http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/uah_may_08.png

None of Al Gore's graphs looked anything like that.

traumatic: "I said earlier, the change is constant and has been for the entire history of the planet."

And as I said earlier, the rate of change is not constant, it hasn't accelerated this quickly before for the entire recorded history of the planet, and it was and is both predicted and explained by fossil fuel burning.

traumatic: "You read about the IPCC being a "scientific body." I didn't know economists were scientists."

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a "scientific body." And per the NAS (and with several other national science academies):

There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. The evidence comes from direct measurements of rising surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures and from phenomena such as increases in average global sea levels, retreating glaciers, and changes to many physical and biological systems. It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities. This warming has already led to changes in the Earth's climate... Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise... The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.

http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf

traumatic: "The sooner we realize that cutting down on CO2 emissions, while definitely a good idea, isn't going to stop climate change (I mean, that's ludicrous if you've actually thought about it.)"

It's also a straw man: climate scientists don't say that. What they say instead is that cutting down on CO2 emissions will slow the rate of climate change.

traumatic: "the sooner we can all get back to the business of not living in fear of something we don't know anything about"

Climate scientists know a lot about global warming, even if you dont.

anti-science sentiment will rule in America.

Look, here is part of young-Earth creationism: The world is under 10,000 years old.

Part of the evidence for Global Warming is that we have temprature records going back 100,000 years or so, from the Greenland ice-sheet.

Further, we have a culture where because we are all afraid of stepping on religious toes. Because we all know that so long as you don't see the bullet coming, it isn't going to kill you.

We have real threats to our civil liberties out there, be it the erosion of privacy rights, the rise of anti-piracy programming which just happens to check your internet browsing habits and your music folder, the coke-head conservative CEO takeover of the news industry, and the cokehead CEO takeover of the government.

America's legal system has been systematically raped by the appointment of jackass justices who wouldn't know the law from a strip of toilet paper and we are constantly bombarded by a news industry that can't tell the difference between facts and opinions.

And we have psuedo-intellectuals who are better at reading philosophers than they are at thinking for themselves supporting this crap with existentialist nonsense that gets proven wrong every time a soldier gets hit by a sniper's bullet.

And our counter to this is a limp wristed parody of liberalism that preaches tolerating bullshit in the name of diversity.

It isn't even a concerted effort or conspiracy theory, it is a reaction to cultural norms that were proven wrong back when the plague wiped out Europe. It is our fault that this is all happening, it isn't something being done to us, but being done by us.

It is all a bit like worrying about mad scientists straight out of old comic books and ignoring the fact that big brother wants to sell your girlfriend a bigger penis.

Now obviously there are global warming deniers who aren't religious, but the thing is they use the same basic cultural norm to prevent people calling them what they are - stupid.

If you cannot attack a religious falsifications, there is a distinct problem with attacking non-religious ones. We are creatures of habit, and groupthink - the idea that unity is more important that actually being right - is a habit.

We don't need to all get along, conflict is healthy, arguments are good for you, and respect while nice, when it means you don't get contradicted when you are clearly wrong or your clearly wrong opinion does not get hammered, is not.

You need your nose rubbing in your idiocy every now and then, that is the way you learn to stop being an idiot.

jmklein: "http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/uah_may_08.png"

Here's another representation of the same data, and other related data as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Satellite_Temperatures.png

jmklein: "None of Al Gore's graphs looked anything like that."

Not having seen the movie I can't speak to Gore's graphs, but the one I referenced here looks very much like the graphs that are used to support that consensus amongst climate scientists that global warming is both real and driven by fossil fuel burning.

"Nearly all climate scientists today believe that much of Earth's current warming has been caused by increases in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels."

-- Ralph J. Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences and a leading climate scientist, U.S. Senate testimony, July 21, 2005

I write this realising it will inevitably have been pointed out before, but I don't really agree with Romm's theory that Republicans oppose action on climate change because it will involve massive government intrusion into their lives.

It's much simpler than that - the constituencies they represent, and indeed a broad spectrum of American citizens, prefer to bury their collective heads in the sand rather than consider the possibility that they might have to make serious changes to their lifestyle in order to deal with the problem.

As far as I can tell, only a small wing of the Republican party actually opposes big or intrusive government. This is, after all, the party of a bloated, oversizes military apparatus (itself essentially a massive welfare system - with bigger guns), enormous budget deficits, intrusive government monitoring (see Glenn Greenwald's column, ad infinitum) and legislative intervention into people's lives (as long as the legislation requires people to sing from the "Moral Majority" hymnbook. Thus, if the Republicans started opposing big government intervention into people's lives, (a) they would lose a lot more votes, and (b) they would be called the Libertarian party.

All this is about is, as Romm correctly points out, cheap political point scoring. The Republicans are simply waiting for politicians from other parties and other political inclinations to stick their necks out, so that they can distract the constituents from how badly the Neocons have fudged up the job of running the country.