According to the best data available global temperatures have increased 0.17 degress C over the last thirty years. That's slightly over one tenth of one degree. The same satellite data shows no temp increase over the last 10 years.

This is satellite data, not tree rings, not temperature stations located next to incinerators (see below,) not hot air pumped out by Al Gore.

So people are worried, because???

Also, ponder this: The world really has warmed many times over the past couple million year. As far as we can tell from available records previous occurances of global warming have, very clearly, been a good thing. Several millons of years ago the temps seemd to have been as much as 10 degrees F higher than they are now. Life flourished.

So again, what's the problem here?

Let's set some definitions. Opponents of the warming myth usually refer to catastrophic warming. You know, that tipping point, we're all going to die stuff.

In the discussions that I've participated in the proponents tend to bounce all over the place. So let's lock it down here.

Yes, global warming has occured. We're no longer in an ice age, therefore some warming is real. And it's inarguably a good thing. Do people really want to be back in an ice age? Why is coming out of an ice age bad?

Catastrophic Global Warming as put forth by Al Gore has never occured and never will occur. There is no positive feedback loop, there is no coming catastrophe, there is nothing that hasn't happened before the invention of the SUV, many times. So when I refer to global warming below keep in mind that it's the catastrophic global warming that we're interested in. Let's abbreviate it to CGW, ok?

By the way, that CGW is a myth says nothing about any other environmental issue that there may be out there.

I'll lay out some facts and provide some links, below.

Oh, one more note. The proponents of CGW like to say things such as, "The debate is over..." and "The science is in..."

Well, no to both cases. In discussions where the insults are kept to a minimum the proponents usually lose by a lot. One could even say that the reason the proponents of CGW use those phrases is because they have no data and no argument. So discussion must be shut down in order for them to continue with their propoganda.

And propoganda it is.

Al Gore, the primary cause of CGW, put together a presentation and a movie that we're all familiar with. An Inconvenient Truth. It's still the primary tool used to introduce kids and others to the concept of Catastrphic Warming.

Except that Al got his facts wrong. All of them. I'm referring to the climate "facts" in the movie, not the biography facts, though I'm suspicious of those, too. it is al Gore, after all.

Ok, let's go:

CO2 is the cause of all warming. Nope, not even close. Actually, Al's graph shows temperature increases PREceeding warming by several hundred years.

CO2 (carbon dioxide) is a natural product of animal respiration and is also produced by burning carbon based fuels (eg: plants, petroluem, coal, etc.) The sum total of all the CO2 in the atmosphere is way under 1%. The total increase in CO2 over the last 100 years is a fraction of that.

While CO2 can, in the lab, cause some warming, the amount of it in the atmosphere is trivial, especially compared to water vapor, a far more common and far more potent greenhouse gas.

Also CO2 has another important trait - diminishing returns. Double CO2 and your do not get double the greenhouse effect. You get far less. Double it again and you get a much smaller contribution from that doubling.

So any graph that estimates future CGW temperatures based on CO2 concentrations is just wrong. BY the way, that goes for the UN's IPCC report, too.

Where's the ice? Al's movie, and the UN report, try to make a case for rising sea levels. No such increase has been seen. In fact, any increase in sea level ,at all, is well within the limits of statistical error. Meaning that if it's there at all, then it's pretty darn small. No, youi don't have to sell your beach front properties due to CGW concerns.

The Antarctic ice cap contains something like 90% of the Earth's fresh water. It's growing. This means that more and more of the Earth's water is being locked up in that ice cap. Don't worry, there's plenty left for the rest of us.

Various reports also show that the Greenland ice cap is growing.

NASA has stated the the de-icing of the Arctic is probably due to cyclic conditions (wind and current changes,) not warming. The Arctic has de-iced in the past, as can be seen from navigation records made by early explorers,and it will in the future.

Polar bears and Extinction: People like to point to the Polar Bear as the poster child of the effects of warming. Actually, it's a better poster child to argue against CGW. Polar bear populations have been on the rise, and not by a small amount, over the last 30-40 years. From around 5,000 critters, to arouind 25,000.

One theory for the increase in bear population is the improved access to food as the Artic ice thins out. Polar bears are superb swimmers. A few miles of open water is no big thing to them, really. They can swim for 100 miles.

There was a report of 4 bears killed by CGW. Actually, those bears died from a storm and the rest of the bear populations is quite happy, thank you.

There is a well known photo of a mama bear and cubs stranded on a tiny iceberg, intended to illustrate the horrors of warming. Given how well polar bears swim, and the population increases over the years, I don't think those bears are worried.

Other extinctions: Consider two facts first, and then I'll put this idea to rest.

1. Every species on Earth, with the possible exception of some bacteria, has been around for hundreds of thousands of years (including people) if not millions, or more.

2. The Earth has undergone a number of warming and cooling cycles during this period. Ice ages have come and gone, droughts have come and gone, etc.

The conclusion? Every species on Earth has already survived warming and cooling cycles far in excess of the tiny amount that we're seeing now. Therefore climite change, such as it is, doesn't drive extinction.

Acutally, according to the fossile records, life flourishes when the world is warmer. People do better in a warmer world.

Droughts and weather: People are panicing about increasing harsh weather due to CGW. Droughts are blamed on warming as are storms.

(Snide aside: Their are various religious cults who pop up every now and then. These cults proclaim that the end of the world is coming very soon. They have something in common with the extreme envioronmentalists. A 100% error rate. Both cultists and extremists have been wrong 100% of the time.)

If you check the actual record of droughts you'll see that there were more of the darn things towards the beginning of the 20th century than the end. By the way, at the beginning of the 20th people were in a tizzy about global cooling.

Storms? Real weather scientists say that warming should decrease the number and intensity of storms.

Temperature stations: The US has established around 1200 temperature stations that are used to... measure temps. They're also used to track warming trends, such as they might be.

The US station network is considered to be the gold standard of temp station networks. Which naturally means that other networks are less reliable.

The US network has a lot of garbage data, so the other networks...

Recenty NASA adjusted temp data for this network. There were some interesting results.

1. According to the data: warming peaked in the late 1940s, not 1998. There was a cooling trend inbetween. Much like the cooling trend in the early 1900s. Do we see a trend here?

2. CGW proponents like to ridicule people who think that #1 is important, generally pointing out that the US is about 2% of the worldwide temp station network. But, since the US is the gold standard, which they admit, and since the US data is largely garbage... what does that say for the rest of the world's temp networks?

The Heat island concept: The idea is basically this: In a concrete jungle heat is concentrated and you'll see an area, a heat island, that's significantly warmer than the surrounding rural areas. Guess where a lot of the US temp stations are located?

Wnat more on this? Check out SurfaceStations.org.

Thirty to fourty years: Satellites. That's how long they've been around. People like to use the terms "ever" and "never" a lot. For example: "We've never seen that much de-icing in the artic...." or "That was the warmest summer ever..."

Well, there's only been an eye in the sky for a few years, relatively speaking. The data recorded by that eye only goes back for those few years. Never goes back a lot farther. See what I'm getting at?

So the example statements are misleading. A more accurate statement is something like, "We haven't seen that little ice in thirty years..."

Ice Cores and tree rings: Obviously we haven't had temperature stations up for 500,000 years. They've barely been up for 120 years. So how do we even guess at what the temps or CO2 levels may have been before we could actually measure them?

Find a glacier which, as far as anyone can tell, has been around for awhile. Take a core, date it, and measure levels of gasses trapped in the ice. This gives one a rough guestimate of temp and CO2 variation over time.

But one core isn't enough. It only gives you info for local conditions. If you want global data you have to take these cores from all over the world. Naturally you have to use similar glaciers that have been around for awhile.

Then you take data from similar points from all of your cores, graph it, and try to make some sense of the data. If you have 5 cores from different parts of the world you'll probably see data points that very wildly. If you have 500 cores you'll probably start to see trends.

The trend seen from the ice cores is that historically CO2 levels come well after temperatures start to increase. According tho this data CO2 increases don't drive temparature increases, CO2 follows temp increases.

Water Vapor and Computer Models: All of the computer models for climate change are hopelssly broken. Why is that? There are a couple of big reasons.

1. Complexity of the systems being modeled
2. Water vapor and precipitation

Weather is driven by systems that we barely understand. Weather is also a chaotic system. Which means that sublte variations here and there can cause major changes later on. Such as the El Nino currents altering weather patterns over much of the world. This is why weather is impossible to predict more than a few days out, other than in a pretty general sense.

Climate is an average of many factors for a given area. To accurately define climate and any long term changes you need to have accurate data and use the same methods in your measurements. Changing methods means you have to run a lot of adjustments on previous data or just use new data sets.

As I mentioned above, many of those measurements are severely flawed.

And about the water vapor, precipitation, etc. No climate model addresses those. Why? We don't know enough about precipitation systems to model them, or even do more than guess at modeling them.

Since water vapor is not only a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, it's present in the atmosphere in far greater quantities. By itself this pretty much kills the CO2 arguement, since CO2 is trivial comapred to water vapor.

Also, keep in mind, that none of the existing climate models accurately model past or present climate. Since they can't model what's already happened then thay can't give decent predictions about what WILL happen.

One of the more popular YouTube videos, on CGW, is this one, "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See." The gist is this: The author lays out an arguement for massive government intervention into the "Catastropic Global Warming Crisis" just in case it might be real.

See for yourself, here's the link.

First, basing government policies, or any polices, on the just in case it might maybe be real concept is an truly bad idea.

Second, there should be real science and good hard data behind any such projects and there just isn't any with CGW.,

Third, and the reason I have such fun with this video, is that his just in case it might maybe happen argument can be used to justify anything. Want to build a space based missile defense system? Use his argument.

Want to nuke Iran to oblivion? Ditto. Want to put up a moon base to defend the planet from alien invasion? Ditto.

So keep that in mind. His arguement can be used to justify anything, and that the data actually supports the opposing arguements.

While catastrophic warming and tipping points are nonsense there are a number of things that aren't.

We do need to wean oursevles off of foreign oil, for a number or real reasons that have nothing to do with global warming. Cutting off our ecomony at the knees to combat somethng that isn't happening isn't the way to do it.

Massive conservation isn't the way to go, either. You can conserve your way into oblivion just as you can with any other. Conservation, within reason, is certainly a good way to go.

We DO need to have energy sources do drive this economy to new and greater hieghts. Right now, oil is it. Certain alternatives can act as a supplement and bio fules cause at least as many problems as they claim to solves. The primary near term solution to replace fossil fuels is nuclear and fusion is the way to go long term, but it's years off.

The US is already pretty darn clean compared to other countries per unit of energy consumed. Even if significant warming is real nothing the US does is going to keep China, India, and others from using the oil that is available to grow their economies and they aren't nearly as clean as the US. And they won't be for a long time to come.

As technologuy improves and the US economy grows we'll be better able to develop alternatives to oil (eg: fuel cells) and make them available to other countries.

Massive government interventio, regulation, and control os not the way to go here. It'll only cause huge problems and solve nothing.

There's lots more to cover in this area, but this hub is already on the long side (darn right! say the CGW fans.) So here are a few links to lots more info:

Four part video debunks warming. The guy knows a bit abot geology and science and climate. He makes some great points.

Snide remarks on warming by Orsen Scott Card. (What's that you say? He isn't a scientist? True, but then neither are Al Gore or the IPCC Bureaucrats. Kick Card out and you have to kick Gore & Co out. Especially since Card makes better arguements)

It's a scam - by someone who studies weather and climate for a living.

IPCC Commentary - we'll get more bang for the buck feeding hungry kids than fighting warming.

Signals and noise - Looking at certain data sets with a skeptical eye. This closely ties into the Garbage In- Garbage Out section above.

The Big List - Listing of over 9000 links to warming stuff, mostly skeptical.

There's more, if people are interested, but this is enough for now.

The conclusion? Relax. Global warming is being driven in its entirely by Al Gore & co and has little resemblance to reality. There's no there there.