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The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Gov. Jay Nixon's spokesman, Sam Murphey, said Tuesday morning that the death toll in Joplin had risen to 117.

Until this week, the single deadliest tornado on record with the National Weather Service in the past six decades was a twister that killed 116 people in Flint, Mich., in 1953.

More deaths have resulted from outbreaks of multiple tornadoes. On April 27, a pack of twisters roared across six Southern states, killing 314 people, more than two-thirds of them in Alabama. That was the single deadliest day for tornadoes since the National Weather Service began keeping such records in 1950.

The agency has done research that shows deadlier outbreaks before 1950. It says the single deadliest day that it is aware of was March 18, 1925, when tornadoes killed 747 people.

thibodeaux wrote:For one thing, the $value---even in constant dollars---is bound to be more just because there's more STUFF to be destroyed. On the other hand, fatalities tend to fewer, because we've got better warnings.

A large majority of climate scientists say the climate is shifting in ways that could cause serious impacts, and they cite the human release of greenhouse gases as a principal cause. But a tiny, vocal minority of researchers contests that view, and has seemed in the last few years to be winning the battle of public opinion despite slim scientific evidence for their position.

Then there’s the lack of significant warming since 1998, still the hottest year on record globally. What’s more, that trend will continue if you believe scientists at the British Met Office, an agency sometimes described as Britain’s NOAA.

The Met created a minor flap recently when, over the Christmas holiday, it posted a new set of predictions coughed up by its computer models. Unlike the previous year’s forecasts, these saw no significant warming for the next five years.

TPRJones wrote:EDIT to add: And I for one welcome the coming Ice Age. It might - might - make summers in Houston bearable.

For the past 15 years there has been a lull in rising global temperatures which has many climate scientists scrambling to find an explanation and global warming skeptics arguing that the dire predictions made by activists are full of hot air.