I couldn’t agree more. Imagine if we had spent all that AIG bailout money on wind power plants.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything. —Ronald Coase

thought it apt..

1. First off, unless we call it climate change the crowd will appear divided and we’ll lose both people and thus the push.
2. Climate change has been off the docket for at least a couple months. Once a theory is challenged with facts, we need to let it slide to the back of the agenda so that the media and government totalitarianizers don’t lose any more credibility than is absolutely necessary.
3. Climate change is now in the same grouping as bird flu, SARS, AIDS, air borne AIDS, Bush’s aides, Bin Laden, Iraq, ebola virus and many of the other impending-crises-that-are-going-to-devastate-the-entire-world that are more than 6 months old. See point #2.
4. The current public manipulating crisis is of course the financial crisis. Please don’t confuse the public and get them to be thinking about something else, not even something they were thinking about 6 months ago. The current push, since you seem to have not read the latest memo, is trying to panic them into letting the banking system and big business loot the Treasury. Your full cooperation in this matter is appreciated and imperative.
5. Please read and fill out the latest poll on what the next crisis will be. Selections are:
a. Food riots in the third world
b. revolution in either:
i.Russia
ii.China
iii. America
iiii. The entire world
c.World tire shortage crisis(sponsored and suggested by goodyear)
d. World kiwi fruit crisis(we’re leaning towards this one as the most credible and believable)

Please fill out the form and submit it as soon as possible. This financial crisis is quickly approaching its best before date and our reporters are running out of ideas

But hey, if we’ve learned anything in this financial crisis, its lets ignore the smart people and take our lumps. Because its better to be rich and dead than rich and alive.

Yes, warming goes in short-term and long-term cycles. Geologically, the last 50 years is quite unusual, just as the last year of stock market returns has been quite unusual. The explanatory principle (theory) linking greenhouse gases (CO2 and methane, principally) and the Milankovitch cycle as the main drivers of the glacial/interglacial cycles is not in dispute–save by the fringe who violate Occam’s razor in trying to dispute the relationship. Skepticism plays a useful role in driving science to overcome it with new data, but the skeptic position over the last 5-6 years of research is finding fewer and fewer places to hide and still come up with plausible explanations for why the last 150 years should not be explained primarily by greenhouse gas.

Review the longterm correlation between CO2 and warming (going back millions of years), review the the changes geologically in greenhouse gas composition which usually change extremely gradually on a decadal or even century basis (warming can go up rapidly once a trigger point is reaches, as at the end of the last interglacial period when the North American ice dam gave way or North American cooling if the gulf stream convection breaks down), then review again the steep climb in CO2 going back to the Mauna Lai measurements in the 1950s and confirmed by icebubble results. CO2 is increasing over the last 150 years at a rate a thousand time the normal geologic increase, and this neatly overlays the Industrial Revolution.

Those who say this is “just” a theory are using theory in the common sense (Rush Limbaugh or creationism), not the scientific sense of theory. Science is built upon theory, and currently there is no legitimate competing theory to explain the phenomena of the last 50 years. The opening of the Northwest Passage for the first time in European conquest of the New World is one example, although I wish we had the data for the Arctic during the Viking colonization, since that is the only possible comparable period in the last millenia.

So we can hope for a short-term cooling cycle of 20-40 years to give us more breathing time to adjust, but those who base their policy on this are the ones who lay all their money on a number on the roulette table when they first walk in the casino door. Read the last two IPCC science reports and you’ll see–legitimate doubts remain but increasingly study results increasingly confirm greenhouse as the main driver of what we have been seeing, as the South American, North American, and Alpine glaciers go into rapid retreat and the coral reefs (going back a long, long, time) begin to disappear because of the two drivers of ocean heat and acidity. These are outliers that cannot be dismissed as a mere 30 year heat shift.

For a blog on many of these issues by climate scientists, see realclimate.org It’s a very useful way also of following climate research studies as the data sets first come in or papers are published. Otherwise, read the technical summary to the most recent IPCC science report, which condenses it down into a manageable 40-50 pages.

http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com

There are many questions about climate change that are unanswered. As you contemplate the charts (some of the comments and links above will help) here are a couple of simple observations to think about that are not mentioned too often in the smoke and mirrors world of media hype and political hand waving:

1. The earth has been warming since the Little Ice Age around 1825 (that is what happens when the earth leaves an ice age) at a roughly linear rate of .5 degrees C/century versus the current rate which is slightly higher. Does it seem reasonable that one should subtract the natural rise in temperature from the current observations in order to determine how much additional warming is due to ‘modern’ human activities and if so has this been done?

2. Although temperature has on average increased linearly since the Little Ice Age there are periods that all agree are different. For example, from 1910 to 1940 temperatures increased but from 1940 to 1975 temperatures decreased (here comes the ‘global cooling’ uproar) in spite of an increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. How does one explain this discrepancy? CO2 certainly has a warming affect but how much? Might something else be going on that is even more powerful? Perhaps the correlation between solar activity and temperature found by Harvard scientists many moons ago has something to do with the earth’s heating and cooling.

http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2008/10/global-warming-accelerating.html

I hope that our planet has stability loops that will kick in before she gets too hot. For example with a high surface temperature you would expect air moisture content to become very high. Water vapor is a green house gas, and traps heat. But it also forms clouds which reflect heat. At some point hopefully cloud cover would start reflecting heat more significantly than the heat trapped by them.

Before that point it could become awfully hot and damp. Perhaps we might see some large lizards making a come back? Dick Fuld looks a bit like a lizard to me.

on ice core data – awesome chart from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1997. I love the axis label – “time before 2005″. This chart is concentrations over 10,000 years paired with radiative forcings*

http://www.greenfacts.org/en/climate-change-ar4/figtableboxes/figure-1.htm

radiative forcings*
Radiative forcing is a measure of the influence that a factor has in altering the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in the Earth-atmosphere system and is an
index of the importance of the factor as a potential climate change mechanism. Positive forcing tends to warm the surface while negative forcing tends to cool it. In
this report, radiative forcing values are for 2005 relative to pre-industrial conditions defined at 1750 and are expressed in watts per square metre (W m–2).