sorry, i do not have a subscription to the wall street journal. i buy it at the newstand.
they've covered this global warming in an excellent manner.
just last week the reprinted again in an editorial the graph of temperatures from the middle ages to the present.
like you, i am not an expert. i'm repeating what i read.
the graph shows an increase in temperatures from about 1000 a.d. to 1500 a.d., and then the temperatures drop significantly, only rising again recently.
now here's the grab: the wsj says that a liberal scientist did a "study" and concluded that the medieval temp rises did not happen! the wsj says he's wrong.
anyway, if one accepts the liberal scientist, then the result is the so-called "hockey stick graph", i.e., withOUT the medieval temps, then the graph is horizontal until you get to the 20th c when the temps go up.
hockey stick, get it?
lol! the wsj says it's a joke. they've said this for years.
ken
From the WSJ:
To add it all up, the Earth is slightly warmer than it used to be a century ago, but no one knows why. Even if fossil fuels were the cause, Kyoto would make little difference, especially with China and India understandably bent on oil-fueled growth to lift their citizens out of poverty. And a warmer Earth may not be any worse than a colder one, certainly not for the longer growing seasons it would allow in the world's temperate zones. None of this justifies passing, for the first time, limits on greenhouse gases that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars in compliance costs on American energy production.