The debate about global warming divides people into two major crowds - those that believe there is no debate and those that insist it's all a gigantic hoax of some kind.
What, so there's no group that believes that there may or may not be warming, that if it does exist that the human component may or may not be as significant as some claim, and that there is still ongoing legitimage scientific debate on the subject? Or there's no large group that doesn't believe it but just thinks it's flawed science rather than a hoax? Or people who firmly believe it but acknowledge that there's still legitimate debate going on? There are a lot people inbetween you know.
Piece of advice - don't try to paint things as only black and white. The global warming folks did that and that in my mind is a big reason why the full on opposite reaction (the folks who deny it outright) became significant.
I agree with this last sentence, but there's a bit of irony in it. If you read the scientific papers they do not speak in terms of a "black or white" view of global warming. If anything, I find them to err on the side of caution about their conclusions. The media and celebrities like to magnify those scientific conclusions, however. The serious analysis gets lost and the headline becomes the story.
Muon2 since you are a scientist I would like to ask your opinion on a few questions if you don't mind:
I'll give it a fair shot. Keep in mind that I'm well read on the subject, but not a climatologist.
As I understand it, astronomers have reasonably clear links between changes in the earth's orbit and the interglacial warming periods. A lot of CO2 is locked up in the ice and when the glaciers recede the CO2 is released. The fresh water does not hold as much CO2 as the ice.
If the release of CO2 was driven by release from ice then the ocean is available to reabsorb it. The ocean would have more water from glacial runoff, but the rate that the ocean can pick up the CO2 is much slower. A decline is reasonable as long as the temperature does not exceed a critical point where the runaway effect takes over.
To the extent that the interglacial warming is due to excess solar heating, the CO2 changes followed the cause.
I'm no fan of Kyoto. I think that it has a great many problems and I'm not surprised that the effect may be minimal in the near decades. I prefer a multifaceted approach that uses a number of incremental improvemnets and can vary by the economy that implements them. I would expect that the difference from a no change option would be small in the initial decades, but the difference would manifest itself more dramatically as time allows the small corrections to take hold.
