maybe you are a bit paranoid if you think all these scienctists from 100+ countries are our to stiffle economic growth around the world and hurt your business. many of them are stockholders, 401k investors and such. many of them, such as myself, have a small business on the side.

what most people don’t realize is that climate change will very likely be bad for business. Look at the south and midwest for example, serious drought…and higher average temps. this creates stress on major crops like corn and allows invasive species or bugs to move in, upsetting the balance. look at the corn production in the US the last few years, and the prices lately. a lot of people think ethanol will save us from our oil addiction. it won’t even come close at the rate changes are happening. and this is just one TINY aspect of the changing environment we are creating. rising temps should be better for some areas, but that neglects the effects of invasive that can move in to warmer areas, and unstable climate (droughts and floods).

you also mention negative feedback loops. they work very well to keep the climate in a sort of equilibrium. however, at the rate we are changing temps, these negative feedback loops will not have time to kick in for the most part. water vapor will, but others sinks will not. most living things can not adapt at the increase rates we are now currently experienceing.

“We *know* climate is a negative feedback system for CO2. Proof by example.”

so now you are quoting Patterson where he states that the earth was colder than now with higher CO2. that’s true, but it was 400 MILLION years ago and does not “prove” anything except that you are willing to believe someone who willingly misleads people like yourself. the sun was different then and it didn’t radiate the same heat. the rocky mountains weren’t present, ocean currents and even the continenets were different. besides, no one is predicting what the temps will be like in another 400 million years. we are talking the next few hundred. if you go back 400,000 years, CO2 and temp match perfectly, as they do now. you keep believing the few misleaders out there though with their “proof”.

“enviro-socialist”. nice, name calling…is this a high school blog?

I don’t know any extreme enviro-socialists, (whatever they might be) who want to shut down growth, and it seems to me that international corporations are already filling the niche for taking over the world economy. But I do know that carbon-based fossil fuels are a finite resource, and we are likely at about peak production right now.

We have extracted and burned about half of all the petroleum ever on the planet, and that was the half of reserves that was easiest and cheapest to extract and refine. See Hubbert and Deffeyes.

What we enviromentalists really fear is the short-term (as opposed to the eons of earth-time) climate difficulties just as economic growth becomes stunted by rising fuel prices. And we will have burdened ourselves with suburban build-out that is unsustainable and will not work in a time of fuel scarcity.

One more thing: technology is not fuel.

You’re either disingenuous or a moron. The processes which EVENTUALLY brought the Earth back to rough equilibrium occurred on the order of thousands of even millions of years. In the meantime, many many many species went extinct. The Earth went on. Those species didn’t.

Likewise, if we push the Earth into a positive feedback loop, the Earth may EVENTUALLY recover to something like today’s climate, but it might be thousands or millions of years from now. The intervening time will not be a good time to be alive as a human being; at least, not as one of six billion of them.

We *know* climate is a negative feedback system for nearly any conceivable input: killer meteorite impacts, what have you — everything that has happened since before the dinosaurs, yet here we are today.

Of course, I am sure the alarmists would claim that only the poorest of the poor would be impacted, and the industrialized nations would continue polluting as before.

I haven’t heard the positive/negative feedback explained in the context of global warming. The fact that climate has a negative feedback loop allows it to remain at the bottom of a two sided slope. Sometimes it rolls up one side (warming) or the other (cooler). So, here is where we start a new conspiracy:

1. Scientists would have us believe that this ball will keep rolling indefinitely up one side of slope (the warm one, I guess because humans are causing a positive feedback loop)
2. We are somehow able to reverse this trend with equally opposite force, as to avoid the ball rolling down to the center and back up the cold side…

These facts just don’t fit… if humans are destroying the climate by warming it in a positive feedback loop, how do we know we won’t destroy the climate by using another positive feedback loop in the other direction?

I find that very doubtful. The absorption effects of a given amount of CO2 are readily measured in the laboratory. Atmospheric scientists know how to calculate the amount of C02 in a column of air given a concentration. (That’s the part I couldn’t do with accuracy – but if the experts in it can’t do that, they know very little about their field.) Put the two together and the saturation concentration should be obvious.

If no one is publishing that, I wonder why? Is it because we’re so far from saturation that it’s irrelevant, or is it that looking at saturation leads to politically-incorrect answers?