H. L. Mencken -- ”The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary…. The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” Boy, did he have Al Gore's number!

He had Cheney's, too. Different hobgoblin, same tactic. Funny how Vice Presidents so often fall naturally to the role of "stalking horse"... remember Agnew?

Mencken had, IMO, the long historical view as well: People have been ruled by fear of bogie men since ruling was first invented. The most successful has been xenophobia. What probably was once a hard-wired caution, when one band of primates encountered another, is still the easiest to manipulate. Until the Enlightenment, fear of the retribution of god(s) was a close second. Most of us were born into a time when nuclear annihilation topped the fear list (see also LBJ's anti-Goldwater "girl in the daisy field" campaign commercial -- and it worked).

When I first saw this thread, during lunch at work, I didn't have time to read the posts -- and now that I come back to it, it's twice as long. At the time, I took JimO's original post's title to have its tongue waaaay up its cheek. It would seem others didn't read it the same way, or the post that goes with it.

It's pretty sad when politics intrudes so vehemently into a science forum... such that a remark about a storm in Jupiter's atmosphere is considered an opportunity for an anti-global-warming gibe (I thought briefly about putting on my Moderator hat and moving the thread to CE -- and I will, if at least half the participants ask). It's also a shame that none of us are bona fide climatologists.

While I'm here, three things:

One: while I accept the evidence that average global temperatures are rising, and that 'anthrogenic causes' are a likely major cause, I do not believe its effects can be predicted, any more than the last three days of a seven-day weather forecast can be taken as accurate. We have in our favor that change will be slow.

Two: I wonder what could be so bloody bad about a global civilization that reduced its CO2 emissions. Leaving out the greenhouse gas issue entirely: the other products of combustion that accompany the CO2 have a proven deleterious effect on people's health, at ground level. Reducing combustion generally by adding nukes, wind and solar to the power grid, while increasing electricity use in transportation, cannot be bad in and of itself. Can it, JimO?

What, then, is to be feared about the rule of leaders who want to make the air cleaner, even if their reasons may be seen -- in a century or so -- as exaggerated?

Three: I'm not the one to do it, but it seems to me a back-of-envelope calculation could be done, to wit: Ascribe all of the recent increase in global average temperature to increased solar luminosity, expressed in watts/metre2. Then apply the inverse-square law to Jupiter's orbital radius, and use the resultant number to plausibly demonstrate that a system as large, cold and far away as Jupiter's atmosphere would react in a way visible from Earth, this early in the alleged increase.