I think it is probably solar cycles that are the key factor in the Earth's warming and cooling phases...not our civilization's carbon dioxide emmissions. I've been thinking so for some time. The primary greenhouse gas is not CO2, it's water vapour. C02 is only a very small part of the greenhouse gas situation around this planet, the greenhouse effect is almost all caused by water vapour.

The source of heat on the surface of the Earth is the sun. If the sun becomes more active (which is revealed through its increasing sunspot activity) then this planet goes into a warming phase. If the sun becomes less active then we go into a cooling phase. I believe we are in a cooling phase right now and it's been happening for at least a couple of years. We were indeed in a warming phase back around the early years of this decade when the sun's activity was considerably highter than it is now...there is presently an extraordinary minimum of sunspot activity occurring.

I think the Global Warming crusade has been turned into a giant political football and, as pdq suggests, it has become a matter of what amounts to religious faith for its proponents.

I may be mistaken too. Nevertheless, I have my suspicions that the present mainstream ideas about global warming are in error.

We'll see, won't we? In time it will become quite clear whether or not it is the human-based C02 emmissions that are causing global warming or whether that was a misperception.

If it turns out to have been a misperception, then people will be yelling about something else instead when that time comes. There's always something new to panic about, some new threat to life as we know it...and a little panic goes a long way toward providing employment and lucrative careers for a whole bunch of people.