Quadrant Online - Think globally, destroy locally

The only sensible precaution that you can take in such a situation is to plan for a continuation of the present climate trend, and recognize and plan also for reasonable bounds of future climate variability. As the temperature trend for ten years now has been one of cooling, since the unusually warm El Nino year of 1998, this requires a precautionary response to cooling rather than warming.
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It is no surprise, and a credit to our parliament, that the Senate has rejected this bill once, for the estimate of the first-up extra direct costs it will engender is about $3,000/family/yr. The “benefit” – get this! - is a theoretical reduction of temperature of no more than one-ten-thousandth of a degree in 2100.
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If such a monstrously socially damaging and environmentally ineffectual measure as the government’s carbon dioxide taxation bill becomes law, it will stand for decades as an indictment of all the parliamentarians who voted for it.

In which event, be sure to remember their names, for nothing is more certain than that you are going to want to exercise retribution thereafter.

Rapid City Journal | News » Top | Pine beetle, global warming connection debated

Bell and other citizen skeptics at the conference, however, questioned whether the cause-and-effect chain in the environment is as clear-cut as McGovern contends. There's no dispute that pine beetle populations have exploded in the Black Hills and other national forests in recent years. And it is considered likely that multiple years of drought and warmer conditions were part of the cause.

But does that mean global warming caused today's pine-beetle outbreaks? Dave Thom, a natural resources specialist with the Black Hills National Forest, said the link between climate change and bark-beetle infestations isn't as clear as McGovern and others might suggest.

"It's more complicated than that," he said.

The complications include an increasingly dense forest with overgrowth of pine trees during the past 30 or 40 years, Thom said. Add that to the recent multi-year drought, and the forest is less able to defend itself against natural attacks, he said.

Solar activity may be linked to cooler temperatures, scientist says | CJOnline.com

[Charlie Perry, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Lawrence] says data indicates global temperature fluctuations correlate to a statistically significant degree with the length of the sunspot cycle. Longer cycles are associated with cooler temperatures.

Johan Feddema, acting chair and professor of geography at KU, studies global warming. Atmospheric science is a program in geography at KU. He says he is skeptical of any one phenomenon being the direct cause of global warming because there are so many climate variables that factor into global temperatures.

Freddema said the warming trend earlier in the century could be attributed to anything from solar activity to El Ninos. But since the mid 1980s he believes data doesn't correlate well with solar activity, but does correlate well with rising CO2 levels.