Ramesh – I agree. I still think global warming is probably happening and I think you’re right to offer the cautions you do. But, I do think a decade long hiatus in what Al Gore and others insist is an immediate and transparent crisis (and the news that the warming trend may not pick up again for another decade, at least) certainly lends credibility to the anti-alarmist case. My basic view on global warming is that it’s a potential big problem that we have time to study it in order to fix it. It’s not an excuse to get the command and control economics (or politics) the left has pursued for a century. And, it’s not necessarily an unmitigated disaster. Longer growing seasons are a good thing, for example. Indeed the warming we’ve had so far was well worth it.
Update: From a reader with an email address bespeaking some level of expertise (but who knows what his job is):
Jonah,
Global warming is happening – we are not in an ice age. Is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) happening? The data doesn’t support that case: it has been warmer in the past with less CO2; it has been colder in the past with more CO2. It is most likely that the CO2-IR system is saturated, i.e. there isn’t enough IR photons to raise the state of each CO2 molecule. The Gore-Hansen “CO2 tipping point” is physically impossible – the system would have run away to its end state long ago when the CO2 was 4000 ppm (10 times more than now and, btw, the earth was then in an ice age).
The claim that “The time scale for warming is long enough to be compatible with a decade of cooling,” is not true of the IPCC GCM ensemble predictions. They are already falsified at the 95% level.
Whether you believe these claims or not, please don’t allow the greens to “frame” the debate keep the focus on AGW, not global warming, much less climate change.
And, FWIW, the NYT’s report on Hansen and censorship didn’t really reflect what the OIG found.