Ha ha, Worldwatch Institute. Continually fudging data to support their determinedly gloomy worldview - and continually getting it wrong.

A typical early Worldwatch howler was the 1965 claim that food problems would be a nearly insoluble problem over the ensuing decades. Which was completely wrong.

Not that Worldwatch's precognition improved any as time went on. For instance, claiming that the world's forests had declined and degraded significantly, when in fact they had actually slightly increased - and making the wildly exaggerated claim that 16 million ha of forest were disappearing every year.

Worldwatch also claimed that acid rain was destroying forests - which simply was not true.

Another typical example of Worldwatch's selective data use was exaggerating a mild, short-term decline in world trade in the early 80s to claim that world trade was collapsing.

Reading Worldwatch's reports is like watching a sham psychic like John Edwards: Floundering about, making wild guesses and jumping to exaggerated conclusions from the flimsiest information - all to the amazement of the gullible rubes in the audience.

Valerie Yule: "The causes of global damage include the effects of pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - as well as thousands of other pollutants".

Now, I'm aware that's the official line, and its backed by the IPCC bankers, etc.

But consider the basic implications: CO2 overwhelmingly comes from the oceans and forests breathing as part of a natural and ancient self-regulating planetary atmosphere. If more than 95% of the planet's CO2 comes from those sources, how can we then keep defining CO2 as "a pollutant"?

Not only human beings, but all species, emit CO2 as part of their natural, self-regulating structure. If CO2 is "a pollutant", then somehow ourselves and all other species have been - and will be - "polluting" the atmosphere no matter what we do!

Therefore, the AGW faith must somehow urge, explicitly or implicitly, the annihilation of much life on this planet. Why not start with the drying out the oceans - the largest "CO2 polluter"? Then stopping the forests in their vast "polluting" process? Then, of course, it'd be time to destroy masses of animals, including we human beings as proportionally "greater CO2 polluters"!

The AGW cult's strange definition of "pollution" explains just why Malthusian genocidalists are coming out of the woodwork now. It also explains why free-trade neoliberalists feel so encouraged to expand their regimes of vast, debt-laden austerity, pumping yet greater burdens of useless monetarist debt, for decades to come.

And yes, it does appear to be heading towards a cooling trend. Sun spot activity (actually, the lack thereof), current Arctic ice caps, and temperature trends, would all support that assessment.

The longer-term view indicates that we're entering the latest Ice Age cycle. Of greatest concern is that once ice starts to spread and consolidate, the effects of planetary cooling intensify as the broader ice sheets reflect so much solar radiation OUT of the atmosphere, thereby ensuring a faster cooling process.

Therefore, we need to start building nuke power fast, and widely. If I'm not mistaken, China and Indonesia are about the only countries embarking on such projects.

The aim of the article about damage control is to list some constructive actions that are possible to help to prevent more damage in the world.
Why submit to trying to adapt to horrible conditions that could be prevented? I am not nostalgic for horrible conditions in the past that my generation had to adapt to.
Please re-read each of the 57 sentences in this short article, to consider the constructive actions are suggested.
Evidence about the damage that is happening now can be found easily – eg. Google, the New Scientist and other earth watch, and your own observations. This includes the human problems which Spindoc rightly refers to, which I have been chiefly concerned with in my own work over sixty years.
The world is getting better in many ways - We should stop the ways in which it is getting worse, including in developing countries, which are now copping the pollution and deforestation that the West may be avoiding. We tourists who visit Bali need some investigative reporting about what is happening there today, that needs changing, for example. And while Australia still has lyrebirds, bandicoots and healthy koalas, the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species lists 717 animal species and 16 animal subspecies that have become actually extinct since 1500. Gone
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The old saying says: Change what needs to be changed, adapt to what cannot be changed – and have the gumption to tell the difference.

You can say, “Jack’s, all right mate, where I live.”
You can say, “Everything is so doomful, let’s just wallow.”
You can say, “There are things that need fixing or there will be trouble,” – and set about how to fix them.
See a smouldering match? Stop the fire.

Most civilisations – hundreds of them - have not survived. They could not adapt in time. We should be able to know better and do better.

Valerie,

Why have you adopted the term Climate Change? Isn't that in effect 'Damage Control' ... a change from the now undoubtably proven wrong 'Global warming'.

Glass half empty, glass half full. Cheer up, Valerie. Try A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Stalingrad, and your damaged outlook will improve.