I’m not arguing which is better, only that global warming is a trade-off, not lose-lose situation. As other comments have mentioned, this isn’t a scientific debate, it’s a self-righteous, religious debate. Global warming will cause disruption, but the measures necessary to stop or reverse global warming necessarily will cause disruption as well.

As a geologist I do admit that minor, short resolution items can impact the ecosystem on this planet, but the global trend from 65 MYA is *downwards*. With carbon dioxide much higher in the past the planet had a relatively stable, balmy climate. But also note that the entire set of continents are riding higher now as they are moving faster than they did 65 MYA. So that needs to be factored in, as well. Do large, but mostly shallow oceans raise overall global temperature? And could that be an adequate way to explain the cooling trend the globe has experienced as of late… well, within the last 65 MY…

This period of having a number of glacial periods with interspersed warming trends is pretty unique in global history, and we are riding a fine balance between tipping back and forth for other reasons.

Now, as to how to address it… has *anyone* done a study to demonstrate lost economic valuation in seaside property against reduced industrial output and economic stagnation to control carbon dioxide levels? Is there a real correlation between carbon dioxide levels and global temperature? And one may not cite a mere 100 years of fine data… a hiccup to a geologist. If solar output was increased 0.01% we would have global warming and no way to counter it. Note that Mars is also warmer the last few decades than previously.

Basically, would would happen to the worldwide standard of living if industrial production and productivity started to decline to meet carbon dioxide goals? What is the cost in health care and human lives agains the cost of some social infrastructure lost while an orderly transition to higher ground is made?

Yoo-hoo!! World-wide economists!! Your cue! Time to pull out all of those fancy industrial models and standards of living impact models and start putting in the numbers… you do have those, don’t you? Or are geologists the only ones to consider climate on a global scale along with its impacts?

Wake me when the studies are done… probably in a decade. I will go back to worrying about Yellowstone and loss of our civilization.

Is this a problem? Why? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is a problem.

In this case, all that really matters is finding a solution. Even then, not just any solution, but a solution which is cost-effective. What that might mean in practice is dependent upon one’s answer to the above question–why exactly is global warming a problem–because only by understanding the nature of what it is we are trying to fix can we be clear on what is a reasonable price tag for fixing it.

But there’s a deeper point here, which is that whether the matter is anthropogenic is irrelevant. If there is global warming and if it is a problem then we have to do our best to fix it, whether we caused it or not. So, whether we caused it is completely irrelevant except insofar as it affects the solution.

And therein is shown the essentially religious nature of the debate. The debate is never framed as an engineering problem to be solved (which it is if there’s a problem at all); it is always framed as a moral issue, a case study in modern-day sin. And, as is common with this sort of religious thinking, as an excuse to beat up on those–Americans, SUV drivers, light-bulb users–who are not yet “of the body” within this new religion. It is not sufficient for the believers in this new religion to have these new beliefs; it is also necessary that they convert the unbelievers around them. Viewed from this perspective, the many SUVs with bumper stickers enjoining us to save the Earth and denounce big oil are not at all surprising nor even logically contradictory: the real message of the bumper stickers is that the drivers are “of the body” and in the end that’s all that’s required.

But the Telegraph article references above goes along exactly with the Martian polar caps data: something is making things warmer in places we can be positive there are no significant anthropogenic effects.

And you are quite correct. If 6 billion of us were to start riding horses the manure problem would likely dwarf the global warning question. Imagine the logistical consequences! On the other hand, given all of that shoveling, we would be in great physical shape!

But unlike Roger, I wouldn’t put much stock in a recent piece of alarmism. Short-term trends do not make for good science policy, and all the longer-term studies show that we are no where near where the polar warming observed in the early 20th century and the Medieval Warm Period (ie, when Greenland was actually green and supported crops and grazing).

Present day climate models can’t even explain the sudden warming before WWII (before the rapid rise in man-made CO2), much less the marked cooling that followed the next three decades. So how does that constitute a recommendation for following them now?

The fact is that “Science” will publish anything on climate science fitting an alarmist agenda (as has ruefully been observed at http://www.climateaudit.org) – and then fail to correct falsifications of Naomi Oreke’s late 2004 study about the “scientific consensus” on ACW. The truth is that “Science” like “Nature” like “JAMA” and other of the biggest named periodicals in science are edited not by scientists as you’d think, but elite J-school grads. Why? They are “profit centers” to larger organizations, Take Columbia Journalism School’s Melvin Mencher’s longtime bestselling textbook “News Reporting and Writing.” A journalist is supposed to be an advocate for social justice – neither dispassionate nor objective as a scientific and sober approach dictates.

Nevertheless, the potential of sustained planetary warming deserves watching because the consequences are possibly enormous. Satellites do that for us best these days. The Ross Ice Shelf melting in the Antarctic is offset by gains over the central portions of the continent. Is there recent increased melting in the Artic, however? If so, this is very recent, but could be consistent with higher latitude, higher low-temperatures that have been observed, as well as the decadal northward migration of biota.

If, in five or ten years, the rate of polar warming levels out, we’ll easily adapt. If it instead accelerates, there will be bigger debates down the road than we have today. That’s where my graduate environmental science studies at the (much less hysterical than US scene) University of London puts me.

Meanwhile, the much hyped “hockey stick,” proclaimed by the UN as “proving” that the last decade was the “warmest ever” is indeed broken. The layman can catch up with the best in skeptical climate science in the topical overviews in “Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming,” edited by Patrick Michaels, published at the very end of 2005.

It’s a nonlinear, non-equilibrium system. Small changes in initial conditions have huge results.

This is the same reason why it is so hard to model climate: physics is built around linear, equilibrium systems. Absolutely brilliant work is being done on the most outlandishly huge computers, and it’s nowhere near enough to settle these questions. Certainly not with the “authoritah” that Greens brandish.