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I think being too quick to dismiss climate change as pure political propaganda is equally as foolish as any blind assumption that the sky's falling and it's all man's fault.


Human-forced global warming clearly is political propaganda. There's hardly any question when the UN appoints a railroad engineer with no climatology experience to lead IPCC, and when Gore tries to ride the issue as a political comeback.

Now, it might actually be right. But it's definitely political propaganda, right or wrong.

Much of the problem is that people expect quick answers to problems, and climatology is really, really hard. We don't know how to predict the temperature 50 years from now, or even next week.

Part of the problem can be seen in the name - "Global Warming". The climate would be warming on a scale of millennia even if there were no humans at all! The question is "human-caused warming" and that is a much harder problem to measure.

The computer models are nowhere near as good as claimed - they're just now getting reasonably good at predicting the past but the accuracy of predictions of the future are unknown. The best modelers can predict how warm it was in 1999 but getting 2009 right is another matter.

And even predicting the effect of human-caused changes isn't easy. For example if you assume glaciers will melt you have to keep in mind that more liquid water will absorb a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere, and that rising oceans reflect a lot more sunlight, meaning less heating of the Earth. Which effect dominates? Nobody knows.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock