Sorry, I have to go with Blast on this one. If I have the choice between scientists or politicians, I've got to go with the scientists.
I've actually heard a few stories from meteorologists and climatologists saying none of this is fact, people in that field saying it's bunk - and yet I'm supposed to believe a politician over them? Sorry, maybe I'm getting too cynical in my old age, but I've learned to not trust politicians as a whole.
Now, that being said, I consider myself to be a fairly 'green' person. I like camping and hiking. I volunteer for clean-ups at our local parks and canal paths. I try to recycle everything I can, wanting to keep as much waste out of landfills as possible. I walk wherever I can, rather than drive, unless it's too far or I have too much to carry. I want to leave the planet in better shape than when it was given to me.
I understand all that, but I also want everything we do as a people and as a country to be based on facts, not someones beliefs.
When I see one of those politicians, flying by himself in a large jet aircraft, cover his backside by buying "carbon credits" from a company that he co-founded and co-owns I have a problem. How is his pulling money from his right pocket and putting it back in his left pocket going to help anything? I don't see how this is anything but another excuse to remove money from your purse and put it in theirs.

This is all very true. No one "knows" that global warming is fact. There is a general consensus among scientists all over the world that the climate is changing. Proving that this is caused by human pollution is difficult if not impossible.

Keep in mind that the tobacco companies had dozens of scientists stating that there is no, nor has ever been evidence that nicotine is addictive and that smoking doesn't cause cancer.

Most people dismissed the threat of acid rain, until huge swaths of forest started dying.

My argument is not that it is or is not happening, I'll try to keep my beliefs to myself in this regard. Just that NO ONE can dismiss it off hand, particularly when there is (at least) some evidence supporting that theory.

Looking at the Global Warming Petition Agenda Website and the scientist behind the petition may prove to be useful. If only scientists didn't have a political or religious agenda which cloud the scientific debate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_B._Robinson

Its not really a surprise that the global climate warming issue is taking some time to go mainstream in the US. The mainstream isn't really based on scientific enquiry as in reality a huge proportion of the populus don't believe in scientific enquiry or principles but base there beliefs systems on, for example, 'creationism' and 'intelligent design'

And of course some Scientists are just out to make a name for themselves. Scientific controversy in the mass media debates doesn't seem to hurt the ego's or reputations either.

Scientists can also have an axe to grind, and they too can be politicians or for even better or worse, preachers too.

"...Blast, who blames the sun..."

There ya go...

Believe politicians???? WHERE ON EARTH did you get the idea that I believe politicians???

When bureaucrats are pointing in one direction, they're hiding something in the other direction.

Sue

Not original unfortunately, its what one of my instructors in ROTC used to tell us.

"At this point hopefully..." "HOPE IS NOT A COURSE OF ACTION!" "Roger sir"

A lot of us in the USA are old enough to remember when "Snowball Earth" was the climate catastrophe du jour in the 1970s. Then El Nino a decade later. More important is that there has been no testing of the theories; i.e., nobody is predicting 2010 weather for us to check the theories, and yet the last decade has apparently failed to meet what predictions have been made.

Science has always worked best when theories are vigorously attacked by people looking for every flaw and defect. Calls to stop the investigation of a theory does not give much confidence in that theory.

PS. When guys like Dr. Gray of Colorado State are forced to retire over their scientific opinions on Global Warming something is very, very wrong...

There have been revolutions in computational power and geophysical data collection since the 1970's. While climatology is not a precise science, our understanding of it is vastly better now than it was even a few years ago.

While there is always a minority view, there is a difference between a minority view primarily motivated by legitimate scientific dissent, and one motivated, at least in part, by powerful economic interests with much to lose, religious perspectives, and partisan politics.

Given the stakes riding on the outcome of the global warming debate, the battle has shifted from the purely scientific community into the political and societal arena, and rightly so. Nonetheless, the core issue remains scientific in character, and ultimately for scientists, not lobbyists, pundits and politicians to resolve. The time for a broader debate comes later.

It seems to me that, by far, the greater weight of scientific consensus is that global warming is real, and only a slightly less strong consensus is that human activity is a significant contributing factor. In my judgment, these can be disputed, but only by scientists doing more more and better science, and NOT by politicians, pundits, or anyone else with an agenda.

Jeff

On the original topic- I think Blast has it pretty much right with his MIB quote. There is always something or signs of something going on that could or might be happening. We are suffering from a serious infliction of instant "news" across a global scale. It used to be news took longer to travel and cost more to transmit so people were blissfully unaware, each tech revolution has impacted the flow time and costs so we get more "bad news", faster.

On the issue of the current climate concerns, my understanding is that all of the most current science on climate change is based on relatively simple models of the environment (they are actually quite complex but simple compared to reality) fed by a statistically insignificant amount of actual data (realistically we only measure a tiny fraction of the possible environmental data). These models are run a whole lot of times on supercomputers with the inputs of each run fed by the outputs of the last run. This may be the best we can do but my concerns are best defined by a distinguished gentleman named George Box, who said that "all models are false but some models are useful". The people generating and using the models hopefully recognize they are false and the debate seems to revolve around a disagreement in how useful they are. I would guess that most people on either side of the public (non-scientific) debate do not have extensive backgrounds in numerical analysis, modeling of complex systems, climatology etc. so the debate is driven by other factors.

For what it is worth - I am not a climate expert but I work a lot with modeling complex systems (that are trivial by comparison to the earths climate). All of our models are for safety critical stuff but none of us trust them without out actual in the field testing. That could be a bit of a challenge for those working on climate models!

- Eric

Folks, I'll say it again, and maybe it will sink in somewhere.

Change is inevitable. For us to consider that the world will stay as we think it ought to, or for that matter any other part of the universe around us, is simply arrogant and unrealistic. To conclude that at this point in our cumulative existence we have such great potential to influence our environment ONE WAY OR ANOTHER is annoyingly arrogant, and has no basis in historical fact yet. We could cut our contributions to global emissions in half next year, and one good volcanic eruption or major forest fire will completely nullify our effort.

My advice is to live your lives. Be considerate of others, but let's not get all chicken little when there's really nothing we can do about any of it except watch and squawk. There will always be very real, very substantial threats, just as there have been since time for our species began.

I am not trying to be defeatist about preparation, just realist. We can do things to deal with the minor issues, but the big stuff is for the most part beyond us.