Oh, come on. Aren't we done with the anti-global-warming thing? No? Ok, whatever.
Here's a link to a summary of what the Nature paper in question actually says:
[LINK=http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/05/decade_break_in_global_warming.html]Nature blog[/LINK]
Quote:
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What this new paper by Noel Keenlyside, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, sets out to do is incorporate data on short term variations in climate into our models of climate change. By doing this they push us into the arena of creating shorter term predictions, in this case of the next decade.
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So, actually some fascinating science going on, which doesn't really have much bearing on the longer term global warming/climate change issues. We've known all along that global warming doesn't mean a constantly warming planet, with no 'cold snaps' or other variations. It means that, to the best of our current scientific knowledge, the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we're putting into the atmosphere are going to cause climate change on a global scale, causing significant warming in a relatively short time.
Personally, I don't think it's the most critical environmental problem we have right now, but climate change like what is predicted will almost certainly cause a lot of disruption and suffering - places that are habitable (and inhabited) by people are going to become a lot less friendly very quickly. People will starve to death.
Obviously I'm not going to convince you, Ustwo, and I don't really have time to counter every single right-winger anti-global warming talking point you can come up with, so maybe I shouldn't have responded at all.
However, I have to say, I find the right-wing's anti-science bias truly shocking. On environmental issues (anti-global-warming, anti-acid-rain), economics (worship of free markets and unregulated capitalism), even basic cosmology, physics, and biology (creationism, anti-evolutionism, anti-vaccination), it's a truly sick culture of denial, evasion, and obfuscation. Any good ideas on the right (smaller government, eschewing onerous regulation, balanced budget...) are drowned out by the crazies.
End rant.