george will is an idiot anyway. if he is this dumb in the present it would be interesting to research any comments he made about the e movement from its start. for example say per rachel carson, or per the club of rome etc

You’re alienating a substantial portion of your readership by egregious misuse of apostrophes. While it seems no one at the WashPost dares question George Will’s faulty logic, at least they have copy editors to make sure his columns are properly punctuated.

For the past … oh … five years, folks like Will have been pointing to the CRU and NASA and other temperature records and claiming they show a decline in global average temperature since the peak El Nino year of 1998. Now, Will et al. are claiming the same temperature data set has been manipulated to show a warming trend.

Folks, you can’t use the same dataset you declare fraudulent as your proof that the planet is cooling, not warming.

Well, if you’re sane and not mendacious, that is.

As my wife says, it can’t have happened both ways.

1998 was an unusually warm El Nino event. The years following 1998 were characterized by La Nina and the Solar Minimum. Factor in Mt Pinatubo belching 20E6 metric tons of SO2 in 1991 and there has to be some cooling, most of it not predictable by any climate model. So, yes, the years immediately after 1998 were cooler, but they were still warm compared to previous years.

Despite this “cooling”, the last decade is still shaping up to be one of the hottest, if not THE hottest, on record.

I fear at this point I begin to question even the basic sanity of many of my fellow citizens.

So a better take on the matter is that we have wasted those three decades in not moving away from burning fossil fuels; the science is just the laws of thermodynamics and the radiative properties of CO2 and water vapor.

Now I would hope that even George Will could manage to understand that summary; it is just not that hard to read. Try it yourself.

And here’s what makes that seem not-crazy to me: We have taken a chunk of the carbon that was locked up in solids and liquids from periods of many thousands of years and released it as a gas into the atmosphere within decades. I don’t see how that could BUT throw off the climate’s balance. Now, I realize that sometimes things that are entirely intuitive are also desperately wrong, and I am open to that possibility. But sometimes, when people try to convice you, for example, that sucking smoke into your lungs ever day over a prolong period will have no impact on your health, for example, I think it’s fair to step back and say, “Really? Because that’s the kind of thing that seems, I don’t know…really hard to accept.”

I see the cars lined up for miles as I fly into Chicago, Miami, Houston, and the factories and huge islands of light, and I just think, “Is it reasonable to think that all of this is having no effect?” It’s true that the precise effect might be difficult to predict or even to measure, but I don’t think it’s stupid to assume that it’ll do something. Even as a non-expert I feel safe having that low level opinion.

But I’ll go one step further: It amazes that anyone would argue for using more fossil fuels. Climate change aside, we have paid a heavy price for fossil fuels, and we simply must transition to something else eventually. Is the threat of global climate change–even if it is not the “sun-is-rising-tomorrow” certainty that some “skeptics” pretend to demand–not a timely motivator for us to seek other sources of energy for their own sake?

http://bloggingheads.tv/forum/showpost.php?p=141546&postcount=1

Can you offer some peer-reviewed papers supporting climate change that are not associated with CRU?

I suppose then that James Balog must be visiting all the exceptions to your “rule.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/extremeice/melt.html And that the Columbia Icefield, which I personally have seen shrink to an astonishing extent over a 15-year period, must be some sort of local hot-spot, eh?

Why you would choose to state untruths that are so easily refuted is beyond me. I hope I speak for your legions of fans when I ask that next time you make it a much greater challenge for us to tell you are lying.

Consensus and controversy: Which makes the news?

Here are a couple other relevant links:

Record High Temperatures Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.

NOAA: Global Ocean Surface Temperature Warmest on Record for June

NOAA: Warmest Global Ocean Surface Temperatures on Record for July

The warming oceans are cause for serious concern. Water holds heat much longer than air does. Warming is directly implicated in the death of coral by bleaching. They are often thought of as the “rainforests of the oceans” and all the major extinction events on earth were punctuated by millions of years without living reefs.

Sharks are being spotted in the Atlantic for the first time. I guess that marine biologists are in on the “fix” too eh? Likewise for all those faked stories of Jellyfish populations booming in warm waters. There are even Japanese fisherman who are in on the big global warming conspiracy and who sank their own boat and blamed it on a giant Jellyfish.

In the end, it may not matter if the changing climate is only partially caused by human industry. It is indisputably changing and we are going to have to deal with those consequences either way. Common sense says that since C02 is a known greenhouse gas, we probably have a notable effect given the 24x7x365 fossil fuel combustion that has been occurring intensively for the last century.

Carl, I made one small mistake on the previous comment. Would you please delete it? A missing HTML close tag caused truncation of a paragraph.

Here are a couple other relevant links:

Record High Temperatures Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.

NOAA: Global Ocean Surface Temperature Warmest on Record for June

NOAA: Warmest Global Ocean Surface Temperatures on Record for Julybleaching. They are often thought of as the “rainforests of the oceans” and all the major extinction events on earth were punctuated by millions of years without living reefs.

Sharks are being spotted in the Atlantic for the first time. I guess that marine biologists are in on the “fix” too eh? Likewise for all those faked stories of Jellyfish populations booming in warm waters. There are even Japanese fisherman who are in on the big global warming conspiracy and who sank their own boat and blamed it on a giant Jellyfish.

In the end, it may not matter if the changing climate is only partially caused by human industry. It is indisputably changing and we are going to have to deal with those consequences either way. Common sense says that since C02 is a known greenhouse gas, we probably have a notable effect given the 24x7x365 fossil fuel combustion that has been occurring intensively for the last century.

Neither George Will nor Albert Gore are noted as scientific thinkers, so their opinions should should be considered in their opposing political contexts.

The IPCC predictions have virtually all been proven to be in error, as the average global temperature continues to fall, sea levels don’t rise, and most glaciers in the northern hemisphere are growing, not melting.

It is interesting that these documented, measureable facts have no bearing on the lemming-like attitudes of the global warming alarmists.

The fact that so many who are true believers are on the left, and many who doubt are on the right, has added a very unfortunate political element into the debate. This pollitical element has tainted the discourse beyond repair.

So of course man-made climate change is real. Any layman should accept the scientific consensus on it. But policy decisions are not a scientific matter. Scientists can give the ecological tradeoffs involved in policy decisions, but economists give us the economic tradeoffs. All must be weighed against all, and unfortunately the histrionics of climate change deniers mask the real discussion that needs to take place.