I'm sure I don't know half as much about it as others here, but the research I've done shows me only that temperature and CO2 are linked over the last few hundred thousand years. The charts are obvious.

Cause and effect is not. Sure as hell there wasn't 300 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere 130,000 years ago because something was driving too many cars around.

I believe we need to stop burning hydrocarbons as fuels, for three primary reasons.

In rough order of importance:

1. Oil and natural gas aren't going to last forever, and there are already signs of this.

2. Too much of our oil comes from places where politics is a serious problem.

3. We shouldn't be dumping so many exhaust products into the atmosphere. And believe me, CO2 ain't the only one.

1 and 2 have switched places a lot for me lately.

More nuclear power plants is a good short-term solution. Rising hydrocarbon prices will, I expect, force more solutions for decentralized energy production, which I have a lot of hopes for. Every non-hydrocarbon energy technology has a role here.

What irritates me most about this argument is the automatic assumption that anyone with doubts about the global warming scenario must be a paid puppet of the evil energy industry, not worth listening to because they haven't published in the "right" places, or somehow just plain stupid.

No judgments are ever made on the other side, although God knows some of them have a political agenda as obvious as the nose on your face. I have never heard ANY solution for any environmental problem from the big players in environmentalism that did NOT involve massive increases in the power of the State and decreases in the rights and choices of individuals.

Other scientists are going along with the crowd for sheer self-preservation. You see, publishing in the "right" places often seems to require saying the "right" things. We went over a few examples of this in a previous thread. And then, when you start talking grants, government contracts, relations with the universities...

Until we can deal with the fact that there are axes being ground on both sides here, I don't think the discussion can go anywhere.