Basically, you need to go and look at the science. Go and read the IPCC reports (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), see what the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, etc have to say.
If you listen to the pseudo-scientific groups (be they sponsored by the right or left) you're not going to get good science. Avoid Michael Chricton like the plague. Don't read things sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute or anything by any other "think tank"
"Avoid Michael Chricton like the plague. Don't read things sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute or anything by any other "think tank""
Michael Chricton is no conservative and he admits that he never set out to write a book about the environment. In several interviews he said that he stumbled in to some of the conflicting data and started researching his confusion. He never wrote the book he was doing research for and instead wrote his envro-whacko hit peice.
Pseudoscience indeed!
Give me a break.
The IPCC report was the most embarrassing piece of propaganda of the last 10 years. Embarrassingly so.
You mean this one?
In the early 1990s Lindzen was asked to contribute to the IPCC's 1995 report. At the time, he held (and still does) that untangling human influences from the natural variation of the global climate is next to impossible. When the report's summary came out, he was dismayed to read its conclusion: "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." "That struck me as bizarre," he says. "Because without saying how much the effect was, the statement had no meaning. If it was discernible and very small, for instance, it would be no problem." Environmentalist Bill McKibbon referred to this phrase in an article in The Atlantic in May 1998: "The panel's 2,000 scientists, from every corner of the globe, summed up their findings in this dry but historic bit of understatement." In an angry letter, Lindzen wrote that the full report "takes great pains to point out that the statement has no implications for the magnitude of the effect, is dependent on the [dubious] assumption that natural variability obtained from [computer] models is the same as that in nature, and, even with these caveats, is largely a subjective matter."
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT
Prof. Richard S. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger, and Charney Awards, and AGU's Macelwane Medal. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and a Fellow of the AAAS1. He is a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., '64, S.M., '61, A.B., '60, Harvard University)