So RWOLFTX plays the "I'm a wingnut and I'm oppressed" game:

"Global warming...or now rephrased as climate change...is the new religion of the left. And if one even suggests there maybe things to debate regarding the subject...you are shouted down and impugned. So much for the tolerant, educated, wise, sophisticated and enlightened left."

Maybe if wingnuts didn't say stupid things like:

"Alaska Rising

'Palin's Revenge' = the current frigid front from the North. Palin to the lower 48...."freeze, baby, freeze!" By the way, how DOES that logic work when people claim the cold wave is a symptom of global warming??? Liberals have gotten unhinged from their own inborn intuition (i.e. common sense.)"

-- NewHavenette

No NewHavenette, this means that the sun has been eaten by the war god and you need to sacrifice another goat.

Or the "Hey Man, it's natural" argument:

"For informed skepticism about the Warmist faith, talk to any geologist. They tell us that the climate has been continually changing, and massively, for the entire four billion years of Earth's history. Comparatively little of this period has been affected by human industry of any sort."

-- agore

I, for one, don't care that it was warmer and colder in the days of the dinosaurs as the continents moved around and the chemistry of the earth and atmosphere changed over thousands and millions of years. There weren't any people then. I care that massive change is happening to my world over a few decades. This change has a cost. Human civilizations and food supplies are tuned to the water, soil, vegetation and weather patterns we have now. If the American West sees a 20% drop in rainfall as expected, we will pay the price. The dust bowl came from an 8% drop for 3 years, 20% is huge. Similarly flooding and drought mean privation, death and war for millions of people around the world. We can reduce those costs by acting rationally now.

says

"Perhaps you are so suffocated by the CO2 spewing from Al Gore's mouth, you are incapable of appreciating a JOKE?"

[in reference to a denial based on it's cold outside]

If it was a joke why isn't it funny?

and says:

"Not sure about you, but I actually READ scientific articles about such things as equatorial glaciers and sediment layers."

Those aren't scientific articles.

And to be sure about me: I'm a physicist old enough to have read the first global warming articles and said "thin theory on weak data." I have no job interest in the question, only interest in my own quality of life.

In the last thirty years the data and calculations have consistantly improved. The questions have narrowed and the

uncertainties have shrunken. The deniers have retreated from "it's wrong," to "what about this" to "maybe it won't be as big as predicted because maybe this would have a counteracting effect" to "it will cost too much," while failing to consider the costs of doing nothing.

The prediction problem has never been one of unknown physics but rather the complexity of prediction for the exact system of topography and atmosphere we have. The theory of the formation of clouds is nearly 100 years old, but including the

details of the reflectivity and location of every cloud formed in response to changes in temperature, flow, pressure and water content used to be way too much information. Computers are about one trillion times faster and bigger than 30 years ago. At the same time, the historical climate information used to test models has similarly improved. Now you can do a model including where continents were 100M years ago and get a pretty good reflection of climate data. Similarly, you can reproduce the detailed climate for the last few hundred years, without free parameters.

It seems that climate change denial never seems to come from real climate study but always seems to arise from personal philosophy. One of: it's wrong to change the world except how we are already changing it or it's our right to change the world but we shouldn't change to avoid approaching problems because we've always lived this way, or we're so small compared to God, we should do whatever we want because we can't possibly change anything.

Some articles indicated that lobbyists had succeeded in stripping TARP-receiving-banks executive pay restraints out of the stimulus bill that just passed, yet the NY Times has a lead article

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/business/economy/14pay.html?hp) this morning bemoaning provisions in the bill doing just that. Anyone know what is real and what happened?

You Said:

There are many concerned parents who still have questions regarding the safety of vaccines and it's a legitimate point of view.

This is not a legitimate point of view. Your feeling that there is a connection does not make it true. In a trend funded by the tobacco companies about smoking and built upon by the oil companies about global climate change and the biblical literalists about evolution, Americans have been sold the idea that ignorant impressions and anecdotes are good enough to establish scientific truth. News reporting in this country is sensationalistic and misleading and our schools don't teach students how to distinguish tentative new data from established fact. How many reporters, let alone readers, know how to do the basic math to look at the size of the study and the number of cases to establish whether there is any statistical meaning in a report?

Repeated large scale studies show that there is no link. The impressions of a link arose because from pure random chance alone, at a rate of even one vaccination a year, about 300 American babies will be diagnosed with autism in the same week as a vaccination. That's a lot of anecdotal reports but in reality you might as well blame astrology.

As to your comment about science and God, miracles and thus God are by definition not testable by scientific methods.