I agree with Bearded Bruce on this one, freda. Extremely bad science is what has been foisted on us through the mass media.

When I first saw "An Inconvenient Truth", I was totally convinced by it. It took quite a while before I began to wonder if I'd been fed some misleading information and incorrect assumptions. I eventually reached the point where I reversed my ealier opinion regarding CO2 and global warming. I do not believe human-produced CO2 has much, if anything to do with the current global warming phase which has been happening since about 1975 (following a global cooling phase between 1940 and 1975...one which prompted hysterical media stories in the mid-70s about the danger of the world going into a new ICE AGE! The scare headlines were very similar to what we've seen about global warming more recently.)

There have been a long series of similar warming and cooling phases in the past going back thousands and tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They occured prior to the development of our industrial civilization, and many of them involved higher planetary warming than we are experiencing now. This can and HAS been confirmed by scientific means through examining deep ice core samples from Greenland.

CO2 plays a very small role in planetary warming. The main greenhouse gas is water vapor. Human-produced CO2 plays an even smaller role in planetary warming than naturally-produced CO2...to the point where its influence can be said to be negligible.

In short, we have been sold a false story...a story which has been embraced by the mainstream media and pushed by a special interest group at the U.N. Why that has been done, I'm not sure. It could have to do with a globalization agenda. It could have to do with levying carbon taxes. It could have to do with people simply not being able to admit they made an error. I don't know.

But this whole global warming by CO2 thing is, in my opinion, a scam.

We ARE experiencing a genuine global warming phase since 1975 till now. There's nothing unusual about that, it's happened many times before (with no significant threat to life on this planet), and it happens due to natural cycles which are, in my opinion, driven primarily by the changing energy activities of the Sun.

It's not an emergency, it's just another cyclical swing of the world climate, as has happened so many times before. It does not justify levying a Carbon tax, because human-produced CO2 is not causing it.

And that's my opinion.

Declare me a heretic. Excommunicate me. Warn you children against me! I can take it. ;-D

I don't take sides on any popular theory in the media merely on the basis of whether it first emanated from the political Right or the political Left. They are both frequently dead wrong about things, and they are both occassionally dead right about something. This time, maybe the luck of the draw, I think the political Right, whom I have no fondness for whatsoever, happen to be quite correct in their response to global warming. They think it's a big scam. So do I. It's no realer, in my opinion, than the media scare about "a new ice age" in the mid-70's.

There is a tactic afoot all the time in our media, and that is to manipulate the public by scaring the daylights out of them. It can be done with things like:

the Oklahoma Bombing
the 911 attacks
SARS
H1N1 flu
Saddam's reputed WMDs
Iran's reputed nuclear ambitions
Global Warming

All these things get pushed bigtime by the media at some point in order to scare people into compliance with something....what that something is keeps changing...it may be a reduction in civil liberties, it may be the sale of billions of dollars worth of drugs and vaccines, it may be the levying of a burdensome new tax, it may be the launching of a new war.

Whatever it is, the main thing is that people must first be scared silly by the media coverage, and then they will willingly go along with whatever the system has in mind for them to go along with.

Anyone who challenges such media scare campaigns is ridiculed, vilified, and equated with "holocaust deniers" or something along that line. The very ferocity of the negative response to people questioning these officially sanctioned scare stories is an indicator of just how fragile a basis they actually are built upon, in my opinion. They do protest overmuch their supposed legitimacy! ;-)

This CO2-caused global warming thing simply doesn't hold water. It doesn't make sense scientifically. There are a great many scientists who do not agree with it at all. And it WILL, in my opinion, turn out to be quite untrue.

If we both live live enough, we'll see.