Sarcastic Devil: "Wow. There must be at least 50 people there. Great turnout! It's good to know so many are willing to make a statement about global warming/global cooling/climate change/natural cycles/unknown variables/atmospheric-carbon levels!"

Impressed Angel: "Thanks for taking a (rare) nice Saturday to come together to make a statement about what you care about. It's inspiring."

As you can see, I am torn about this climate-change business. We are so young as a species and know so very little about long-term climatological/astronomic cycles, much less the many unknown variables. 

Concurrently, we are very clearly on an unsustainable "energy path", and burning/releasing carbon does, in fact, cause atmospheric change.

The Earth (and the Universe) are in a constant state of flux; in their quest their stillness, molecules move ceaselessly. Why do we assume that a planet's atmosphere will be forever-inclined towards biological habitation? Things change.

Then again, one of my greatest pet peeves is when able-bodied people push the "automatic door opener" buttons. I recently saw a perfectly healthy man approach a door, start to open it, then retreat and walk four feet to push the button. What a waste of electricity! What a lazy-ass!

So I'm torn. The sun is closing in. The end is (eventually) nigh. Yet I want my great-grandchildren to eat freshwater trout.

so very torn about climate change said...

Concurrently, we are very clearly on an unsustainable "energy path", and burning/releasing carbon does, in fact, cause atmospheric change.

This is an old version of a Malthusian argument suggests a number of things.

It's selfish, for one thing, because it presupposes that the whole intent of keeping the Earth in check should be solely for human beings.  We're here for the geological short haul, but we shouldn't forget the planet is pretty resilient when it comes to sustaining life in general.

Be it natural industry causing atmosphere problems, or as a nice History Channel show demonstrated that it is possible to use weather changing techniques to gain war advantage (I know, I didn't believe it at first either), the life on this planet will probably go on, just maybe not for humans.

You can disable a powerful uke (big dump truck) with snipping the right wire, but the Earth biodiversity is a little bit strong to suggest humans could inadvertently do the same thing.