[sailaway21]

I'd also like to address the falacious thinking that ice core samples can tell us much about causality. If we accept that an accurate picture of the atmosphere can be derived from ice core samples for a given time in the past, and I am not conceding that to be a given, we are no further ahead on exactly what caused those gases to be present in those concentrations at that time. All we really have to go on, in interpreting the data, are relatively recent caches of data that do not reach back nearly far enough to make generalizations about activities of a thousand, or thousands, of years ago. That's not honest science; that's what is called a swag. A swag is a scientific wild ass guess. At the heart of the data interpretation is some sort of idea that our present condition is somehow "normal", or was until recently "normal", and that change is bad. And again that is faulty thinking. The only thing that we do know is that change is constant, sometimes cyclical, but what causes it and why we're substantially less sure of. By substantially less sure of, I mean "we can take a swag".

Now I'm no uranium engineer here, but I well recall the global cooling scare of thirty years ago and it proved to be unfounded. And thirty years is quite some time in terms of scientific data gathering abilities-heck 30 years ago I was throwing temperature logs over the side for Scripps, now it's done by satellite. What has not changed though is the innate intelligence of scientists. Those guys in the seventies were no less bright than scientists are today, and they believed we were cooling. So let's do away with the notion of the infallibility of scientists. And that is waht the global warming advocates are asking us to trust, to the tune of a major restructuring of the world's economy.

What HAS changed is that science is now big business. Usually big business on a government grant. If you are employed at a research university you are quite likely to be more valuable, hence higher paid, for any research monies you can bring in versus any individual spectacular scientific discovery. From a governmental standpoint, the congress is confronted with scientists seeking money to study in impending avian flu virus competing against scientists seeking funding for the study of global warming. And that funding is on a scale that makes what was spent on the Manhatten Project look like "doofs dabbling with isotopes". It takes little imagination to see this research end up right where cancer research is at-nowhere. Do not get the impression that I am against studying any of these things; I'm just not prepared to declare the crisis necessary to make GW research the next General Motors of science. Those who do appear to have the cart before the horse and, when in doubt, I recommend "follow the money". The GW public relations campaign has a very familiar odor about it. It's an odor that has become increasingly common over the last forty years, since roughly the first Earth Day. And it's not the cause that stinks so much, it's the selling of the cause. The TV shopping channels do much the same type of marketing and selling for far more tangible goods, proving the method works. In another time this was known as the 'blue light special" where you were encouraged to hurry over and get a deal, before time ran out, on something that, in retrospect, you might not really have needed.

A lot of us who've been on the planet for longer than ten minutes think we recognize these tactics. One word describes them. Spinach. We don't like it and we ain't eatin' it.