Andrea Merkel, German Chancellor, called it too late to stop global global warming or climate chaos because the industrialized nations' increasing rate of heat trapping gas emissions has further accelerated. As Bill Mckibben commented nearly two decades ago that humans have developed the capacity to alter the atmosphere thereby affecting all natural weathering and reproductive processes on earth. More significantly past climate variations no longer provide reliable predictive patterns for our future because automated pollution has been so prolonged, so pervasive and so decisive in altering the oceans, forests and climate that we are on unknown ground. Yet, current poling shows a decline in the US public understanding of global warming just as the scientific consensus is becoming more contentious. Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson warns that "Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet." (6-12-08, NYRB, 45) It is, he insists, for that reason "the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate." Other critics such as Ross Gelbspan, a pulitzer prize winning journalist, instead, insists that corporate advertising and cheap–subsidized fuels feeding an aging infrastructure- trap people and institutions into self-abusive behavior. Economists on the other hand argue that we have in place perverse incentives that make the very behavior the causes or exacerbates a the problem the path of least resistance. So we are lost in the rhetoric of inaction awaiting a Godot to reassure us in keeping our worn out assumptions.

In the sense of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek writer, we have significantly heated the airs, acidified the waters and altered places by removing necessary vegetative cover. Airs, waters, and places were once the province of forces beyond human influence and technical control. Any physician, according to Hippocrates had to know about these natural conditions to better understand situations in which diseases due to climate, pests, or water sources spread among people whose health doctors sought to restore.

Today the conceptual triad from the Hippocratic Corpus provides an opportunity for us to understand the threat rapid accumulation of natural carbon in airs and waters to places. The earth until recently has been a rather abstract concept that most people fail to grasp in its entirety. The triad may reveal how --by treating this waste gas as a commodity-- the inherent natural assets of wildlife, forests, even water bodies take on an economic importance closely linked to their native condition that is not now apparent. Airs and waters are inherently tied into a functional bundle that manifests widespread influence in places on human health in the corpus.

Any profound ecological understanding must comprehend that there are comparatively larger amounts (called ratios) of heavier carbon ions produced only by combustion than there are naturally occurring carbon ions generated by bacterial and plant activity. In addition to the isotopic evidence the decay rates of radioactive carbon support the recent accumulation of "heavy carbon" that is attributed to high energy associated with the explosive power involved in converting of oil, coal, and charcoal fuels into motion.

Ions don't lie, like tree rings or clam shell growth striations, these accumulated markers indicate we are in the midst of a profound change due to industrial waste accumulating to such an extent that oceans and the atmosphere they stabilize are reaching the saturation point. That refers to the ability of the of the ocean-air conditioning system to maintain long-established conditions. Fierce critics of the global warming argument such as James Lovelock, nonetheless, point accurately to the importance of see this abrupt shift in the planet's thermostat.

The system of ocean temperature circulation that generates the weather and the amount of trace elements of carbon in the air deserve our attention and closer investigation. The point Lovelock makes is that the earth–like the three bear's porridge choices in the children's story of Goldilocks–persists in three different thermal states. A thermal state is defined as a range of expected temperature variations over the seasons and through the annual pattern of the planet's rotation and revolution about the sun. We have been moving from the coolest thermal balance for millenniums, but are now moving rapidly from the the "just right"–cool to balmy–state to a very different condition. This hotter condition has not been witnessed on Earth by anything human; instead during the Eocene and Paleocene more than sixty million years ago, the very hot thermal state persisted. But there is an additional reason for concern, we are moving quickly–too fast for plants and insects to adjust–from the "just right" to these "too hot" conditions. The pace, the extent and the prolonged impacts are enough to make specialists and reasonable generalists concerned for crops, timber, fisheries and water production to meet growing needs. The risks are real as seen in Sudan and Ethiopia, Pakistan and the Tibetan plateau, Indonesia and Australia, the Andean mountains and the Amazon basin.