It's been so sick to watch this stuff unfold. We've known CO2 in the stratosphere causes a minor (and the emphasis is on minor) greenhouse effect, but there's an upper limit: http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/med_greenhouse_effect.jpg But what's not talked about is how increased CO2 in the troposphere vents heat into space. So they pretty much cancel each other out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTSxubKfTBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k69HUuyI5Mk When this hysteria began in 1985 it did't get much press and it was easy to dispute because it was so silly and the math was so bad. I was a math major and went to Waterloo and they actually use the IPCC math to teach what not to do in statistics classes there, it's that much of a joke. The worst part of was their denial that plants use CO2. Honest to god there are peer reviewed papers that show they don't, recent ones. wtf? I bugged nasa for years about this and in 2010 the dam burst. Nasa finally looked at it and went "oops": " 8th December 2010 13:24 GMT - A group of top NASA and NOAA scientists say that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise. " http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/new_model_doubled_co2_sub_2_degrees_warming/ And a year later the "climate scientists" admitted - and were surprised that, trees use CO2. Oh, help. "If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world's established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions," he told AFP, describing the findings as both "incredible" and "unexpected". https://web.archive.org/web/20110719214513/http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2BAdNIG5Q2FJlEdac1l-KXiTSCA?docId=CNG.dfe97e07f144a2d29eb615412e0c12be.a81 "incredible" and "unexpected". Only If you skip high school science. When the Gaia they guy admitted the temperature wasn't rising and he could say this because he wasn't getting climate grants you knew it was over. https://web.archive.org/web/20120425004724/http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/23/11144098-gaia-scientist-james-lovelock-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change?lite It should have been over when the Climategate thing happened but nobody looked at the data, just the opinions. Here' the data they actively suppressed shown in one handy chart: http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/hawaii.jpg It was warmer in the 30s then got firghtfullycold and that's why it's been warming. http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/hawaii.jpg There's a ton of good solid data to back this up. The Danish tree ring data i sone and the Greenland ice data another: " In the early 1920s and 1930s, temperatures were high, similar to that of the present, and this affected the glacial melt. At the time many glaciers underwent a melt similar or even higher than what we have seen in the last ten years. When it became colder again in the 1950s and 1960s, glaciers actually started growing," http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2012/2012.5/glaciers_greenland_photos/ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1481.html It goes on and on and on. The ice caps have grown consistently for 3 years now, coral has genes it can switch on to compensate for acidity and temperature - but nobody looks at this stuff and the press is too lazy to look at it to say nothing of the fact a lot of paes are bribed to run PR releases as stories. The Guardian was just outed for this. Maddeningly the Daily Mail is the one that subjective and actually had superb factual coverage. The. Daily. Mail. IMagine a world where they're accurate the NYT wasn't. Shocking. Part of a larger problem is that the folks on the right were never fooled by this but for the wrong reasons, it's not like the knew why but the knew it was a pack of lies - even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Liberals really need to come to terms with this but it's an intransigent plank in the liberal platform sadly and even with pollution getting worse by the day (Fukushima, The gulf) they still swallowed the kool aid and bought into the "global warming is the worst problem facing mankind" noise without realizing if the world is treeless and toxic the temperature in 200 years really isn't going to matter.