So, yeah. Protect yourself from bad stats. :-D

On a personal note, as a lifelong environmentalist, I bought the whole GW thing hook, line and sinker until a friend challenged me to look at the data. I argued fiercely for it, trotting out all the usual info the GW crowd uses, then set out to prove my friend wrong.

As a scientist, I looked at the data dispassionately and disccovered, to my great shock, that not only was there no compelling evidence for human-created CO2 causing GW, but that there is no evidence that unusual GW exists outside the usual natural cycle, there is evidence that we are now entering a cooling cycle, and there is evidence that climate change over time has been caused by many things (sun, orbit, volcanos, undersea vents, etc etc). I could go on for pages about all the very serious issues with the “science” behind GW, but others have already done this better than I could.

The problem with the GW hysteria is that it is directing resources and political will away from proven, serious, environmental issues that are doing harm to life on Earth (e.g. deforestation, poaching, fertilizer runoff, ocean garbage, …)

Another problem is that we may go and do something really stupid (seeding the oceans with iron, putting an aerosol sunscreen around the earth, etc) that could actually disrupt the balance of nature and cause a true global catastrophy.

When it comes to climatology, we should think of ourselves as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Anything we DO is likely to cause problems. (As opposed to anything we STOP doing, which would be beneficial, like stopping destroying the Americas rainforests)

Further, GW has now been twisted and co-opted to somehow justify misguided policies that redirect food to be used for fuel (ethanol), causing all sorts of negative, (presumably) unintended side effects.

gm