I am no scientist, just been around sinse the last Ice Age. Well not hardly but it feels like it sometimes.

I remember during my childhood 50's and 60's we got 6 to 8 snow storms on average each winter that accumulated from 4 to 8 inhes on average.

We have not had a substantial winter in East Kentucky with any appreciable amount of snow fall for 15 years. Have one late one on now with about 2" accumulation.

Is this a trend, is this scientific? No, but I am the stick your head out the window if you want to know what the weather is kind of guy.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it may be a duck.

I am glad because of the price of natural gas now that we are getting warmer winters. We have not had any serious drought in the summer yet, and I live quite a distance from the sea. My mountains keep the severe winds off me, tornado's are super rare. No major flooding in over 30 years.

Global warming, I don't know but if this was the stock market I would go with the trend or if anybody is giving odds I would make this bet.

The food production in the nation at large is still quite good. The only linkage to higher food cost now is high price of oil and using a food staple as an alternative fuel, Corn.

However water shortages and drought seem to plague the rest of the country. We have plenty here if they would just keep from polluting it and quit covering up fresh water streams with mountain top removal method of coal strip mining.

Ain't that the way it goes, even when you end up on the plus side of the global warming cycle humans will manage to F#*k it up despite dodging the bullet and getting a reprieve.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

joseph, the article was excellent.  i'm concerned about the venue, however.  salon is great, but the readership there was shaking its head yes, yes as they read.

this quality of public intellectual writing needs exposure in forums where real consensus is achieved by our elites.  the WAPO, foreign affairs journal, national journal etc.

still and all, great article.  i too believe in science, and real world observation.  and you have crystallized in those two (cut) sentences why i am so hard on the religious or those who believe anything fantastical--e.g. astrology.  we just don't have time for that crap anymore--it's literally too dangerous for our real world circumstances.

I haven't seen this much backpedalling since Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday that she "opposed NAFTA" even when Tim Russert shoved quotes of her saying it was an economic boon in her face!

All of a sudden there's no consensus and not only that, it's not needed.

Shades of NGW!!!

I have been lurking here for a few months now.  Amazing site with real meat on the bones.

But this Jabailo guy:  is he for real?  I'm a big free speech advocate and, like many of you, have chosen to just ignore his troll behavior and move on down to the next post.

But now, after all of this time, and continuous posts with half tuths or downright falsehoods, I am wondering if he needs a slap!  What a pure example of an immature jerk!

I have several theories about who this guy really is.  Lets take a poll:

A member of the Grist staff pretending to be a dolt to anger others, cause controversy, and increase page views.

 An adult who still lives in his mother's basement with a computer, without a job, and has a puckish spirit and enjoys irritating others to pass his time.

a Fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, working along side a row of staffers who spread lies across the internet all day long.

Just another person in need of medication with a lot of free time on his hands.

Thanks for participating.

There are plenty of well worded challenges that come through these forums, taking aim at environmental assumptions, but this is not what this guy is doing.  He's a wrong headed smart-ass with bad reasoning.

Why not just say "infidel"?

I find the graph that shows the usage of the terms "Global Warming" and "Global Climate Change" over time to be interesting and telling.

How long does a cooling trend need to be before "Global Warming" is no longer an appropriate way to refer to contemporary changes in the global climate?

What would the data gathered over the next decade need to look like to disprove the consensus theory/hypothesis (take your pick)?

Let's agree on a criteria so the Infidels will have to convert if you are right.

1991:

If the Kuwaiti oil fields are set ablaze the resulting smoke and soot will enter Earth's upper atmosphere and we will experience "Nuclear Winter". A year without a Summer. The consensus among scientists is overwhelming regarding this point.

The resulting die off of oxygen producing phyto-plankton in the world's oceans could spell the death of our species.

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I did not suggest anything about any trend in temperatures. That would be silly. I don't know what the climate will be like in ten years. I just know that it will continue to change as it always has.

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Ted Danson was kind enough to let us know about the consensus that the oceans would be dead by the mid 1990s. This would happen because we were reaching a tipping point. Man was throwing the oceans into an imbalance that was beyond recovery.

Any questioning of this "fact" was met with jeers and sneers.

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Ok enough on consensus of climate scientists who believe in man made climate change. The fact is the majority dont believe in an effect of tiny amounts of C02 that come from every mammals mouth and man's autos. There was never any consensus since most of real scientists were actually working on finding real facts while the phony sooth-saying computer modeling Global Warming pushers were making wild accounts of false predictions. And their dreamy eyed fake claims were promoted in the  leftist media all over the world who helped them push out the word "consensus". This was to stop the real science from being found and put out in the news. Man is not changing anything and is far too insignificant compared to all the Natural climate changing phenomenum on this planet!  
  We are going into the new cooling period no matter how many scientists are christian hating, socially left leaning, Global warming believers.
  Consensus is found in most science and most finds in science are proven before they can be agreed on. Yes we will have to learn more and more about the natural climate and how it works. But to take a false political claim and call that science then push a fake consensus through a propaganda machine, doesnt amount to science at all.

Naturally Im Right!

Jon Boy, David Nicholson,

You guys make it so tough for me.  Should I believe your half baked ideas or those of the IPCC, NASA, NOAA, AGU, and the vast majority of published and peer reviewed studies?

Man, I just cant decide.  This is gonna keep me up tonight...

Actually that is only half true for me. Sagan was my hero. I bought into his Nuclear Winter assertion completely. There was such overwhelming scientific consensus. When this was proven to be so wrong as too be silly, I had to ask the question, "What happened here?"

I expected a flurry of debate over why the predictions had been so wrong. Instead...silence.

The "Oceans will be dead before 1995" people have never been called to task, either.

Citing two examples where the AGW folks were dead wrong is now called a "half-baked idea".

How utterly pathetic and intellectually dishonest.

No David, it is your intellectual dishonesty that extrapolates small changes in knowledge about Global Warming to a declaration of calling the whole thing a farce.

I think the answer is "None of the above". And it's probably not a roomful of students paid by Exxon to crank out this stuff (though I wouldn't rule it out).
I base my guess on the depressing reality that both my sisters, despite high IQs, are into the denier mode now...and one of them believes that soy food is dangerous and its popularity is a conspiracy by ADM and Cargill, the other that the government is building internment centers for dissenters all over the country.
Yeah, a tendency to paranoia does run in the family, but I think there is another factor here, taken from a line tossed off at the International Forum on Globalization's Triple Crisis forum in DC last September: "Of course, we have to realize that most people will remain in denial as long as they can." People don't want to believe that a drastic change in lifestyle is an imminent necessity--and Exxon is only to happy to fund the production of "information" on which to base denialist claims.
All this said, I am suspicious that jabailo and David Nicholson and JonBoy are not three people.

Not just JonBoy, but still many others. You know none of these so called skeptics can point to any specific piece of scientific conclusion and say what is wrong and why. So next time you're confronted by them, indeed any of you on this list, why don't you tell us exactly what you think is wrong with the the 99.9% of scientific opinion. This is a very serious question. Scientists have argued this now for going on 20 years, they've analysed, subtracted, modeled, projected back, projected forward, and the stubborn conclusion remains - we are witnessing a significant man-made component of global warming. So c'mon guys, I apologize for calling you lunatics. Why don't you put on your lab coats and tell us where they scientists are wrong?