the regional scale (like in the Arctic), there is more variability," he wrote.

The Boulder-based researchers used a combination of early reports from aircraft and ships and more recent satellite measurements to come up with their observations of the ice melt. They said the discrepancy between their observations and computer projections indicate computer models may have failed to portray the entire impact of increasing levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The computer models indicated that increased greenhouse gases and natural climate variations were about equally responsible for ice loss between 1979 and 2006, the researchers said. They said their own study indicates greenhouse gases may have a "significantly greater" role than the models suggested.

A number of factors may lead the computer models to underestimate the rate of decline in sea ice, the researchers said. Several models overestimated the thickness of the ice, and the models may have failed to fully account for changes in currents in the atmosphere and oceans that transfer heat to polar regions, they said.

Recent studies (November 2004) have shown that stocks of krill in Antarctica have declined dramatically in recent years. The reason for this is likely to be a fall in the amount of sea ice in the winter months particularly in the Antarctic Peninsula region.

Krill numbers may have dropped by as much as 80% since the 1970's - so today's stocks are a mere 1/5th of what they were only 30 years ago. The decline in krill may in turn account for the decline in the numbers of some penguin species.

Dr Angus Atkinson from British Antarctic Survey, says: "This is the first time that we have understood the full scale of this decline. Krill feed on the algae found under the surface of the sea-ice, which acts as a kind of 'nursery'.

The Antarctic Peninsula, a key breeding ground for the krill, is one of the places in the world where there has been the greatest rise in temperatures due to global warming. This region has warmed by 2.5°C in the last 50 years (much more than the mean global rate), with a striking consequential decrease in winter sea-ice cover.

"We don't fully understand how the loss of sea-ice here is connected to the warming, but we believe that it could be behind the decline in krill."

There are commercial implications as well as scientific ones. The Southern Ocean is a valuable fisheries resource, many of the species caught feed on krill. Thousands of tourists are also attracted to Antarctica to enjoy the spectacular wildlife, most of which feed on krill.

There has been previous speculation that krill stocks might have decreased, based on smaller more localized surveys over shorter time periods. This new finding comes from data from nine countries working in Antarctica who pooled their separate data covering 40 Antarctic summers, in the period between 1926 and 2003. This is the first time such a large-scale view of change across the Southern Ocean has been seen.

Is science or philosophy/wisdom the key?

Yes. We're ALL gonna die. Every last one of us. Eventually.

Why am I the only one who's thinking about the bigger picture? Not the earth but the universe, and not a 100 hundred years but billions of years.

It's not going to be around forever; at least not in it's present state. I'm no astro-physics expert but eventually either the universe will collapse again, killing all life as we know it, or all matter will be drawn into a singularity.

Nobody has even mentioned the fact that our sun will die sooner or later, and will we have to transport our selves off this planet if we want to survive in the mean time.

Researchers in Switzerland have demonstrated more-efficient water-splitting solar cells based on a cheap, abundant, and long-lasting material: rust. The advance could lead to a cheap and energy-efficient way to generate hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles using solar energy.

If this level of efficiency can be met (20% xs), hydrogen-generating solar energy could mitigate some of the challenges that threaten to make hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles impractical, says George Sverdrup, hydrogen technology manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO. For example, if consumers and businesses used these panels to make hydrogen, rather than getting hydrogen from a large facility, it would cut out the cost of shipping hydrogen, making hydrogen more affordable. Solar-to-hydrogen panels would be more efficient than small electrolysis machines, and they would ensure that the hydrogen comes from a renewable source.

The good news is that marine algae farms could be an expensive source of petrochemical like compounds to replace crude oil as base chemical stocks for industrial materials manufacturing.

Higher taxation is not IMO the way to radically curb the use of fossil fuels, coal, nuke, etc. Prohibition is the way IMO (after an adjustment period). When the problem is so advanced, economic/financial tools fail. Policy/legislation is the way. There need to be humans alive for markets to exist, that is obvious. As obvious as the melting of Alpine glaciers.