#1. You have a new forum now and abandoned this one, remember? Trying to avoid Dan??

#2 You have not been reading much lately. The science of climate change has been shown to be fraudulent. Tree ring data was cooked. Do some research and wake up. Then go post elsewhere. I own this page:-)

>>"On the other hand, actually looking at temperature trends over the past 100 years (to say nothing of the past 10) is pretty simple in itself. Just follow the arrow as it heads, incontrovertibly, in an upward direction."<<

You might find this article interesting:

www.co2science.org/educatio...tique.php

I am personally undecided on the issue of anthropogenic forcing of climate via CO2. Here is why the data you refer to is not definitive:

There was a clear cooling event called the little ice age that ended about 100 years ago. The upward trend from that time could be viewed as a return to a "normal" interglacial temperature regime. There was a major dip in that trend in the mid-20th century that occurred despite increasing CO2. From the perspective of geologic time we are in the middle of a glacial age that has witnessed at least four major advances of the ice sheets separated by very short (10,000 year) interglacial periods. We are in an interglacial epoch that began about 10,000 years ago; simply based on what happened in past interglacial epochs, we could very well be on the precipice of a new ice age. If we look back over temperatures from the beginning of the interglacial epoch, we see that current temperatures are considerably below the "Holocence maximum" that occurred fairly early in the epoch and also below temperatures seen in the "Medieval warm period". If you recall your history, this period was warm enough for settlers to live in southern Greenland. Climate alarmists want us to believe that if we again approach temperatures seen earlier in this interglacial, that the biosphere will be severely damaged and civilization will collapse. The fact is that warmer temperatures have always meant greater biodiversity throughout earth history and periods of cold have had devastating effects on human populations, while civilizations tend to thrive in warmer times.

Since I have not been studying climatology, I don't have the data to prove it, but my guess is that anthropogenic CO2 may be having an effect on climate; perhaps extending the current interglacial epoch beyond its normal endpoint. If one actually looks at the long term trend from the Holocene maximum to now the trend is quite flat and definitely downward. Let us suppose we can reverse this trend as we seem to see in the data for the last 10 years; is this really something to be alarmed about? A lot of people are saying it is, but I am not so sure. There is still a long way to go be for we would even reach Medieval temperatures. Also, it is demonstrable that plant growth increases as CO2 content increases. Estimates of CO2 going back hundreds of millions of years indicate there was 9-10 times more CO2 in the atmosphere in the Carboniferous Period, where we find many massive deposits of coal, suggesting perhaps that plant growth during this time was extremely rapid compared to what we see today.

The simple fact is that earth's climate has always been and always will be in a state of flux. Organisms adapt to the changes and men are the most adaptable organism on the planet. All the dire predictions about disaster if our climate gets warmer, seem wildly overblown to me. A far greater problem would be a return to ice age conditions, but the most devastating effects take a while to develop and of course modern humans developed in ice age conditions, so we ought to be able to continue to thrive if they return.