I wonder if this study takes into account the energy intensive things we Americans tend to do on our time off, however.

I think that gasoline at $5-10/gallon would do marvels for the physical and mental health of the US population, not to mention the benefits to the environment.

Imagine what might happen if more Americans walked to work and the market, raked their leaves (instead of blowing them), swam in the water (instead of jetskiing through it), and walked in the woods (instead of riding through it on ATVs) -- and on and on and on. What might happen to rivers and lakes if fishermen ROWED their boats.

Just an idle fantasy.

or....

Milk at $8 a gallon (think about fewer cattle stinking up the atmosphere)

No more delivery pizza.

Leave the trees in the forest, the biowaste is difficult to get rid of.

I can't swim in the water..too many microbes might make me sick.

Everybody sing with me:

"Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream..."

OR

If people turned off their computers and quit spending so much time on blog sites making desultory comments! :-) (like mine)

Merry Christmas all!

how can my wife walk 45 miles to work ?

Implementing shorter work weeks will simply reduce the productivity of our great nation and result in higher unemplyment rates, just like Europe has now. The idealist view of the socialist utopia where we all ride bikes to work and run in fields of flowers has been proven over and over not to work. For example, they do this now in North Korea, and are starving to death.

What is amazing to note is that the United States of America has managed to clean itself up on its own without oppressive world treaties. We are the cleanest, most environmentally sound country in the world. The effects of a free society result in eventual self-imposed, environmentally sound business decisions that benefit everyone. The timber industry stopped clear-cutting and started "managing" their timber lands when they relaized they would run out of trees to sell - not because of a treaty, law, or regulation. The steel industry cleaned itself up when they realized they had to upgrade their processes to compete with Japan, before the EPA even existed!

Government imposed policies, like the Kyoto Protocol, only stifle economic development, cause massive unemployment rates, and force pollution to occur in the less developed parts of the planet. Businesses outsource their polluting industries to third world countries to stay in business. So the pollution still occurs, just somewhere else.

False science got world governments to ban an extremely safe and effective chemical known as DDT. That ban has since resulted in 48 million malaria deaths in the last 30 years in places where malaria had been nearly eliminated.

Another false science, global warming, is now causing governments to enact more policies which are harmful to the human society. Science has already proven that global warming is caused singly by the periodic energy cycles of our Sun, and not by humans. But since socialists in our world society have made this thinking to be politically incorrect, the world community will continue to follow blindly into economic chaos by ceding its liberties to bureaucracies.

The steel industry cleaned itself up when they realized they had to upgrade their processes to compete with Japan, before the EPA even existed!

The steel industry cleaned itself up?

Fred is either lying, joking, breathtakingly ignorant, or all three. Maybe Fred and woodNfish are working on a stand-up act. First of all, the steel industry long ago lost the competition with Japan. The US steel industry fought each and every environmental regulation VIGOROUSLY, each and every step of the way. A very SHORT and incomplete list of federal regulations made necessary by the irresponsible behavior of the steel industry includes:

• The 1970 Clean Air Act: Restricting steel industry emissions of sulur dioxide, particulates, and toxic releases.
• The 1972 Clean Water Act: Restricting steel industry effluent.
• 1980 Comprehensive Environment Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund): Forcing the industry to clean up the mess it made when first polluted and then walked away from plant sites all over the nation.
• 1982 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA): Driven in part by steel industry production production and improper disposal of dusts, sludge and slag -- in particular, EAF dust containing heavy metals.
• 1986 Superfund Amendments and Re-authorization Act (SARA): Demanding that steel plants report their environmental discharges.
• 1990 Clean Air Act: Needed because of unchecked industry emissions of carcinogens like benzene and coal tars (from coke plants), heavy metals (from blast furnaces, basic oxygen furnaces, and EAF steel making), volatile organics, and nitrogen oxides.

False science got world governments to ban an extremely safe and effective chemical known as DDT. That ban has since resulted in 48 million malaria deaths in the last 30 years in places where malaria had been nearly eliminated.

"False science"? "Safe and effective"? Whatever Fred has been smoking, he certainly seems to have inhaled. The grain of truth in this claim is that their are recent indications that the benefits of limited DDT application to combat specific mosquitos might outweigh its established environmental consequences. That effort is being driven by the scientific community "Fred" attempts to castigate. The organization that led the successful drive to ban DDT within the US, Environmental Defense, wrote this letter to the USAID in May, 2004, in support of the limited indoor use of DDT as part of the campaign against malaria.

Fred apparently prefers distorted cheapshots to a fair presentation of what various participants actually propose.

Science has already proven that global warming is caused singly by the periodic energy cycles of our Sun, and not by humans. But since socialists in our world society have made this thinking to be politically incorrect, the world community will continue to follow blindly into economic chaos by ceding its liberties to bureaucracies.

The great thing about blogs like this is that claptrap like this can be called what it is: claptrap and rubbish. Science has "proven" no such thing, Fred. It is not "political incorrectness" that causes a lunatic who claims that DDT is "safe and effective" to be ignored. Instead, it is the reality that once a point has been compellingly demonstrated and proven, it is not necessary to revisit it unless and until new data or theory is presented that challenge it.

If Fred wants a real example of a bureaucracy taking liberty, muzzling free speech, and denying the taxpayers access to knowledge we have bought, paid for, and have a right to know, then perhaps Fred might look more deeply into the way the NASA researcher Dr. James Hansen was muzzled last year by the current administration.

Fred claims that the US steel industry "cleaned itself up", that DDT is "safe and effective", and that the "false science" of global warming is a product of a worldwide "socialist" conspiracy. All I can say is that opposition from "skeptics" like Fred persuades me that the rest of us must be on the right track.

Butbutbutbut Fred. What about the children? (sarcasm off...)

Great post. Hopefully your pal Brookline takes note.

If the north pole will be melted during the next 40 years,how match is average sea level risen after that.
Best way understand for an average man, i believe so if that's all right by you, is draw this on the paper from where can be seen X and Y axis.
X axis present time function and to same extent
Y axis present sea level developing presumably upwards.

I remain yours faithfully: Jouko K�rkk�inen

i'm not from the states so i really know little about snow. i'm from the philippines and if you are experiencing a warm christmas there, well here, its strange that it still rains in december. usually storms come until september only. but its really peculiar that we have a typhoon in december. and on this year was when the strongest storms were ever recorded

Please note:

The US GDP is approx. 29% of the entire world GDP yet we consume 25% of the world's energy making us a less energy-intensive economy than the rest of the world.

Also, simple math will yield the result that the rest of the world consumes 75% of the world's energy while producing only 71% of the world's GDP.

why is it that US energy consumption as % of global is never quoted in context of our GDP dominance?

Perhaps there is a political agenda?

What do I have to do to get approval from the site owner to post a comment?

Mr Jouko, if ice is floating in water and that
ice melts there is no change in the sea level.
Only ice that's held up by a continent or
island and melts will raise sea level. This is
a direct result of the principle of bouyancy
(a floating object displaces a volume of liquid
equal to its weight).

Mark

What is sad is that many people, especially in the US, believe the arguments that Fred makes, which are based on ideology (government regulation is always wrong, private corporations and the market produce all good), and not on science or even common sense. How else can someone believe that "Science has already proven that global warming is caused singly by the periodic energy cycles of our Sun, and not by humans"?

Saddening is;
the intolerance a position receives, such as Fred and many sane, rational people of the globe, subscribe to, believe, and profess.
This group of scientist and others are treated as if their facts hold no water to presumptions of the environmentalist fervor.

These berated and trampled beliefs are backed by scientific fact, not consensus. Their belief and proof, subscribes to a greater belief that man is not the destroyer of this globe. That there are greater performers on the world stage and by comparison, man is insignificant.

There are many scientists opposed to the consensus of man made global warming. There is simply not enough hard data to support and to conclude that man is the essence of global warming.

Environmentalism; a Religion:

Wrought with Gods, Sins, Immorality, Punishment and Apocalypse.
An environmental belief, that man is a plague upon Mother Nature. Sinning against her beyond repair.
Accounting amongst the facts for this religious belief is data contorted and/or inadequately studied and tested. The sampling rate contained in this data is less then 1% of planet Earths' tallied position amongst the heavens.

The data is flimsy and askew.
Those who choose science by consensus remain tithed to uncertainty and presumption.
Creating in themselves, the hypocrites they purport not to be.

The only logical conclusion the environmental, global warming, religion can reach is, that man is bad and he should be destroyed in the name of saving the earth.

Global warming scares: hurricanes, Atlantic Ocean conveyor currents
Two More Global Warming False Alarms

By Dennis T. Avery

Saturday, December 16, 2006

The global warming debate has developed a pattern: In part A, a scientist makes a scary claim and gets headlines for himself, and his funding source, across the known world. In part B, a few months later new evidence blows the scary claim away�but with no press coverage of its demise.���

Two more global warming scares have just been quietly blown away: the claim that global warming is causing more and bigger hurricanes; and the claim that warming threatens to shut down the great Atlantic Ocean conveyor currents.

In the wake of Katrina, the message that global warming was producing more and bigger hurricanes led the news on TV and the front pages for weeks. Now, the journal Science has published a reanalysis of the recent global hurricane data.���

When the data were analyized on a uniform framework of space and time, the regions that get 85 percent of the howling tropical storms show no upward trend in storm energy released.�Some even show small declines. The Atlantic is the only region showing an increase, with a doubling of storm energy between the 1980s and the last decade. However, the Atlantic increase is globally canceled out by the North Pacific, where storm energy releases dropped 60 percent.���

James Kossin of the University of Wisconsin led the reanalysis of the tropical storms.�He says there's no sign that tropical storms are intensifying globally as the ocean waters warm.��� This is further endorsed by the old British Navy records from the Caribbean, which indicate more than twice as many major land falling hurricanes per decade during the Little Ice Age years from 1700 to 1850 as during the last 50 years of global warming.���

The Abrupt Global Cooling Scare has also been discredited. In 2004, researchers had moored 19 new buoyant, instrument-laden cables from West Africa to the Bahamas, to get better long-term data on the conveyor currents. In the process, they also took a �snapshot� of north-south current flows and compared them with similar �snapshots� dating back to 1957. Horrors, the snapshot showed a 30 percent drop in the northward flow of the Atlantic currents over 47 years!

That conclusion was headlined, along with the scary scenario of a Gulf Stream collapse like the one that threw the world back into Ice Age temperatures 12,000 years ago. Now, however, several years of data from the instrument-laden floating cables are telling us that the 30 percent drop in current flow is within the conveyor's normal variability. Oops. As Science said, �False alarm.�

Even the global climate models knew better. The big Goddard Space Institute climate model found that without melt-water from the huge mile-thick ice sheets that covered Canada and Northern Europe during the Ice Age, the Atlantic currents showed a safe and sane linear response to further warming.���

Keep this �scare-now and discredit-later� pattern of global warming press releases firmly in mind for the future. Weather is highly variable, and the climate's constant changes only reveal trends over long periods�but the global warming scare tactics have wrung $18 billion out of recent federal budgets for climate change research.���

Remember, too, that hundreds of research studies in recent decades have found a moderate, natural 1500-year climate cycle that explains the earth's pre-industrial 0.5 degree C warming from 1850 to 1940, and may also explain much of the very modest 0.2 degree C net warming since 1940. If increased atmospheric CO2 has produced nothing more than 0.1 degree or so of warming in the last 65 years, we may need to rethink the whole global warming issue.