Here's an interesting article about climate change and what is different about the climate change we are experiencing these days compared to other climate changes in the pasts millions of years.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/the-climate-is-set-to-change-orders-of-magnitude-faster-than-at-any-other-time-in-the-past-65-million-years/278290/

Lots of things are necessary for one to be happy, but under certain conditions one of them does not have to be money.

Good health obviously promotes happiness, though I think there are people who don't have what we would call "good health" are are nevertheless happy.

In happy communities I've seen, people have lots of social relationships. They are not isolated. They may live alone, but they don't remain alone all the time. Contact with other human beings is necessary for happiness. (Certain kinds of contact -- a guard outside your cell telling you to shut the F+++ up -- doesn't come under this category.)

You have to have food and shelter.

I think having a sense of place and purpose promotes happiness. If you are an untitled man in Samoan society, you know who and what you are, you know what your job is, you fit in, and you have a purpose -- to support your extended family as well as your own smaller, nuclear family. So we might condense these elements into something called "security."

One of the major components of happiness is to have someone to love and share with.

As far as other things are concerned, what makes people happy varies from person to person. I could stand life if all I had was my television set -- I spend enough dumb hours in front of it, admittedly watching both intellectually interesting as well as really dumb shows. But a lot of my unhappiness would be gone if I did not have my reading. Some people don't read and are content not to. We're all different.

As for the definition of poverty, my dictionary says: "Lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts." The dictionary does not mention money.

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Where do you place the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society in this spectrum of conservative-middle-of-the-road- liberal-socialist-communist spectrum ?

The majority of scientists are, in my opinion, honest. You have merely to watch how very, very careful they are in making the announcements of the results of their experiments to see that they care very much about their reputation -- on which, after all, their reputations depend.

I had not heard that this is true, but it makes a lot of sense and fits into the picture. Trees use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. Fewer trees, less carbon dioxide used, more carbon dioxide remains in the air. There are so many reasons not to deforest areas you would think people would know the terrible effects this practice has -- floods, greater carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, erosion, etc.

On the other hand, if you are a Republican and want to read the consideration of other Republicans that climate change is real, read this opinion piece by other Republicans from today's New York Times.


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OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
A Republican Case for Climate Action
By WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS, LEE M. THOMAS, WILLIAM K. REILLY and CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN
Published: August 1, 2013 3 Comments
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EACH of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally.
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There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.

The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”

A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but that is unachievable in the current political gridlock in Washington. Dealing with this political reality, President Obama’s June climate action plan lays out achievable actions that would deliver real progress. He will use his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the nation’s power plants and spur increased investment in clean energy technology, which is inarguably the path we must follow to ensure a strong economy along with a livable climate.

The president also plans to use his regulatory power to limit the powerful warming chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons and encourage the United States to join with other nations to amend the Montreal Protocol to phase out these chemicals. The landmark international treaty, which took effect in 1989, already has been hugely successful in solving the ozone problem.

Rather than argue against his proposals, our leaders in Congress should endorse them and start the overdue debate about what bigger steps are needed and how to achieve them — domestically and internationally.

As administrators of the E.P.A under Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush, we held fast to common-sense conservative principles — protecting the health of the American people, working with the best technology available and trusting in the innovation of American business and in the market to find the best solutions for the least cost.

That approach helped us tackle major environmental challenges to our nation and the world: the pollution of our rivers, dramatized when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969; the hole in the ozone layer; and the devastation wrought by acid rain.

The solutions we supported worked, although more must be done. Our rivers no longer burn, and their health continues to improve. The United States led the world when nations came together to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Acid rain diminishes each year, thanks to a pioneering, market-based emissions-trading system adopted under the first President Bush in 1990. And despite critics’ warnings, our economy has continued to grow.

Climate change puts all our progress and our successes at risk. If we could articulate one framework for successful governance, perhaps it should be this: When confronted by a problem, deal with it. Look at the facts, cut through the extraneous, devise a workable solution and get it done.

We can have both a strong economy and a livable climate. All parties know that we need both. The rest of the discussion is either detail, which we can resolve, or purposeful delay, which we should not tolerate.

Mr. Obama’s plan is just a start. More will be required. But we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.

The writers are former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency: William D. Ruckelshaus, from its founding in 1970 to 1973, and again from 1983 to 1985; Lee M. Thomas, from 1985 to 1989; William K. Reilly, from 1989 to 1993; and Christine Todd Whitman, from 2001 to 2003.

Bangee, the reason you have been hearing about over population for years is that the world's population has been increasing for years and years and years. The reason we haven't had a much larger die-off of people due to starvation is that the "Green revolution" occurred -- a way to get greater crop yields from the same area of land. You may deny the threat of overpopulation as much as you want, but the tide of demographics is implacable and inescapable. Shutter Bugger is correct.

You have contributed a lot of interesting ideas in this discussion, and I am glad to have your reference for documents directly from historic figures.

However, I have to disagree with one statement in your recent post. You have stated: " Now there is no freedom OF religion...they have turned it into freedom FROM religion."

I could not disagree with you more. Freedom of religion exists today. You can join any church or faith you want to, and the police are not going to hunt you down or restrict your access to your place of worship. You have absolute freedom of religion.

Freedom of religion also includes freedom from religion. One does not preclude the other. In fact, the freedom not to have to join a religion is an important part of freedom of religion.

The one thing you do not have is the freedom to inflict any particular religion on other people. You cannot do this by force. And you cannot use taxpayers' money (non-believers' money) to promote your faith. Your faith is your business. One of the cornerstones of this nation is the practice of tolerance.

Sahlins looked carefully at the cultures of Oceania and came to a number of interesting conclusions. One insight was that whenever the average person feels he still has a shot at being at the top of the social pyramid -- becoming a chief instead of just a commoner, for instance -- revolution was highly unlikely. But when an individual's hope of social or political class advancement wasn't present, this paved the way for revolution.

I am wondering what this portends for the United States. We see a widening of the gap between the haves and the have nots. The Horatio Alger belief -- that all you have to do t succeed and get rich is to work hard --is vanishing. I speak with young people very frequently. I don't mean middle school students. I mean college students. One of the college students was telling me a while ago that his fellow students at a nearby university were becoming so discouraged by our economic system that they were actually using the word "revolution." They had decided, many of them, not to vote in the past major election because they didn't feel it would do any good. They weren't planning it, but they were predicting that something has to change or maybe a revolution would someday happen. That some of our young people are becoming so disaffected saddens me.

A number of you have brought up the example of Detroit and that city's failure and current situation in order to vilify liberals and liberalism and Democrats. They seem to have felt that all Democrats are responsible for Detroit's failure and that all liberals are also responsible for it.

It seems clear that Detroit's leadership was solidly Democratic for a long, long time. And it seems clear that Detroit had several dozen greedy unions that demanded too much and helped bring the city down. But that doesn't mean that all liberals and all Democrats are responsible for Detroit's failure.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-detroits-death-by-democracy/2013/07/31/74a109c2-f94a-11e2-afc1-c850c6ee5af8_story.html

Here's an article that tells a little bit about the situation. I tend to agree with this article -- that Detroit should not be bailed out. What do you think ?

My understanding of the reason for the delay was to make an accommodation to business because business people were saying the change was coming too quickly. This may be true. This may not be true. However, most of the folks in this forum hate Obama so much and so irrationally -- and I think you have lined yourself up with them -- that I would not expect any of them to accept anything Obama does for any decent reasons.

I have to repeat here what I have said a number of times: like social security, Medicare, and a lot of other government programs, ObamaCare is here to stay. There will be opportunities, I hope, to work out problems still in it. But the majority of the people in this nation (about 62%) either approve of it as it stands or want a plan even more extensive than ObamaCare, such as a single payer plan.

You are sure of a lot of foolish things.

Sea Chelle, out of curiosity, what is the most expensive hospital in the nation ?

Good to have your insights, participation and ideas about this.

Are you familiar with the work of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins ?