The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million. …

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

Yep, that’s the problem with hype, generally. Best way to hide something is to point to it obnoxiously (Al Gore).

(Barry, go to your room!)

Buddy, thanks for your kind words. Your point is well taken. Most of the people hollering for carbon control are against the one obvious solution that doesn’t require massively intrusive regulation, and are for all kinds of other social and economic controls when they’re talking about other issues. My point is that they can be malicious and the science can STILL be right.

That’s part of why I’d love Roger and PJM to round up some experts who can explain clearly the risks and our level of uncertainty. Not a list of policy points– I’m a voter and I weigh risks and costs and benefits as well as the next guy. Hell, I live near a prestigious tech school if he doesn’t want to do it.

If it turns out that climate change is our doing and is harmful, I’m going to tell you all “I told you so”, buy a submarine and move to Europa. You have been warned.

Heck, maybe they’re right, it sure makes sense.

It seems to me that if the sun is putting out less energy the earth should cool, despite anything we humans do.

On the other hand, I must ask the GW crowd exactly what the optimal temperature for the planet is and why. Nobody seems to be addressing that question.

It should be pretty easy to rationalize all the possible AGW cures and let us see the cost/benefit ratios.

For example, how much greenhouse gas can we eliminate? I mean before we go to far and turn into Mars? Can we eliminate mankind’s ‘extra’ greenhouse gas for say ten trillion dollars?

Who will be the end-user of those dollars? Who will fork them over?

Will the capitalist running dogs have to fork them over–or is that just the propaganda, when the truth is that slowed global growth cements the existing power structure via eliminating competition, which will mean the third world will fork it over and the investor class in the first world, now pouring cash into green venturess, ultimately gain those dollars?

Or will those dollars just disappear, or not appear in the first place? Lets hear from some non-partisan economists. Oh, there aren’t any? Well that sucks.

“After five days of sometimes tense negotiations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopted its fourth and final report this year, along with a summary, on the science of climate change and the effects of human-produced greenhouse gases.”

Does that sound like a scientific report? Tense negotiations. Science isn’t a matter of negotiations and if it needs five days of argument it’s obvious the data aren’t all that clear. As has been pointed out many times, the IPCC is as much a political process as a scientific one and any conclusions they draw need to be looked at in that light. The reports might be well meaning, but they are political reports when all is said and done.

But it seems to me the people screaming loudest about the terrors we are said to face are the same group who have been wrong on virtually every major question of the past century.

When I was a student of physical chemistry and molecular biology in the sixties and seventies, I counted myself (politically speaking) among this benighted group, and I remember trying to persuade less enthusiastic comrades of the putative dangers of Paul Erlich’s “Population Bomb.”

Which seems to have been a dud.

Jamie Irons

Spot on. Follow the money. The AGW scare is all about cash. Look who’s getting paid–fringe environmental groups, right thinking scientists, opportunistic politicians, UN flunkies.

And AGW is a fairly safe political issue. Hell, who wants the planet to die? And guess what? We really don’t have to do anything but talk, and feel good about our green credentials.

Two things will stick a fork in the craziness. Good science and political reality. We’re not going to ever do anything remotely Kyoto like without a helluva lot better data, and that data will kill not bolster the AGW alarmists.

Until that happy day, let the blow hards yammer.