There's something happening here

Paul Douglas, a Minnesota meteorologist and author, writes a regular weather feature in the Star Tribune. This article first appeared Thursday on the Huffington Post.

I'm going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I'm a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I'm a Penn State meteorologist, and the weather maps I'm staring at are making me very uncomfortable. No, you're not imagining it: we've clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern.

To complicate matters I'm in a small, frustrated and endangered minority: a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up. It's ironic. The root of the word conservative is "conserve". A staunch Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, set aside vast swaths of America for our National Parks System, the envy of the world. Another Republican, Richard Nixon, launched the EPA. Now some in my party believe the EPA and all those silly "global warming alarmists" are going to get in the way of drilling and mining our way to prosperity. Well, we have good reason to be alarmed.

BE to me...I can see what you're saying that there are interesting things happening with the weather, but very explainable IMO.

Last Saturday, here in Utah we were reaching temps close to 70 which is rare this early in the year. On Sunday, a storm front blew in from the Northeast and brought the temps down to the high 30's, which is colder than normal as well. When that storm front finaly reached Texas it mixed with warm gulf air and produced severe thunderstorms and tornados.

Could it be as simple as the air was colder than normal that mixed with the normally warm air of the gulf?

you really believe man isnt ruining the environment and possibly doing damge to the ozone?  Do you really believe man isnt destroying our oceans with the shit that is being dumped in there?

It doesnt matter what happened a million years ago, what matters is whats happening now. I guess we should just continue down are same path without adjusting anything and then just hope that it was a weather cycle, and if we wrong and destroy the planet for generations down the road, we can just say opps, we messed up

The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing.

The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut.

 That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.

I guess we have Coca-Cola to thank .....   Polar bears with jobs multiply faster .........

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Either way, if we want a successful and egalitarian economy/political system of taxation, we should be taxing land at the ground level, especially carbon based fossil fuels. I think we all agree that we want to be able to reap the full benefits of the product of our own labor, but who produced the land(which includes petroleum etc.)?

This is why the American Henry George solved the problem so eloquently over a century ago, and the fervor at which both sides of the political system lashes out at the idea, only strengthens my knowing that it is the solution to most our problems

Land Value Tax
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There is already property tax based on land value.  Such a capital tax is among the worst taxes because it ignores ability to pay.  Carbon tax is better because it targets fuel consumption and is based on ability to pay.  .