I'm impressed to see so many people on this sight being logical about this issue!
I watched a 20/20 episode where John Stossel (sp?) was critiquing this issue, and particularly Al "Save the world so I can get richer" Gore's movie about human-caused global warming.
As for the CO2, he showed Gore in an auditorium displaying slides that showed a chart with CO2 levels on the top, and temperature levels on the bottom. It covered 600,000 years of data. He says (paraphrased) "see, every time CO2 rises, the temperature rises! It's an obvious correlation."
Stossel says "let's actually put the CO2 series over the temperature series and see what it really looks like." In EVERY case of rises of both series, the temperature rise preceeded the CO2 rise, usually by 100 or more years!!!!!
Gore is shown talking to a bunch of schoolkids about how the very school they're in would be underwater because global warming could raise the sea level as much as 20 feet! Man, that's serious! Those poor little schoolkids were about to crap their pants they were so scared.
Stossell says, well, that could be right IF the temperature continued to increase for more than 100 years!
He interviewed a group of scientists who were listed as supporting the findings of the international association Gore works with (can't remember the name). They tell him that they DO NOT support the findings of that organization, which are ridiculous, and have repeatedly asked the org. to remove their names as supporters. The organization responded something like "sorry, but you didn't inform us before we started using your names, so it's too late."
I have spent some time in Paraguay. I met a real estate guy there (who actually brought me to the government Senate offices in Asuncion and introduced me to Ing. M. Sc. Herminio Chena, the nation's President of the Senate) earlier in the year. He was interested in working on some projects with me, including one I found very interesting - buying some property (like 20-30 hectares) outside of Encarnacion and turning it into a neighborhood and providing mortgages, something they don't have much of now, to allow middle class people to actually own decent homes.
Another project this guy told me about was planting Eucalyptus trees to sell carbon credits to US and European businesses. The land and labor is cheap, the trees grow easily and millions of dollars are to be made off of just 20-30 hectares of land!!!!
Scare mongers, every one of them!
No one really disputes that the Earth did warm over the last century - but to the tune of .6 freaking degrees over 100 hundred years! Most scientists that are not looking only at simulations begun in the 70s, and are not tied somehow to grants related to global warming, think it's ludicrous that man is responsible for the increase.
And now, as was mentioned, weather and ocean patterns are changing again, and ice at least in the Arctic is re-freezing and increasing mass again.
Geez. Scientists can't even get the weather forecast right for much mroe than a day or two in advance often. Why do people think they can do better with an even more complex subject, with data that is much harder to collect and interpret than weather itself!
