The unraveling of the case for anthropogenic global warming

I have long been a skeptic regarding claims that man's activities are causing the planet to significantly heat up. The proponents of this theory first tell us that the planet's climate is incredibly complex. Then, seemingly in the next breath, they claim that all this complexity boils down to a simple (simplistic?) equation: higher levels of carbon dioxide equal higher temperatures. Really?

Maybe not. It seems that every week brings new revelations undermining the case for AGW. The tipping point was probably the release of the East Anglia documents -- which include, in addition to the damning e-mails, working files that cast doubt on the data that purportedly support the warm-mongers' dire predictions.

The warm-mongers also stridently insist that the decade-long cooling period we have just witnessed is a temporary aberation. But their computer models didn't predict it and can't explain it, so how do they know?

Now we learn that the Himalayan glaciers will not disappear by 2035 as the UN's IPCC predicted, and that some of the IPCC's supposedly-peer-reviewed claims were based on an article published in a mountain climbing magazine and on an unpublished student dissertation that in turn relied on "anecdotal" evidence. Curiouser and curiouser.

Even mainstream politicians are calling for the resignation of the head of the IPCC -- he is a railway engineer, not a climatologist. And Al Gore steadfastly refuses to debate the merits of his claims with real scientists.

If the case for AGW collapses, so does the entire rationale for the President's cap-and-trade scheme, which he himself admits would "necessarily" cause electricity prices to skyrocket and would bankrupt anyone who built a coal-powered electricity plant (we get over half of our electricity from coal-fired plants).

It is definitely time to hit the reset button on this entire issue.

The AGW debate continues

Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, has an excellent article in today's Wall Street Journal in which he discusses the many unresolved issues and paradoxes in the AGW debate.

The science is anything but settled.