So is global warming realllly happening?  Yes, of course.  Is it cyclical?  Or man made? 
I’m by no means a scientist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.  (lol)
(not really mom…we didn’t have a fight…it’s a line from the tv commercial)

Okay, so.  The Earth is about 4.5 Billion years old.  It is constantly moving in and out of cycles of warm and cold.  About 30% of the Earth has been covered by glaciers during some point in time during the last 3 million years.  During an ice age, ‘summers’ are short.  They are not like the summers we experience today.  The winters are long and cruel and vicious.  Plants and animals have a tough go of it.  Every thing is frozen over or desert like.  There is no in between.  (This is just a quick history lesson….hopefully I don’t lose ya!)

Also, we have pole shifts that contribute to climate change.  We see shift evidence when archaeologists dig up frozen saber tooth tigers, elephants,  hippos and tropical plant life in Siberia of all places! 

About every 100,000 years our climate experiences “interglacial warm periods” (it temporarily gets warmer for a duration of 10-20,000 years).  By the way, we are in one of these periods now. 

This most recent warm period (that we’re in now) started about 15,000 years ago.  Glaciers gradually melt, sea levels rise, the forests unfold and flourish.  The summers and winters are…well, like the summers & winters we have now.  We swim, play on the beach, snowboard, frolic in the fields, we walk our dogs and play golf.   The birds sing and animals roam freely.  Life is warm and fuzzy!  Let’s all hug!

We are technically in the end of this warm period….but in the 70′s we were introduced to the term ‘greenhouse effect’.  Now look, we NEED the greenhouse effect.  It’s a natural part of how the earth works! 

All life requires the suns energy.  But we if we absorbed all the energy from the sun we would burn up.  Our outer atmosphere throws back  1/3 of the sunlight.  The stuff that reaches us bounces back and gets trapped in ‘greenhouse gases’.  These gases slowly stop the heat from escaping…and is like a big warm cuddly blanket for the earth.  (Makes you want to curl up and read a good blog!)

Now, like chocolate or Lay’s chips…you CAN have too much of a good thing.  Man-made pollution speeds up the natural process and creates MORE greenhouse gases (more than what we need) .  Temperatures are now slightly RISING rather than continuing to cool.  Uh-oh. 

When we are hoggishly burning gas, oil and coal we are releasing carbon dioxide.  When we deforest we are taking away trees that would otherwise help balance the gases in the atmosphere.  Yes, go hug a tree, they are very helpful to your existence!

It’s a proven fact that since the Industrial Revolution we’ve increased these emissions into the atmosphere in a big way.  If we continue down this road, by the end of this century we could see the carbon dioxide increase up to 350% over what it was before the Industrial Revolution.

So yeah, when people say….ahhh…global warming is a farce!  It’s all a cycle…well………it is cyclical!  But what they fail to comprehend is that we are speeding up the natural process!  We are a very wasteful bunch of people.   The Native Americans had it right on the money….they killed an animal and used every part of it for something.  No waste.  They only took what they needed.  They replenished what they did take.  They respected the Earth because they were allowed to live on it. 

Me?  I think they were right.  AND…. I may move to um…say….eastern Pennsylvania.  Looks like that may be ocean front property in the future.