Well, Raoul, there's the lung cancer analogy. One pooch's ponderings, though it seems to fit a lot of things, especially this.

In the US for years and years and years the tobacco companies successfully claimed that since people who didn't smoke occasionally got lung cancer, tobacco was not a factor. The tobacco companies were subsidized, enormously profitable, and could spend fortunes on public opinion.

They got away with that, and by the time the truth was known, millions had died. No one at the time suggested that tobacco sure wasn't doing any good.

There are folks who say that since climate varies, you can't blame man-made emissions as a factor. The industrial countries are so powerful and short-term dividend driven, they cannot limit themselves to any effective degree and spend a fortune pointing out that climate varies all by itself.

Since the world-wide climate system is so vast, by the time we positively establish man-made emissions as a factor, the huge climate system with it's many variables will probably be tilted beyond man's ability to turn it back. No one is suggesting that man-made emissions aren't doing any good.

In the meantime, the industrial nations suggest that their emissions do not affect climate, or are healthy, or that there are ways to adjust the climate which will be cheap and easy.

Safe in the longer term doesn't precedence over profit in the shorter. Sort of grim long-term. At least that's how it looks this low to the ground. From higher up it might seem different.

Arf