John Coleman(founder Of Weather Channel) Slams Global Warming

[laserguy]

This is all getting ridiculous. As seen earlier (ta for that link,LadyP),no stone can be left unturned in blaming any observation on globowa,er climate cha,er particulate emissions from OAP's pipe's and bringing about widespread catastrophe. I've got an idea. Why don't we all line up,lemming like on the cliffs of the continent we happen to be in and take the collective plunge? Save the rest of the planet's inhabitants a lot of grief,for sure. And it'd stop us lot arguing like a bunch of football pundits agonising over why we lost the match. Why bother living,when anything,and I mean anything we do is detrimental to 'the planet'?

We all know there's too many of us now. It's not what we do,it's our numbers. Can't go on indefinitely,stuff's running out. Some lunatic enviro types are already on about blowing everyone else up (except their wholly perfect selves of course) to reduce our numbers to sustainable levels so they can live out their Utopian fantasies while stood in the giro queue which won't exist anymore. Unless we've the mind of Hitler,no-one can choose who lives or dies. Let's all go,let the world breath a sigh of relief that we are no more. Roll on 2012. The more I ponder all the hoo-ha about that,the more I believe there could be something in it. Not Nibiru,solar storms,pole shifts or whatever,but our own demise brought upon ourselves. Seems to me that's the way things are gong.

[Roo]

Why don't we all line up,lemming like on the cliffs of the continent we happen to be in and take the collective plunge?

Oh, LG that's very gracious of you to do your bit....go on then!

[BrickFielder]

Some will have seen me ramble on about some of this stuff before, but it is has been a while so I thought I would put some of my thoughts down.

There are some undisputed facts. These are :

• Global temperatures have been on the increase in recent decades.
  
• Carbon Dioxide concentrations have increased in recent decades.
  
• The artic oscillation has been more positive in recent years.
  
• Artic Ice cover reached a minimum last year.
  

There are also some common misunderstandings.

• Firstly there is a misunderstanding about climate models and what they are. Many people think that a Climate model represent all the interactions in earths climate. In reality climate models model physical and chemical interactions at a fairly granular level and are meant to be run multiple times. They do not cover the carbon cycle for instance and while appearing good on a global level have more limitations at a local level.
  
• Secondly is the assumption by many that the only reason for global warming is CO2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas but its effects can be mitigated or enhanced by other factors. We also need to take into account sulphur dioxide emissions, ozone destruction, soot build up, acid rain, deforestation etc.
  
• The third assumption is that CO2 increased are all due to burning fossil fuels. Every time we cut down a tree we destroy something which removes carbon dioxide from the air. Plankton blooms have reduced by nearly a third in recent years reducing the ability of the ocean to reduce CO2. Even stopping all fossil fuel consumption alone may not stop the increase in CO2.
  

On a personal note I am unhappy with some of the generalisations used in climate models about certain effects in the atmosphere. Where the models are mostly particular about chemical and physical processes at a very granular level they have some averaged effects of certain cycles and large atmospheric processes which don’t quite feel right. My argument would be that they need to be better rather than their message is wrong. I am also a little unhappy with the IPCC treatment of tolerances. Whilst it may be a reasonable thing to say all tolerances average out to force political action, it does not make it true. The biggest worry is that politicians and the commercial world seem to be concentrating on CO2 and the trading of CO2 and ignoring other aspects of climate change which might require some rather harder and unpopular decisions.

[Android]

Back to topic,

have a read of this by John Coleman:

http://media.kusi.com/documents/REMARKS+OF...MAN+FINAL6c.pdf

A lot of it is just unfalsifiable conspiracy stuff about the UN, but from the small section about facts and data, it's quite clear that his arguments are flawed, his knowledge very limited. He doesn't know what co2 forcing is, he doesn't understand climate models. His arguments against the surface record don't make sense. It's particularly misleading in places and there are strawmen. In short he's no authority on this issue of climate change he sounds more like a shock-jock than a scientist.

Edited November 19, 2008 by Android

[Roger J Smith]

Osmposm, I'll concede your point is valid, we are seeing an encouraging return of ice extent this autumn but the baseline implied in this is recent and it will take several seasons if the trend is to return to the "normal" levels of say 1961-80. I don't see this as unreachable but I also believe in the concept that natural variation is the driver of recent fluctuations, which implies that the future would be unpredictable unless one understood natural variation.

I'm working on that, as is David Dilley (GWO) and we are probably both optimistic that some understanding is possible, perhaps even within reach. We'll have to see how predictions pan out and so far we don't have the same predictions.

In my case, and apologies for re-stating, my concerns about AGW are quite different from the standard skeptic's position that we are wasting our time. My concern is that natural variations could in some future time make the predictions of the AGW lobby come true for the wrong reasons (natural warming) and this will take away any chance of a political realization before that time that prevention is not the answer, anticipation is the answer.

This to me is the most important political question, but I have noted in the past two years that the skeptics are making political progress with their more simplistic "relax there won't be a catastrophic warming" mantra. I don't believe that any more than I believe AGW to be the driving theory. Also I concede that there is some truth to AGW, perhaps over-stated, but the sooty deposition part of it seems the most damaging to arctic ice extent. I don't think sooty deposition can overcome a large natural cooling cycle, however, there's only so much anomalous melting that dirty snow or ice can produce on thick or long-lasting ice cover.

This autumn has the look of a big ice season in the making, the rapid southward advance in all sectors is encouraging, the early appearance of deep winter cold in eastern Siberia and the Greenland-northern arctic sectors on land is highly encouraging, and the current location of ridges and troughs in the mid-latitudes seems close to what we need for a cold winter in Europe in particular. This is the factor that needs to be reversed to get back to a colder natural climate, anomalous winter warmth in Europe has been distorting the hemispheric signal which otherwise is pretty flat or even slightly negative since 1998-99.

If I stopped posting tomorrow for any reason, the one thing I would hope people would always keep in mind is this -- if the changes we have seen are natural rather than anthropogenic, then our whole political approach has to be deeply flawed. If they are natural, then unless we reach a state of high-confidence LRF prediction, we can't by definition predict what may happen 30 to 100 years from now, but the chances at random of that being serious melting must be at least one in three, given the absence of obvious external constraints like Milankovitch cycles in our favour in that short time scale. With the odds being that high, I think the political response should be to plan for inevitable sea level rises. The resolve to do that is perversely being undermined by AGW theory which teaches that through concerted political and social effort, we can change the climate. This is actually being sold in TV ads over here by political parties hoping to get elected or re-elected on the basis of their carbon policies. And the public are being encouraged to believe that they can make certain minor sacrifices and get the weather "under control" like bringing back colder winters. In British Columbia, they would like colder winters to kill off the widespread pine beetle infestation.

I find all of that very dangerous thinking if in fact natural variation is driving the climate bus. What if it does turn a lot colder, before the social and political changes have reached the levels prescribed. Will the AGW lobby try to claim a success and look for even more draconian changes, or will they admit that nature has done what they were hoping to do? Or will they persist on the basis that the cold was a fluke of nature?

You can see the dangers in shifting the whole complexity of logical thought process to help entrench a political position. That has always been a dangerous thing in the past.

[BLAST FROM THE PAST]

Indeed. It's obvious that's why we've lost the first two one dayers against India

Incidently, an analogy just came to mind for those who might argue that because warming or ice melt or whatever has occurred, for natural reasons, in the past, then any warming, ice melt or whatever today can also be attributed to natural reasons.

There have always been forest fires on Earth, usually caused by lightning strikes.

Does this mean all forest fires today are caused by lightning strikes?

Or, in addition to lightning strikes, might human activity also be responsible for the increased rate of forest fires observed over the past few thousand years?

It's very much the same with global warming

Here is one and see if you can answer it.

When there is no one around and a tree naturally fells in a forest/wood...does it make a noise?

BFTP

Edited November 20, 2008 by BLAST FROM THE PAST

[Gray-Wolf]

laserguy asked so I thought I'd better respond.

Most 'equipment' used to check out AGW was made to measure climate fluctuations and not AGW. As such they are pretty poor at doing a job not desined for. Fear not, for the past 5 years instruments specifically designed to 'measure' climate change have been up and running and, as such, we now have enough data to start to post results.

Apparent Problem With Global Warming Climate Models Resolved

ScienceDaily (May 30, 2008) — Yale University scientists reported that they may have resolved a controversial glitch in models of global warming:

A key part of the atmosphere didn't seem to be warming as expected.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Computer models and basic principles predict atmospheric temperatures should rise slightly faster than, not lag, increases in surface temperatures. Also, the models predict the fastest warming should occur at the Tropics at an altitude between eight and 12 kilometers. However, temperature readings taken from weather balloons and satellites have, according to most analysts, shown little if any warming there compared to the surface.

By measuring changes in winds, rather than relying upon problematic temperature measurements, Robert J. Allen and Steven C. Sherwood of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale estimated the atmospheric temperatures near 10 km in the Tropics rose about 0.65 degrees Celsius per decade since 1970—probably the fastest warming rate anywhere in Earth's atmosphere. The temperature increase is in line with predictions of global warming models.

“I think this puts to rest any lingering doubts that the atmosphere really has been warming up more or less as we expect, due mainly to the greenhouse effect of increasing gases like carbon dioxide,” Sherwood said.

Many scientists, including Allen and Sherwood, have long argued that temperature data were flawed for many reasons such as the change of instrument design over the years. “These systems were never designed for measuring climate change,” said Sherwood. However, some global warming skeptics had argued that weather balloon temperatures were accurate—and models that predicted global warming were wrong.

Allen and Sherwood predicted that measuring thermal winds, which are tied to fluctuations in temperatures, would be a more accurate gauge of true atmospheric warming than the thermometers. To measure the thermal winds, they studied data on the motion of weather balloons at different altitudes in the atmosphere. They then calculated temperatures that would account for the wind velocity recorded.

The findings were reported online May 18 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Insofar as the tropics are concerned it would appear that they are cooking nicely with the rest of the planet......

Edited November 20, 2008 by Gray-Wolf

[7andY]

laserguy asked so I thought I'd better respond.

Most 'equipment' used to check out AGW was made to measure climate fluctuations and not AGW. As such they are pretty poor at doing a job not desined for. Fear not, for the past 5 years instruments specifically designed to 'measure' climate change have been up and running and, as such, we now have enough data to start to post results.

...so how long do we wait before we can discern a trend from these new instruments? It seems we should have to wait several decades, unless we join the 'naysayers' and have discernable trends over much shorter time periods...

7&Y

[Gray-Wolf]

...so how long do we wait before we can discern a trend from these new instruments? It seems we should have to wait several decades, unless we join the 'naysayers' and have discernible trends over much shorter time periods...

7&Y

It truely depends on whether or not you trust science to 'advance' in it's capacities...........though a look over the past 200yrs of advances will surely push you in one direction only.....The fact that we have tried to use that which was available already shows willing surely? the fact that from the flawed data' folk (with thew knowledge and ability) have fashioned tools more suited to the job (and escape the 'contrarians' 'but','if's') has to be applauded?

The fact that these tools are 'looking for' the effect/non-effect would tend to suggest that not much time would be needed to 'confirm' or 'deny' the proposition.

If 90%+ surety doesn't do it fer ya' (in the real world of guaranteed imperfection) then I'm sure 100% from a model won't cut yer' mustard either!!!!

Y'see, slowly but surely I'm gettin' it!

No matter how convincing the 'proof' there will be those 'na'nnas that want the whole 100% surity!!!!!.....nothing in life is like that............not even marriage vows (it would appear).

[laserguy]

Cop a load of this:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/glo...ring_it_on.html

I place it here since the article mentions John Coleman,hence best place for it. AGW? Hilarious.

[The PIT]

Cop a load of this:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/glo...ring_it_on.html

I place it here since the article mentions John Coleman,hence best place for it. AGW? Hilarious.

Well it's got to be rubbish hasn't it how dare it go against AGW or whatever they want to name it. pure tosh. :lol:

[Roger J Smith]

Hey, what would a guy who ran a weather reporting company for a decade or more know about weather trends? Right?

I think what people perhaps miss is this point -- if the whole northern hemisphere had lost winter to the extent that western Europe has lost winter in the time of most recent memory, the past twenty years or so, then there would not be very fertile grounds for skepticism about AGW, especially among weather scientists or at least professionals.

When you live and work in North America, the mind set is considerably different, here it is part of the ongoing experience that winter has not gone away and hidden somewhere, it keeps appearing every year in one form or another. Actually, we had the "winters are nothing like they used to be" phase earlier than you did, I would say from 1987 to 1991 or even 1992, the winters were generally what might be described as "feline cat" winters in the Great Lakes and northeast U.S. (in political terms, where the perceptions count the most). The temperatures were generally above normal, with a few near-normal spells, and snowfall was sporadic, sometimes absent for long periods of time. It was back in that period, now quite distant in memory, that many North American weather people formed their concept of "runaway global warming."

Then that came under attack with the return of more severe winters let's say 1993 to 1997. That was followed by the two year El Nino episode and all the record warm conditions that went with it, as well as the big ice storm (Jan 98) that tended to link the concepts "global warming" and "increased severe storms" ... and the summer of 1999 was quite hot over here, so by the turn of the century the AGW position was dominant again.

A turn to more severe winter weather since the 00-01 winter has generally left the actual state of the debate more wide open, despite what the media say or think, it is mainly the higher echelons with their connections to powerful lobby groups that could benefit from carbon trading and other globalist political trends who support the AGW-climate change theories, the lower echelons in the rather numerous ranks of American weather forecasters (and hobbyists) are generally skeptical.

In Canada it is somewhat different because the government agency controls almost all meteorology here and people who dissent are scared to say anything for fear of being posted to observe in Resolute or Eureka for five years. And there is of course the example of that notorious dissident, Roger Smith, say his name only in code lest ye be banned even further, to Alert or just pushed off the ice floes with the polar bears. I know of two other professional dissidents here in Canada out of perhaps five hundred, so you European groupthinkers can feel all warm and cuddly about the Orwellian success you've had in my country. They don't want to be troubled with things like alternate theories or new discoveries in Kanuckistan any more than in the E.S.S.R.

At some point, the irony of the media reporting sinks in, even with a population almost immune to irony, when an earnest news reporter tries to pass off a 40 inch snowfall as a "consequence of climate change" -- back in the 1970s, it was apparently a consequence of cold air crossing Lake Huron. When the intellectual environment is warped to that extent, people disconnect. All of this cold, snowy weather is making it very difficult for global warming proponents -- one would have to think the coming ice age will really have them on the defensive.

[Android]

The americanthinker article is pseudoscience. The americanthinker also has articles attacking "Darwinism" as well containing equally specious arguments and so-called experts (John Coleman, again, is clearly no authority on this subject displaying quite startling ignorance of basic climate concepts)

[Gray-Wolf]

They also appear to be very hurt that the Republicans took such a thrashing in the elections.....you get the feeling they would happily ignore the masses, grab their guns, and take over...........'nuff said!!!

[paul tall]

Climate Change is a lucrative business. Fact.

[Iceberg]

Climate Change is a lucrative business. Fact.

Not as lucrative as the fossil fuel industry. Fact

Not as lucrative as the ice cream market either.

[Kained]

Not as lucrative as the fossil fuel industry. Fact

Not as lucrative as the ice cream market either.

Does your statement make Climate Change more or less lucrative? Or is your statement not actually a rebuttal but rather an attempt to obfuscate any further argument?

[osmposm]

Does your statement make Climate Change more or less lucrative? Or is your statement not actually a rebuttal but rather an attempt to obfuscate any further argument?

No, just a simple statement of the irrelevance of Paul's. Just because people earn a living from something does not necessarily make it either untrue or wicked; and in any case, even if you must take the daft view that all human beings are subject to self-interested gross bias in their work, then you can always find a reason why those espousing the opposite view are also biased. Which makes it a perfectly good rebuttal of the implication in Paul's, that because Climate Change is "lucrative", it must de facto be suspect. 'Lucrative' is of course, a nicely perjorative word, further implying that the evil warmists are making lots and lots of money from it, not just (most of them) carrying on as usual in their not-particularly-well-paid salaried academic positions.

It's a bit like implying that accountants distort their interpretation of tax law on the sole evidence that they charge large amounts of money for doing so. I don't particularly like accountants, and often resent the money they charge me; but that doen't make them all liars (though some may be!). And like accountants, the expertise of most climatologists will still be required whichever way the thing is running.

I think it's more effective to argue with facts, not just throw in all-purpose, infinitely broad attacks on what you think are the motivations of those you disagree with.

Ossie

Edited November 24, 2008 by osmposm

[Kained]

True it wasn't a particularly focused statement. Your response is much more well rounded where Paul's and Iceberg's wasn't, yes there must be a balance and broad statements only help to factionalise the discussion.

Knowing a few accountants though, i would actually think that they get paid more for their ability to interpret tax law to the benefit of their clients, within the boundaries of the legal system. That's more a question on the difference between morale and legal systems though.

Edited November 24, 2008 by Kained

[Iceberg]

Sorry I will endevour to be more well rounded and use more words to say what I mean to say so that nothing untowards can be infered about the statements that I make. I wouldn't wish any future contributor to be under the mistaken impression that facts all be it very relavent in a debate of this nature don't add enough substance and can in fact cause futher obfuscation of the arguement currently under debate. I must not under any circumstances respond to a piece of the argument by responding in a short but sweet NO, your wrong.

Editing whilst I am responding isn't fair !.

BTW I am joking.

[Kained]

I realised i still wasn't being balanced by not including Paul.

[osmposm]

True it wasn't a particularly focused statement. Your response is much more well rounded where Iceberg's wasn't, yes there must be a balance and broad statements only help to factionalise the discussion.

Absolutely, K. However, I think you can argue that Iceberg's retort was only replying in kind, and - unlike me, alas - brief, pithy and even witty. I may seek (usually) to be full and fair in my comments, but that leads all too often to posts of impenetrable complexity and turgidness!

I completely agree with you about accountants, by the way. My analogy wasn't terribly good, really, since as you say they are on the whole paid not to be neutral.

Oh, and welcome on board!

Ossie

[PersianPaladin]

Not as lucrative as the fossil fuel industry. Fact

Not as lucrative as the ice cream market either.

The fossil fuel industry; particularly oil companies make obscenely large amounts of money. Look at the Rockefeller family for example; they earned money from an oil monopoly as well as going into banking, and then earning shares after their Standard Oil company was broken up followed by starting up a replacement company. They funded many international political and economic organisations and have had seats at many of them. Oil profits have been linked to both the Afghan and Iraq wars by credible sources and there is a lot of amoralism in the energy business and breaches of human rights for profit.

AGW might be lucrative for some politicians and the globalist agenda; but its a shadow compared to the energy industry and tbh...AGW is something they would either rather deny or want to dodge via whatever means possible.

We need to stop the heavy lobbying of global political organisations and governments' by oligarchs and bankers whose interests are a big clique of corporations rather than the full representative portfolio of the public.

Edited November 24, 2008 by PersianPaladin

[Roger J Smith]

I think climate change and evolution tend to produce the same two sets of skeptics, what I call complete skeptics (these question warming per se and all parts of evolution) and qualified skeptics (this includes me) who see the one big flaw in evolution being the disregard for humanity's special case, and who are more likely to see climate change or AGW as a misread of scales of natural and anthropogenic.

Going back to the evolution question, it is clear that within academia it is considered a sort of litmus test of solidarity with the cause or "inside or outside the tent" to blithely ignore six thousand years of cultural history and the belief structure of half of the human race, to make an aggressive and almost blasphemous display of excluding even the possibility of God's existence, with such symbolism as car ornaments that place the name Darwin in fish form to mock Christian beliefs, etc. This is really a political rather than a scientific question. By forcing people to accept this last chapter of evolution as equally valid science to all other parts of that and other theories, Science (as the new religion) is presuming to state that there is no God, because if there were a God, clearly man could not be evolved from the apes as postulated by the Darwinists. A missing step is ignored in the orthodox science. This missing step was still fully present in the consciousness of such first rate scientists as Newton and others (I would quote examples but I am not an expert on 18th century science), however, the social scientists of the late 19th century made such progress in demanding an atheist foundation that this spread into the physical and biological sciences as well.

In fact, if God exists, the theory of evolution is suspect at all points. There would be absolutely nothing to constrain God from playing an active role in all stages of what we think to be evolution. There is nothing inconsistent in the concepts required to have an active God at all stages of natural history. To go back to the divide between complete and qualified skeptics, this also extends into the subtle distinctions between "creation science" and intelligent design. Creation science, from my perspective, is hampered by the foundation of Biblical literalism, where all the events suggested by natural evidence around us must be telescoped into some very rapid timetable that allows the Book of Genesis to be read as literal fact. Many who have separated themselves from that constraint (I don't presume to call it an error, having not been around before 1949) have no problem with the 4.5 billion year age of the earth and solar system and whatever age for the universe (14 billion years last I heard), but still see much evidence of intelligent design in all of that, and especially in the biological realm. If there is intelligent design in the biological realm, at the very least it casts a new perspective on evolution.

If people inside the scientific orthodox establishment were intellectually honest, they would admit that they use one large scatter gun to blow away creationists and more nuanced ID proponents in the same way that they insist on total acceptance of AGW without reservations, and a whole litany of other suspect theories in the social sciences as well. They co-opt the reputation of Einstein and other workers in totally different physical sciences, even though many of those scientists expressed support for the intellectual foundations of ID by saying that they believed in God. If a scientist believes in God but not in intelligent design, then he or she believes in a powerless God, or an inactive God, and what kind of God would that be?

I have no objection to a thinker saying, "I don't believe in God, therefore ..." because this establishes a value and belief structure that can be identified and responded to, but when they add, "You must not believe in God to be in our science," then I have to counter, "then your science may not be all it's cracked up to be." This is the whole problem with the intellectual heritage of neo-Marxism and the vast sweep of social, political and natural science since around the middle of the 19th century. Most of it is based on what could be the biggest wrong assumption ever made by science, that there is no God. Changing that to the absurd formulation "we can't base science on a belief in God" (which falls apart at the moment that one simultaneously believes in God) just places the dead patient on life support with the heart beating but the brain not functioning.

The end of all these things is not pleasant to contemplate. Our culture and civilization got to where it did on a strong foundation of active belief in God. Compare the state of our culture before and after the decision of the academic world to reject God (giving perhaps 1850 as the arbitrary dividing line). So much chaos and evil have come into the world since that time, all pushed along mindlessly by either a sympathetic or uncaring scientific orthodoxy. Compare the music of Bach and Mozart to the screeching sounds of modern culture. The effects of the decision to place man at the head of the temple are nowhere more obvious than in music. In many ways, we have undone perhaps five hundred years of cultural development in less than half that time, and God only knows how much deeper into the abyss we will slide.

Modern people have forgotten that science can be done on a foundation of belief in God, that the Enlightenment was still a period in which this connection had not been broken. The hallmarks of atheistic science are a dogmatic insistence that all must accept the groupthink of the elites. The lack of a totally convincing proof of theory is not a barrier to this insistence. This is also a departure from the kind of science that is done by people of faith. When you believe in a God of truth, it is intellectually difficult to fill your mind with "certainties" that some part of your mind can see are mere "postulates." Therefore one tends to think in terms of probabilities or possibilities, and not in these quasi-religious terms of certainty about things that are not proven, in fact perhaps not provable, such as "man descended from the apes" when there is the nagging problem of the recognized existence inside the mind of a spiritual dimension that the apes do not display. Where did that evolve from?

Or to put it a much different way, gravitation doesn't prove atheism.

[PersianPaladin]

Interesting post Roger; albeit I'm not sure what your point is tbh. Science is about things that we can measure and knowledge collated on experience in which theories are then developed around it. Some scientific study is based less on everday experential measurement than others; and thus it becomes a looser form of theory which is dependent on other related phenomena that we already know; BUT may interact with this in ways that are slightly chaotic and variable. The danger is when scientists start saying of the latter; that this theory is accepted fact because there are no other theories that explain the phenomena that is accepted amongst the community. My view is that there are no other theories yet due to socio-political and cultural influences. On the issue of evolution and intelligent design; I feel that both theories have pros and cons but are not fully conclusive. There is evidence of harmony in this universe to show that it isn't the result of pure chance; and the fossil-record shows evolution seems to occur suddenly in a jump-start fashion which has problems for finding intermedaries. More research is needed in both fields and until then; they are a looser form of theory than accepted things we can confidently measure such as gravitational potential energy or wind speed, etc.

The AGW research is pretty compelling; and there is evidence there that shows that mankinds' overproduction and waste has caused the earth to react to this extra energy in the system. This reaction is exarcebating the natural warm\cold cycles in ways that are in the long-run...producing a background warming when you look at the full representative curve and timescale over the past 200 years. I do think that (as I said before) the issue is confused by politicians and businessmen who have their own agendas'; but if we look at the research there is enough evidence to at least get us to change our wasteful ways.

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if the agenda atm is to downplay AGW so that big energy companies around the world can go on influencing governments' to continue over-production and environmental degradation. The US-based oil companies are in Iraq for a long haul and there is a large oil reserve there with plenty of barrels to sell to places like China for a good while. And no government...not even Obama is doing anything about it.