Edmunds CarPool

And I bet you thought the links between smoking and cancer were a fraud too.

Unless you have 5-10 years experience in climate modeling and data analysis I suggest you stick to talking about cars. Trying to understand how the climate behaves is a complex task and most scientists (99.9% of all climate scientists) are talking about the best predictions we can make based on the available data extrapolated forward (and checked by putting in data from the past to see if they match with our existing climate).

What should concern you is that their predictions are off. Events that they thought would happen 50 years in the future are happening now. When you're mucking around with something as complex as the climate of the entire planet I think its safer to be prudent and try and cut CO2 emissions.

The worst thing that happens is that we get cleaner air, a decrease in GDP in the short term, and more fuel efficient cars. If we do nothing then we risking a lot more (such as mass emigration, floods, droughts and probably a host of other problems we haven't thought of yet).

The only thing the hacked emails suggest is that scientists get frustrated having to deal with climate denialists trying to undermine their credibility all the time.

The "fraud" issue was a guy trying to use old sets of temperature proxies based on tree ring growth. The method with which the original tree ring information had been converted to temperature was shown to have an error in it a long time ago, so scientists who want to use that tree ring data have to apply a correction to the data so that they're using. That correction has been misconstrued as fraud.

Look, none of us but the carbon credit traders want global warming to happen per the models. But the qualitative theory (that says CO2 will cause warming, without saying when) has never been attacked. If you have any questions, I feel qualified to talk about that, but not about models. The quantitative analysis (the models that say how much warming will happen, and when) have been, but no one's really offered an alternative model.

hmmmm Now who is in denial? It's a fraud. It's been exposed for the fraud it is.

Even if global warming/climate change turns out to not exist/not be man-made, what's the harm in making cars more efficient and less polluting? Have you seen the skyline around LA? Cars still cause pollution, and pollution isn't good. Cars also use non-renewable resources, which will eventually, by definition, run out (or become prohibitively expensive to extract).

Magnitude matters. I think it would be fair to say that the Michael Mann hockey stick graph out of control global warming is highly suspect at this point. Doesn't mean that we can continue on our current trajectory of fossil fuel use, but it suggests that moving away from fossil fuels can be slower and much less expensive. If the human CO2 effect on climate is small, it's possible that fuel shortages and higher prices contain the problem without lots of government intervention.

Concern about future gasoline prices is making me think about the energy efficiency of my next car independent of the climate change debate. The global warming "crisis" appears to be a hoax, but the rapid increase in the number of cars on the road in China is very real. Increasing demand for oil without corresponding increases in supply means future pain at the gas pump.

JibJab Hide the Decline video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk