"Plus, he wrote, "They've overlooked humans' capacity to adapt —like building dikes.""

Seriously? This guy works for the NY Times?

Thank you. THANK YOU for this article. I was incredulous at Tierney's column when I read it in the NY Times. What is the point of encouraging hot dog consumption and use of plastic bags? The whole thing stunk. Your article should be an op-ed in the Times.

Holy smokes we should build dikes around this moron's office? He may want top take a look at a map of NYC if rising levels don't concern him

Humans adapt by deciding to adapt. To some degree, like our fellow bio-entities on planet Earth, we adapt behaviorally and physically in response to environmental effects.

Sometimes we adapt as individuals, sometimes as families, tribes and/or communities, the fittest becoming the norm as the less fit die off.

But in the global culture of industrial humankind in the early 21st century we are locked into behaviors and physical traits by that cultural deliberateness, led, or misled, by those who make the decisions to continue to make our personal decisions in the same way, based on trust of others, not our own data collection, data processing, and data analysis.

For decades the leadership decision-makers have decided for us all not to adapt to the changed environment, ignoring the scholarly research of those who discovered Threatening Change (capital 'T,' capital 'C') occurring. The threat increased with their ignorance of it, and their misleadership to lead us all to ignore it. Their domination of the global media made their message of ignorance equal to, and then greater than, the scholars' messages of warning.

Here again, we see their hand encouraging the general public, from an influential source, 'The Newspaper of Record,' to ignore, to be ignorant of, the scholars' warnings. We are encouraged, authoritatively, to follow instead, their cardboard cutout hand-puppets and talking heads, mouthing words imitating the scholars, mis-citing the scholars, but saying the exact opposite of what the scholars objectively discovered. Their intent is to influence behavior subjectively, for fun and profit.

Nothing you trust can be trusted. You can't trust your doctor. He only knows what the pharmaceutical companies pay the medical schools to teach, how to put people on chemical pills; not medicines that cure, just chemicals that have some effect on a symptom or part of a disease, but become a cause of other diseases.

You can't trust the media. It serves the interests that buy the advertising, or page space or air time, to promote their profit endeavors, often posing as objective news reporting, literally dressing and behaving like newscasters, journalists, and authorities in a given field.

You can't trust the politicians. Their allegiance is to the money sources that elected them, and will re-elect them, or turn to their opponent if they don't deliver their allegiance through legislation favoring them.

Police? Often corrupt. Firemen. Often arsonists. Soldiers? Often gangsters on orders. Honest cops, firemen, soldiers, doctors and other health-care personnel are sometimes outnumbered by the corrupt.

Trust a realtor or lending institution to buy your home? Trust a Savings & Loan? (If they still existed.) Trust the media? Trust the food companies taken over by the tobacco companies that addict and kill 435,000 Americans a year, year after year, to sell you healthy food?

Something changed in your diet in the 1980's and made 63% of Americans overweight, 34% obese. From 1990 to 2000, diabetes, a diet-related disorder, not a gene or a germ, but a diet-caused disease, one of a complex of diet-related disorders, increased 60%. Sixty! Percent!

Did any of the scholars manage to find a way to tell you? Did any of the sources you trust tell you? Doctors? Media? Politicians?

Do your own research, and beware the source. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Thank you Daniel Luzer! Always nice to see some fact-checking being done.

I do have a Q though - isn't the NY Times supposed to fact-check its articles? Why aren't they fact-checking Tierney's claims?

Spare us from ideological Libertarians, whose sentiments and prescriptions are as faith-based as Mullah Omar's are. They've never lived in, never seen, the world they advocate, yet they push it as if the "principles" are proven and obvious.

What defines the Libertarian world-view is a near-autistic conviction that no person has the right to have expectations of another. Indeed, relying on anyone for anything is seen as a failing. They imagine that, having been raised to adulthood by self-sacrificing parents and a supporting social system, they are somehow exempt from an obligation to continue and extend that blanket of support to the people around them. Libertarians think they are islands in the stream (then, what is the stream, if we are all supposed to be islands?)

They supposedly want to live in a world that would make no demands on them, beyond the "natural" consequence of failing to protect oneself from starving, or some other result of physical laws. To me, this attitude is better described by another term: narcissism, or self-centeredness.

They call it a preference for "freedom" or "liberty," but it's really a fantasy of not having obligations to meet. Typically American, the idea that one can benefit from one's connection to the social network, but not then be obligated in turn, is spiritually toxic, and tears apart the net of connections between us, even as rattlesnake venom degrades and destroys tissues in the body.

If they (really!) had their way, they would never have been fed by their parents, never been educated, or shown how to farm, fish, read or count; much less write or govern.

Libertarianism is juvenile fantasy, amply illustrated by Robert Heinlein's science-fiction books. Heinlein was an arrested adolescent, still idolized by "modern" Libertarians. Libertarianism should be granted no more credence than that.

The Republicans are winning. According to a survey from ABC News, Planet Green and Stanford University, fewer than half -- 47 percent -- of Americans consider global warming an important issue to them personally, down from 52 percent in April 2007. Although a vast majority still think the planet is warming -- 8 in 10 respondents -- that figure is also down from last year, having dropped 4 percentage points. Furthermore, in an open-ended question, the number of respondents who called global warming the biggest environmental challenge facing the world fell 8 points from 2007 and currently hovers at 25 percent.

If we never admit to the problem we never have to fix it. This guy (as are many in the media and business) is a jerk. I hope he doesn't have children.