But even more frightening is the mass ignorance of the facts.  Mass delusionbal media is doing it's job too well.  Those Mayan cities where everyone suddenly dissappeared or the population of ancient Rome suddenly going from millions to thousands after destruction of the aqueducts.  These are the forgotten warnings.

What about the Gulf Stream conveyor?  Could the halt of the flow cause reflective cooling from less snow melt in northern regions?  Is there a chance the double exponential effect could be tempered with this sort of event?

Right now human welfare is secondary, since humans caused this.  Crop and food disruption could really sound a warning that government can't ignore.  With food riots already in progress from ethanol farming (commodity grain prices tripled), this seems to be another counter exponential effect.

There is not much that be called actual civilization left, measuring the state of present corporate culture and governance.

All we have is our circle of family and friends and what is left of the natural world.  The mass culture is on a continual hair trigger for massive disruption and collapse.

Liberty asociated with traditional human rights has already been completely undermined by the corporatist reaction to terrorism.  Official state kidnapping, torture, and murder are accepted as a matter of course.

We are in a world of hurt, about to become a world of chaos.  Maybe Jim Kuntsler is right?  

My feeling is that the catastrophic return of a new ice age can protect pockets of civilization isolated in interior areas like the northern midwest.  But then disease wafting in on the air from the great conflagration could even wipe out these outposts.

Is our future history already written?  We died off because humans couldn't "get the math" of exponential change?  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Not peak oil.  Kuntsler is only right about the decomplication.  The disintegration of mass production and mass transportation?  

It will continue on a distributed level, hehey.

Is very sophisticated small scale production anymore expensive than centralized mass production?  Not with ubiquitos information mobility.  Feed the file to the robot, it makes the part.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Great post, and thanks for all of the links to relevant articles and related content.

One quick comment regarding you "Our Changing Weather" paragraph, though. You point to an article that was posted on Gristmill about climate deniers/delayers being given too much media limelight. Then, point to Roger Pielke Jr's "geek-talk" and "Update on Falsification of Climate Predictions" article. Sounded alarming! When I did go to that article, I found the following statement by Mr. Pielke:

"None of this discussion means that the basic conclusion that greenhouse gases affect the climate system is wrong, or that action to mitigate emissions do not make sense. What it does mean is that we should be concerned about the overselling of climate predictions and the corresponding risks to public credibility and advocacy built upon these predictions."

The article also highlighted climate variability -- and weather vs. climate. Seems that this post actually makes the same point you do, not a different one -- perhaps just not as blatant and sexy or gripping in its writing.

Seems a little misguiding to say this person is nay-saying global warming.

The Aqua satellite "expert" is likely refering to Roy Spencer.

(i.e. The guy who used to say that the troposphere was cooling, then it was found out his math was flipped in reverse, either by mistake or on purpose.)

Would be interesting to see some commentary on Spencer et al. 2007.

Romm's story is silly now that 2008 turned out to be 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07 according to the Met Office's Hadley Centre. So, the global cooling trend continues. For the record, that's no net warming since 1998, and 1998 was one of the warmest on record only because of the monster El Nino that year. CO2-induced global warming doesn't exist. Climate is driven by natural cycles, and man's CO2 emissions haven't, can't, and won't drive catastrophic climate changes.