The earth is due for an ice age soon, if the patterns of ice ages over the last 1/2 million years is an indicator. Certainly human activity has something to do with weather, but I am not certain how much. Geologists that look at long term patterns seem to be shut out of the discussion of temperature, in favor of climatologists using a more limited amount of data collected from the last few hundred years.

Mark Twain famously commented that "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it". But that was the point of view in a different era, when people understood weather as an "act of God".

Al Gore's great achievement has been to politicize weather. I personally don't understand what the people in 2005 did to have so many hurricanes, versus so few in 2006, but alas I am no expert. Certainly we should keep the people in charge of the weather in 2006 because they are more competant

Nowadays in our modern scientific era, people have to find other people at fault for natural disasters. And come to think of it, the 7.0 Bay area earthquake in the Bay Area occurred when another Bush was in office.

Those damn authoritarian scientists.

Incidentally, from Nature:
Climate factors such as sea-level rise may be changing more rapidly than predicted, according to a new survey of global trends since 1990. The figures suggest that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which publishes a fresh assessment of climate change tomorrow, may have previously underestimated the changes that lie ahead.

Researchers led by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany studied the most recent data for atmospheric carbon dioxide, global temperatures and sea level. They calculate that carbon dioxide levels are rising in line with predictions, but that temperatures are rising in line with the upper limit predicted by the IPCC, and that sea-level rises are on the very edge of the worst-case predictions of climate models."

If there's any politicizing of the weather, it's by people who think if liberals are concerned about it, it should be viewed skeptically, whatever the scientific consensus says.

I disagree that it is conservatives making this a political issue. First page of googling Katrina "Global Warming" Bush, yielded:

this
this
this
this
this and
this,

which seem to be of the liberal/left political persuasion.

Granted I am not a scientist, just a signal-to-noise tweaker, but at work I have looked at graphs and waveforms for many years now. You probably are correct about trends since 1990. On the other hand, those 100,000 year periods of very low ice age temperatures interrupted by shorter higher temperature epochs look like a much larger signal to me.

An interesting weather related post by Dave Schuler about how the Northern Hemisphere has longer summers and shorter winters.

I just wonder about the motivations of some of those most interested in declaring 'the debate over' and so on.

That would be 90+% of the scientists who study the issue, and I do not see any reason to doubt their motives. The real debate is over the cost-benefit of different proposed solutions (which may include nothing).

And every solution that I've seen the global warming enthusiasts put out requires significant expansion of the powers of the state.

Are you aware of any solutions that could be implemented without significant state involvement? That is just the way it is with any necessary environmental regulation.

Again, its about possible solutions and cost-benefit analysis, including the cost of greater regulation. I am aware that you doubt the utility of doing anything, but that assumes that the costs of doing nothing are less than the expense and benefits of the remedies. That is the debate.

An analogous situation is the problem of ozone depleting chemicals which has been very successfully dealt with (and a much easier problem to address). It was a real problem that could only be dealt with by significant government regulation and international cooperation. And I hope no one jumps in to tell me that it is also just hype -- the guy who figured out the science just happened to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the effort.

Dave C:

Geologists that look at long term patterns seem to be shut out of the discussion of temperature, in favor of climatologists using a more limited amount of data collected from the last few hundred years.

This is not an accurate statement of the science. It is the paleo-climatologists who are studying every kind of data back as far as possible to get a grip on global climate patterns (decent data goes back about a million years) -- geologists do not study the problem (though they have made an interesting contribution mentioned below). And no one is being shut out of the discussion.

If you read the science (linked several summary articles a while ago at ObWi), the key thing you learn is just how much natural variability there has been to climate (your point, I think -- the scientists agree). The swings that we are experiencing over the last few hundred years are well within the natural fluctuations that have been observed over the last million. There is real uncertainty over the exact cause and effect relationship of human activity to observable changes in recent climate trends.

On the other hand, there is a lot of certainty that recent historical changes in CO2 levels are going to induce some degree of global warming, which is going to have massive impacts over time. So, grin and bear it, or try to do something?

The earth is due for an ice age soon...

If by soon you mean "maybe in a few thousand years," this might be true.

Or not. The earth over the last 2 million years or so has been in an ice age epoch, but no one knows why. (They have a good idea on what has been causing them to come and go over every ten to twenty thousand years or so). It is a serious oddity in earth history. Estimates are that the epoch when the earth last had ice ages was around 300,000,000 years ago (and another very serious one 600+ million years ago -- the snowball earth theory). Decent data regarding paleo-climatology does not go back very far (one million years tops -- very sketchy after that), although there are ways to deduce the prevalence of ice ages in geologic time since they leave a few unique signatures. The belief is that earth's climate over geologic time has over time been warmer than in the last few million years, and ice ages just did not occur at all. Maybe we are done with them again.

A view from the author of War:

The 100,000 year fever.

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