Getting warmer

I'm meaning to write a piece about global warming. There's a lot of aspects involved - the variations in climate that are little discussed, from global dimming to the Greenland glaciers - the American popular attitude to the greenhouse effect - feedback loops, desertification and polar shifts.

What is clear is that there's no consensus, and no way to accurately forecast the devastation that is about to be wreaked. Having two kids, I'm frankly embarrassed about the state of the planet we're leaving to them, and I only marvel that my parents' generation don't share that embarrassment for what they've done and allowed to happen.
Lately, I've been getting concerned that there may be a feedback loop happening, and the more I hear and read, the more I'm afraid that this has begun. For instance, there was quite a bit in the papers a few weeks ago that the Arctic ice shelf was at its lowest spread in summer since records began. Which was evidence of the thinning of the ice cap and the heating of that area. This effect can be evidence of feedback - the reduction in ice cover can absorb more heat instead of reflecting, for example.
In the last few weeks though, apparently - almost since that article was published - the ice cover has spread beyond its normal extent for the time of year. Which is an incredibly quick freezing of the area.
And these wildly oscillating extremes are exactly the sort of behaviour we should be predicting from a system moving across the event horizon of a catastrophe curve. The system will attempt to self-correct, which will involve more and more extreme states, as it attempts to regain a stable state, before suddenly settling into a new balance.
The weather here has been warmer than ever before in recorded history for the time of year. Now it's starting to get colder, towards normal temperatures, and perhaps below normal. In fact, i expect that we are about to go into a cold phase (and whether this is related to the Easton winters concept, I've no idea). It seems by the time a climactic effect is noticed, there's already a swing towards the opposite occurring in the Earth's macrosystem.
Climatologists need to stop thinking in terms of lateral cause-and-effect, and start considering the strange phenomenon as strange attractors. Look at the hurricane season that has just passed in the States. Come November 30th or so, I'll write a proper piece about that too, but it was without doubt the strangest sequence of weather phenomenona most weather watchers have ever seen. That the last cane of the season (so far!) was followed by a deadly twister in the midwest, which itself followed the first winter storm of the season, should give us some idea of the rubber band effect that seems to be happening.
That most Americans seem to think global warming is an unproved theory, only illustrates the power of the neocon media over there, as well as the gullibility of a population that allows 'intelligent design' to be seriously proposed as a scientific concept.