Natural or man made?

global warming is obviously man-made. any intelligent, educated, rational person with the least bit of knowledge of fundamental science would understand that, i would like to believe.

the earth is over four billion years old, and for the past hundreds of thousands of years it has been GENTLY cycling between ice ages and what are called hot houses. it simply takes many thousands of years for temperatures to shift, not a mere decade. nothing in the universe has changed that would account for this frightening new pace of the earth's warming. it's a local problem; it's our problem and we need to take responsibility for it.

also, concerning convection: i'm so glad someone mentioned this as there were others struggling to understand how global warming can cause both warmth and cold simultaneously. global warming is not just about melting ice and flooding our coasts; global warming is about disrupting natural events and creating extreme patterns in the weather, ecosystems, currents, etc.

consider the following:
the main reason western europe is as warm as it is is due to the tropical ocean current coming from the east coast of U.S.A (warm water from florida, basically). global warming has many complicated, unbalancing effects on the earth. changing the temperature of the ocean alters its salt content and changes the circulation cells. in fact, it's estimated that, if we don't do anything about this, we could see europe slip into an ice age in as soon as 15-20 years or so. by "ice age," i mean that the average temperature in europe would drop very dramatically--10+ degrees. interestingly, my spanish grandfather has lived in madrid his entire life and he swears that spain is getting colder every year, especially recently. for some reason, i'm not surprised.

also, the majority of the world "believes" in global warming. the U.S. government, too, knows damn well that global warming is real. it's a shame they can get away with smoke screening. the bush administration has refused to publish reports until the authors rewrite them to sound less threatening. politics is all about word choice and word games; they're VERY good at playing these games to manipulate public opinion and knowledge.