Stan seems awfully sure of what he believes is true. I wish I were that sure. There are so few things that are certain in the natural world, I've always thought it's safer to remain skeptical until you have enough information to be sure. I suppose everyone, though, has their own threshold for belief. For myself, I require more than some has-been politician desperate to remain relevant to the public who puts out what a British judge ruled was a propaganda film that wildly exaggerates and misrepresents the facts.
The same people who cannot forecast the weather accurately a week out want you to believe their mathematical models. Models which are built atop nested assumptions, each with its own statistical error which compounds as each new term is added to the model. These people want you to believe that their models are actually predictive of what will happen to the earth's overall climate years in advance when the data is unavailable. And they never show you their margin of error. Why is that? They show you a thin black line on a chart. If I presented data that way, I can guarantee you my colleagues would be falling all over themselves trying to impress the VP sitting in the corner by pointing out that I did not include in my chart the confidence limits in my data. Yet the GW fearmongers get away with doing just that, and nobody calls them on it. To me that says the conclusions have already been drawn, so models are substituted for data. And models can be tweaked this way and that to produce whatever its creator wants it to show.
Now, in contrast to predictive modeling, here is some historical data. Check out the following site. You'll find that the earth's climate during the Carboniferous Period is not as you say it was:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html "What this graph shows is there is no correlation in the geologic record between
atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature. The Earth went into an ice age 450
million years ago despite a level of atmospheric carbon dioxide that is ten times what it is
today. 150 million years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were five times what they
are today, but that didn’t stop a Cretaceous-aged glaciation."
Such drastic shifts in earth's climate are brought about by far powerful forces than mankind is capable of inciting. Until we have more to go on than mathematical models whose cumulative errors of prediction dwarf the effect they are trying to predict, I'll remain skeptical. Show me the data, not a model.
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the wise are full of doubt."-Bertrand Russell
Quinn