I appreciate your desire to have science prevail over politics. Unfortunately when I read your source from energyplanusa I really felt that the report didn’t, to use their own words, “pass the smell test” either. It seems to me this report and it’s assertions are not based in any fundamental understanding of science in general or climate science in particular – no matter what you think of the IPCC report.

It includes the same litany of “skeptic” arguments that have been bandied about for years such as “what about water vapor?” What about it?

Nowhere have I seen any scientific assessment of climate change ignore, dismiss, or try to hide the fact that water vapor is the most prominent (by far) naturally occurring greenhouse gas. It cycles through the atmosphere in hours or days. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for years and decades.

There is also no denial that there are, and always have been, natural climate cycles. However, to fail to consider the one difference this time around, modern human civilization, is to ignore the millions of years worth of carbon burned into the atmosphere in barely two centuries. At best it is a grand experiment on the atmosphere of which some, such as your source here, are alarmingly cavalier.

The whole “why can’t meteorologists predict the weather past a few days” statement is a real red herring. Climate is not weather, and meteorologists are not doing climate science.

The IPCC is indeed the basis for Kyoto and UN negotiations for what happens after Kyoto. But it is hardly the only science or scientific institution weighing in on this issue.

This US-based “non-political scientific commission” is a fine thing I suppose, but it has been done – it is being done every day. The facts have been reviewed, are being reviewed. The fact that many of the projections from the ’07 IPCC report have indeed been wrong, as in too conservative, should give one pause.

The thing is – and this can be true on both sides of the issue – that some people will always hang the “political bias” tag around whatever it is they don’t want to hear – this seems glaringly obvious to me in the work cited from energyplanusa. Are you sure they don’t have an agenda? It sounded to me as one of the most biased papers I’ve read in awhile.

I appreciate that you are a democrat. But that shouldn’t make any difference.

I am a Democrat. For the past 20 years I believed global warming was caused by CO2. Now I'm not so sure, after taking an objective look at the wellspring of man-made global warming theory, the United Nations' Climate Change 2007 report. Whereas the report should have considered all possible global warming culprits then narrow the field, it instead removed from consideration the possibility that natural forces might drive global warming. It is little wonder that the report pinned the blame on CO2 when in their own words (p. 95), "The topics have been chosen for…assessing…risks of human-induced climate change." The fix was in. It was politics not science. The mission statement should have read, "Topics have been chosen for assessing risks of human-induced or NATURE INDUCED climate change." Remember, the UN developed in Kyoto Protocol. They have a vested in demonizing CO2. For further discussion of the report see
http://energyplanusa.com/ipcc_reports_dont_pass_s…