http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html

Everything you want to know about climate change but were afraid to ask is right here. Here is the actual report that they (the IPCC) issued (pdf), the same one that Big Oil said they would pay any scientist big bucks if they could refute its findings. To date, I have not heard of a single reputable scientist who has been able to cast doubt on the findings.

Human influence on climate change is a fact. The scientific debate is over. Unfortunately the political debate is not.

I think climate change is awesome. We should speed it up a little by nuking the polar ice caps. I mean look at all the prime real estate in Antarctica! It's bigger than Europe! I, for one, would be one of the first to stake a claim on some ocean front property. I imagine whiling away the days with a beer in my hand on the balmy shores of the Ross Sea.

You know how happy those penguins would be too? Shiiiit!

"The scientific debate is over. Unfortunately the political debate is not."
what he said.

Actually, I decided not to care about Global Warming or Climate Change, I only care about people being more environmentally responsible. I like Clean Water and Clean Air, we pollute like mother fuckers and we rape this planet of its resources, were running out of em.

I dont fucking care if the world is heating up or not, lets just be more responsible for the planet we live on.

From the article I posted above:
"Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

I think the ultimate point of this article is that the scientific debate is not over. Conclusions have been reached that are not supported by data being collected over the past few years. This includes not only the general hold on rising temperatures, but the record increase in sea ice levels in Antarctica. My favorite part is the end:

"Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"

I'm withholding judgment for a while. I've heard plenty of reputable scientists doubt global warming as it has been presented, including most of the Ph.D.s I work around. and Al Gore.... he's way out there. His BS doesn't even agree with the IPCC. I know of almost NO scientists who stand by Al Gore's fear tactics.

The Scientific debate is not over. It is only starting to warm up... pun intended. Ironically, though people somehow choose to ignore it, the number of reputable climatologists expressing doubt over human-caused global warming is increasing, not decreasing, and very rapidly.

I don't know who is right, but those who say the debate is over are misinformed. In fact hundreds of the IPCC members have since retracted their support of the document. MANY papers have been published refuting it's conclusion and MANY reputable climatologists have also refuted it. Those public figures who say there are none are lying, plain and simple. They know, and they are lying.

Nevertheless, we should be taking care of our environment anyway. It just remains to be seen if we should worry about CO2. We should probably be much more worried about destroying rain-forests and rare habitats.

My solution, put more money into technology research and the whole thing will work itself out on its own. We'll get cleaner cars, cleaner power, and cleaner industry without having to fire millions of workers in a panic over a company's "carbon footprint." Make me an electric car and I will freakin buy it NOW.

P.S. UhOhZombies is the best handle evar.

Electric car charged off of Renewable energy: what could be cleaner?

I tend to look at the problem like this:

If we tackle climate change head on, and it turns out to be nothing, we end up red faced but not too much worse off.

If we ignore it and it's real, we're totally fucked.

To me it makes it a rather obvious choice which path to take.

Strangely its only in the US where the scientific debate whether or not climate change is real takes place. The rest of the world is already setting goals and acting. The US remains the only nation not to sign Kyoto or even place some aims.

That's because the Kyoto protocol is a complete waste of time and resources, providing an almost statistically insignificant change over time. It serves only to make you feel like you're doing something, and has about the same effect as putting a ribbon on your bumper. Throwing money at everything with good intentions without first having a concrete scientfic basis for your decisions isn't productive.

http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-pm072998.html

"This analysis assumes the IPCC’s "consensus" estimate of 2.0°C of warming by the year 2100 in the absence of substantial emissions stabilization. Please note that my testimony indicates this is a considerable overestimation.

The Kyoto Protocol requires that the United States reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions by a remarkable 43% for the 2008-2012 average, compared to where they would have been if we continue on the trajectory established in the last two decades. The economic costs are enormous, they are but not the subject of this hearing. What are the climate benefits?

Wigley (1998) recently calculated the "saved" warming, under the assumptions noted above, that would accrue if every nation met its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. According to him, the earth’s temperature in 2050 will be 0.07°C lower as a result. My own calculations produced a similar answer. Wigley is a Senior Scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

0.07°C is an amount so small that it cannot be reliably measured by ground-based thermometers. If one assumes the more likely scenario that warming to the year 2100 will be approximately half of the IPCC estimate, the saved warming drops to 0.04°C over the next fifty years.

This is no benefit at an enormous cost."

Ohh GoogleFu!

On CATO Insitute:

The Institute's work on global warming has been a particular source of controversy. The Institute has held a number of briefings on global warming with global warming skeptics as panelists. In December 2003, panelists included Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling and John Christy. Balling and Christy have since made statements indicating that global warming is, in fact, related at least some degree to anthropogenic activity:

No known mechanism can stop global warming in the near term. International agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, would have no detectable effect on average temperature within any reasonable policy time frame (i.e., 50 years or so), even with full compliance.

In response to the World Watch Report in May 2003 that linked climate change and severe weather events, Jerry Taylor said:

It's false. There is absolutely no evidence that extreme weather events are on the increase. None. The argument that more and more dollar damages accrue is a reflection of the greater amount of wealth we've created."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute#On_environmental_policy

"Economists have been trying to analyze the overall net benefit of Kyoto Protocol through cost-benefit analysis. There is disagreement due to large uncertainties in economic variables. Some of the estimates indicate either that observing the Kyoto Protocol is more expensive than not observing the Kyoto Protocol or that the Kyoto Protocol has a marginal net benefit which exceeds the cost of simply adjusting to global warming.[citation needed] However, a study in Nature found that "accounting only for local external costs, together with production costs, to identify energy strategies, compliance with the Kyoto Protocol would imply lower, not higher, overall costs."

The recent Copenhagen consensus project found that the Kyoto Protocol would slow down the process of global warming, but have a superficial overall benefit. Defenders of the Kyoto Protocol argue, however, that while the initial greenhouse gas cuts may have little effect, they set the political precedent for bigger (and more effective) cuts in the future. They also advocate commitment to the precautionary principle. Critics point out that additional higher curbs on carbon emission are likely to cause significantly higher increase in cost, making such defense moot. Moreover, the precautionary principle could apply to any political, social, economic or environmental consequence, which might have equally devastating effect in terms of poverty and environment, making the precautionary argument irrelevant. The Stern Review (a UK government sponsored report into the economic impacts of climate change) concluded that one percent of global GDP is required to be invested in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, and that failure to do so could risk a recession worth up to twenty percent of global GDP."

This is still all based of the idea that there is "unrecoverable" damage being done to the environment. That doesn't address the point that the data being collected just doesn't match global warming theory anymore. As Doc_M pointed out, the number of reputable scientists that are doubting the theory is on the rise. It was even mentioned in the Royal Society's talk on the future of science (linked below). Also, when you pointed out that Kyoto represents a political commitment only validates my point. It makes you *feel* good because you're taking action. Working towards cleaner industry and a generally more environmentally friendly society is a great goal; setting a "precedent" that costs trillions of dollars for something that scientists don't even agree is a real problem is just a poor idea. Costs are fine, if you can prove you are actually going to fix something. Don't forget that regulation is a business. Apply the same skepticism to handing them trillions of dollars that you do to anything else. It's not like if we don't adopt the Kyoto protocol, pollution will run rampant and corporations will ignore regulation. It's almost become fashionable to be environmentally conscious in business, and there is plenty of oversight in place today. I also don't think our "google-fu" is going to produce any answers since all we can do is cite different scientists who are actually doing the research and can't agree.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Future-of-science-talk-at-the-Royal-Society
(1 minute mark)

>> ^Farhad2000:
Strangely its only in the US where the scientific debate whether or not climate change is real takes place. The rest of the world is already setting goals and acting.


We also happen the be the country responsible for 90% of all the scientific research done in the world. If the scientific debate is going to continue somewhere, it'd be here... and the thought that the debate is limited to America isn't really accurate, scientists from other countries are still doing research and still debating it, their governments and media however have made up their minds.
AND, it is not a Right v. Left debate, at least where the scientists themselves are concerned. One of the biggest Ph.D. skeptics of man-caused global warming that I know is about as far left as you can get. The rest are mostly moderate or mostly democrats. I'd say of all the scientists I know, we're split about 50/50... and no one thinks Al Gore's data and predictions are any good... granted, we're not climatologists.

Still, it remains mildly ironic that, at least in terms of developing and funding research into new technologies, fuels, power sources, fuel-cells, and so on, the US is doing far more than the great majority of all those nations who signed Kyoto. America's VAST funding of technological advancements generally will do a great deal more than most other countries combined for the cause of global warming whether it's real or not. If anything we should be more worried about China. Their pollution levels are getting worrisome some to say the least. Most of Europe basically has their crap together, but Asia is so industrial right now, they are making a mess for themselves. I've read a number of scary reports worried about the next generation of youth born in very highly polluted regions of China.

Deleted. Unfortunate sources sited in linked publication.

Until China overtakes America as the worlds worst polluter, both overall and per capita, the rest of the world is still waiting on America to be the one to initiate real action. When will America lead the way in environmental issues? Ask yourself which countries lead the way now in renewable energy, more efficient motoring, strong environmental political policies, real debate in the media etc. 30 years ago you could have answered America, but not any more. Now the world leaders are Japan, Germany and other European nations.

America is by far the scariest and most dangerous country in the world right now - responsible for the most dangerous wars and the most dangerous pollution. America has shipped their worst polluting industry overseas to China and India, and tried to shift the blame at the same time, but the market remains at home. Why is the American public, including the usual vocal internet community, so quiet about environmental issues?

As for recent cooling, lets just say that any article that talks about cooling in the past few years but fails to mention La Nina or El Nino should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Here are another few interesting that appeared in the Australian.

This one concludes the article posted above:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23632059-11949,00.html

This article is typical of the nonsense that sways so much of the public:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-7583,00.html

This article calls the previous one's bluff:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23612876-11949,00.html