There is only one goddess Gaia and Al Gore is her only prophet...

[Jester]

I've been a proponent for eliminating coal fired plants when Al Gore was still figuring out if he wanted to be a minister, journalist, or lawyer. I'm not against him for the cause, rather his reactionary conclusions and the dire need to strip peoples freedom and property in order to "Save the Planet". And, by freedom I mean outlawing light bulbs, TV sets, and determining your proper carbon footprint.

Arrgh sound bytes. Nobody has ever proposed outlawing lightbulbs, in the sense that you'd have to live in the dark. Regulating the *type* of lightbulbs for energy efficiency is a rather different activity. I don't even know what you're talking about with TV sets.

As for determining your "proper" carbon footprint, and refusing to "strip peoples freedom and property", what on earth do you say to the electricity producer who tells you he likes his coal power, because it's cheap and plentiful? To the Hummer owner who tells you he really enjoys his 100 yard drive to the mailbox? To the tarsands oil producer who burns off their sour gas without a care in the world? If you don't *somehow* restrict their activities, their freedom, their property, they'll do what they do naturally - what they're doing right now - and continue polluting.

I'm all for stopping pollution in the least invasive, most libertarian way possible. But there's no free lunch. You can't get people do do what you want without either a carrot, or a stick, and the carrots aren't free either.

And, by property, I mean that process where the government separates a person from the fruits of their labors. But, here is the biggest rub; No one listened to me, or others in 1975 onward until the Green wacko's suddenly grew alarmed.

In fairness, if your profile is correct, you were 14. And the "green wackos" have been against coal power since the British Industrial Revolution.

We've already burnt the baby, so yes, not burning another one would be good, however, what do you plan to do about the gigatons of CO2 already released?

If we pollute absolutely zero CO2 from this point onwards? We do nothing. We sit back and let the atmospheric CO2 levels drop back down to their natural levels. This isn't a catastrophe at current levels.

But we're not going to pollute absolutely zero from here on out. We're not even slowing down the rate of *increase* in CO2 emissions - what hope do we have of outright stopping? At what level are we going to stabilize? 350? 450? 600? 1000? Is there a limit, except the oil in the ground and the forests on the earth? At that point, our options suck - risky, unpredictable geoengineering, ludicrously expensive carbon scrubbing, or just accepting whatever the consequences are.

The long term trend as we are coming out of an ice age is that the Earth is warming, and AGW may have an influence on that trend, but the science is still unclear.

We don't know what caused the "little ice age". The Maunder Minimum seems like a good guess, but the decline seems to precede it, which makes the causality suspect. We don't know if we'd still be experiencing it, were it not for AGW, or what the "normal" temperature would be. Maybe it would be about this warm, maybe not (I would say probably not - our sensitivity estimates would have to be way off.) It's probably a safe bet that the earth wasn't going to continue on a cooling trend forever, but beyond that, it's just a guess, except for what can be modelled (which is a sophisticated guess.)

I know some scientists are claiming it is clear, but the critics do need to be able to review the raw data and methods to debunk or corroborate their findings. That is the process of science.

It is, so long as you include the "or corroborate" part - which seems to be the part that gets left out, which AGW scientists find infuriating. Even the best work that has come out of the skeptical community has had a strong flavour of "gotcha" about it. While purely critical analysis has an important place, much of what is published by denialists, even the stuff that seems to hold water like the McIntyre pieces, seems to confirm the angry accusations of the AGWers when they were circling the wagons: that their critics are not interested in contributing to climate science, but merely with tearing down a theory they find politically inconvenient. Now, a wrong theory *should* be torn down, and in that, I'm in at least philosophical agreement with the critics. I think the AGW scientists failed to appreciate what McIntyre was doing (to say the least), but I don't think they were wrong to suspect that most of their critics loudly demanding data and filing FOI claims were doing so in bad faith.

My theory is that unlike Venus, the Earth has oceans, and terrestrial ecosystems filled with plants and organisms that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. I believe the reason that the actual climate is cooler than predicted by the AGW models is that the Earth has complex negative feedback systems that science has yet to fully understand. Also, I doubt that this buffer has infinite capacity for CO2 absorption, and I have no idea how close to "overwhelmed" this buffer system may be either.

First, the earth is not cooler than the AGW models predicted it to be. The current temperature and warming trend are both well within the bounds of the predictions.

The process of plants returning CO2 to the ground is not that poorly understood. Given that the total forestation of the world is declining dramatically (both adding CO2 to the atmosphere and stopping re-absorption) I wouldn't put all your chips on that particular bet, unless you think vigorous grass growth is going to stop climate change. The planet would restore a CO2 balance eventually with no human intervention, but unless you have Dyson's Diamond Trees, that process takes millennia to produce results. That time frame falls under Keynes' "in the long run, we're all dead." Even if we let it work without interference, a thousand years of climate change is pretty much the definition of an unacceptable solution.

If there are other negative feedbacks, it would be fascinating to know them. Climate modellers would certainly be interested to hear major areas where their models are lacking. But until we actually have more than a vague hunch about the planet's adaptability, I'd rather not risk our future on it. I'd be thrilled if the planet can take the beating and in some sense, no doubt it can. But I'd rather it not flood the coastlines of the world before settling down.

Finally, the earth might be cooler than expected right now because there is currently very little sun spot activity.

This seems plausible to me. I recall last time this thread came up, there was some discussion of the solar cycle, and the reasonableness of measuring everything from 1998 (which, to me, is cherry picking the peak to show a non-robust "decline"). The argument in favour was that the solar cycle is 11 years (presumably, 1998 to 2009 would return us to the same point in the cycle.) But this cycle is very late - we're still essentially at a solar minimum, whereas 1998 was a maximum - which means that measurements taken from 1998 are as deceptive as possible, from the perspective of the solar cycle.

However, I don't think the link between sunspot activity and warming is well enough established to lean very heavily on that explanation for the current "lull" in warming (not static, but nearer the lower end of predicted warming for the moment.)

-Jester