Global Warming Doesn't Meet Its Burden Of Proof

How accurately do the man-made global warming models predict future climate temperatures? Is there any statistical significance to the predictions?

The burden of proof is on the man-made global warming alarmists. They are the folks who want to spend huge amounts of money to fight the phantom menace, so they have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that global warming is occurring, that man's activities are causing the global warming and that their solution, getting all of our energy from renewable energy sources, is the most cost effective solution to the global warming problem. So far, I don’t think global warming alarmists have met any of their burden of proof.

If global warming was a scientific theory without a political program attached to it, it might be easier to believe that its proponents were not cooking the books.  However, when you read something that says initially the data didn't fit the hypothesis, so the data was adjusted, it tends to lessen scientific credibility a lot.  That's exactly what this sentence says: "the apparent slowdown was due to measurement errors that, when corrected, show that global temperatures have risen steadily."  If you also notice that the Climate Research Unit fought off a Freedom of Information lawsuit requesting a copy of their unadjusted raw data by saying that it had accidentally been erased, you begin to think something very unscientific is going on.  Then you notice that scientific papers that find evidence that global warming is not happening are suppressed and their authors' careers are destroyed, global warming begins to look more like a religion that science. 

The cost of changes that the alarmists want to impose is staggering. In the US, 33% of our electricity is generated from burning coal. To meet the Paris climate goals, we will probably have to scrap all coal fired generators. This represents trillions of dollars in investment. Another 33% of electricity in the US is generated from burning natural gas. Mean green organizations want all of these generators closed as well. The US gets 20% of our electricity from nuclear power. Almost all nuclear generators in the US are over 20 years old. Over half are over 30 years old. The number of nuclear plants decommissioned in the last several years easily outnumbered the new nuclear generators.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3

Assuming that any global warming we see is man-made, the answer is nuclear power, which emits no carbon at all. But alarmists don’t like nuclear power. Assuming you don't like nuclear power, then we have to build a lot of dams, probably killing a lot of snail darters and other endangered fish. We also have to carpet sunny places like Death Valley with solar collectors without regard to the possible extinction of obscure lizards. We also have to build wind turbines and kill literally tons of migratory birds and ruin the view from Martha's Vineyard. We also have to build a lot of high voltage transmission lines through everybody's back yards to move the renewable power from where it’s generated to where it’s used. But the environmentalists, who fervently believe in global warming, fight all of these things. 

Assuming you don't like any of these options, you have to assume a miracle happens in order to stop the carbon. Or we can go back to 19th century technology and live in an Amish paradise. I’ve personally mucked out barns. Horses have a major pollution problem. The expense of all of this gets obscene. The flimsy justification for the economic ruin that the fight against global warming will cause, is a statistically insignificant anomaly. Good luck with the politics of flimsy justification, miracles and economic ruin!

How Global Warming Cooked the Books

The problem with the theories of anthropomorphic global warming is that the models don't predict future observed events.  They also largely ignore historic weather events which occurred before systematic temperature records began about 135 years ago.  Finally, we have less than 30 years of experience with all global climate models because we didn't have the computing power to run predictions for such complex models before about 1985.  Here's a link to a description of the climate over the last 18,000 years.  See what you've been missing.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years-2/comment-page-1/

Obama says that 99.5% of climate scientists think controlling CO2 emissions is important.  The original paper this figure is based on, by John Cook, has been completely discredited by reviewers, including reviewers who accept the thesis of anthropomorphic global warming, AGW.  See Professor Richard Tol's blog entry about Cook's paper:

http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html

Professor Tol  accepts AGW.  See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tol

Leif Ericson Says Global Warming is Malarkey

My problem with the whole argument for man-made global warming is the narrowness of the time frame of observations being used. Just look up the Wikipedia entry on paleoclimatology and look at the temperature graph over millions of years. There are some really wide swings and long periods of time when Earth was a lot hotter than it is now. 
 
I think the 135 year time span of the primary detailed observations leaves a lot of room for reasonable doubt, particularly since the satellite record for the last 36 years shows almost no change. The obvious political motivations of the people behind the global warming movement, who seek unchecked absolute power through the control of all energy use, makes me believe they have both the motive and opportunity for falsifying the data. The fact that Michael Mann's famous hockey stick did not show the Medieval Warming Period at all should make everyone think that something is fishy. The Medieval Warming Period is why Leif Ericson was able to discover America sometime around 980 AD. The following Little Ice Age is why there were no Viking settlements when Christopher Columbus got here in 1492. The existence of both the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age really are accepted scientific and historical facts. 
 
I know some legitimate scientists take this very seriously. But I believe that the planet is a very big place with a huge amount of water that is going to buffer whatever man does in the short run. I think AGW is a political movement disguised as science. I don't think AGW has met its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson

Global Warming Alarm Is A Late Night TV Ad for Steak Knives

Science the way I learned it was a painstaking process of alternately theorizing and testing with experiments. Anthropomorphic global warming is a late night TV ad for steak knives. Act now or the planet will be irretrievably destroyed. Also, we'll double your order. That's high pressure sales tactics in the service of a wild political program. Pinky and the Brain say that if you let them take over the world, they can save you. Since they are speaking from their laboratory, you should believe what they say is scientific. You're not supposed to notice that they try to take over the world every night.

My Personal Exposure to Paleoclimatology and Global Warming

My problem with the whole argument for man-made global warming is the narrowness of the time frame of observations being used.  My reservations are based on my personal experience.  I grew up in Missoula, Montana.  It was a prehistoric lake.  I was painfully aware of this as a kid, because anytime anybody tried to dig a hole to plant something there was about an inch of topsoil, an inch of gravel and then a seemingly infinite layer of big smooth boulders, most much bigger than the original size of the hole, that had to be removed.  It turns out that Lake Missoula got filled repeatedly as the result of ice dams on the Clark's Fork River 15,000 to 13,000 years ago.  Periodically the dams would break up suddenly and flood everything downstream with the contents of the Lake Missoula.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods

This personal experience and subsequent exposure to paleoclimatology led me to understand that climate varies quite widely over geologic time based on natural processes.  I believe that the state of our understanding of these natural processes is exceedingly incomplete.  We have had the computational power to study these processes for less than 30 years.  This is really not enough time to build all of the relevant factors into the models and then run them enough to understand the bugs and fix them.  If we are going to take action that requires drastic expensive changes to our economy, the burden of proof is on the people calling for the drastic expensive changes.  We should be sure beyond a reasonable doubt that the changes are necessary.  It is not enough to find warming.  It has to be shown that the warming is caused by increased CO2 emissions or other alterations to the ecosystem that are the result of human activity. At this point, I think even showing the warming is a stretch.  It is definitely not proven that human activity is causing any warming observed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology

I think the 135 year time span of the primary detailed observations leaves a lot of room for reasonable doubt, particularly since the satellite record for the last 36 years shows no change.  The obvious political motivations of the people behind the global warming movement, who seek unchecked absolute power through the control of all energy use, makes me believe they have the motive and opportunity for falsifying the data.  The fact that Michael Mann's famous hockey stick did not show the Medieval Warming Period at all should make everyone think that something is fishy.  When the Climate Research Unit refused to share the raw data and fought off a Freedom of Information Request by saying they accidentally erased the data, I really became suspicious.  Science is supposed to be open and reproducible.  Accidentally erasing the data is the scientific equivalent of "the dog ate my homework."  I have provided a link for the erased data incident.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_documents

Personally, today I am dealing with 10 degree F weather in Chicago.  I have found global warming to date extremely disappointing.  Last year there was a 35 foot high pile of snow extending 100 feet along the edge of the parking lot where I work. When I posted a picture of it on my Facebook page, one of my friends wanted to know if it was Montana or Illinois.  I know some legitimate scientists take this very seriously.  But I believe that the planet is a very big place with a huge amount of water that is going to buffer whatever man does in the short run.  I think AGW is a political movement disguised as science.  I don't think AGW has met its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.  

The Not So Hottest 2014 Climate Scam

This week the Pravda Press had screaming headlines that 2014 was the “hottest year on record.”  However, if you dig into the numbers, the records referred to only go back to 1880.  They are the records of land based mercury thermometers.  Digging further, you find that the difference between 2014 and the next hottest year was under .04 degrees.  So I made this comment:

All years are above average here in Lake Wobegon. If the best liberals can do is measured in hundredths of a degree, we're dealing with statistical noise. The difference is well within the margin of error. No thermometer available in 1880 was accurate to .05 degrees. Even ignorant rednecks like me know this ain't a big enough difference to talk about. In making a big deal out of this, liberals sound like Pinky and the Brain have decided to use the threat of global warming to do what liberals try to do every night, try to take over the world.

In defending the “hottest on record” screaming headlines, some commenters tried to argue that statistically the error of observation is reduced by the large number of observations.  One commenter told me I needed to take a remedial course in statistics.  I had this response:

Me: MS Statistics 1972 University of Illinois. You: MSNBC. Your comment makes no statistical sense and ignores history. If individual readings are only accurate to .1 degree, no amount of multiple observations are going to improve the accuracy of your instruments. The observations come mainly from urban areas which have gotten hotter over time due to increases in paved area. The time span from 1880 to now is an eye blink in geologic time. Even if the readings are as incredibly accurate as you say, they prove no connection between industrial activity and temperature fluctuation. The models used to establish a connection have no statistical significance. The logical conclusion is that you are a disciple of Jonathan Gruber using complication to obscure a power grab (pun intended) of unprecedented proportions. I don't want to live under a dictatorship of East and West Coast Liberal idiots controlling all energy use and forcing rednecks back to horse and buggy technology. You guys are rich enough to pay for dikes to protect your property in the event that the oceans actually do rise. I see no reason I should have to subsidize the foolish superstitions of the 1% by paying exorbitant prices for alternative energy or doing without energy altogether.

At ths point, the liberal commenter complained that the above was a personal attack.  He also said he never watched MSNBC and didn’t know who Jonathan Gruber was.  As always in these arguments, liberal commenters refer to the sanctity of science and proclaim debate as unscientific.  So I hit back with this:

It would seem that you can dish it out but you can't take it. If you tell someone they are so ignorant they need to take a course to remediate their knowledge, that's a personal insult. If you get a response in kind, you should not be surprised. Jonathan Gruber designed Obamacare to be so complex nobody would figure out that it was really a tax increase. The "science" you are pushing is really a political program of increased centralized government control. If government controls all energy use, they control the entire economy with no checks or balances possible to keep them from becoming abusive. If your education was so narrowly focused on gender studies that you can't see that, then I feel sorry for you. Renewable energy is 11.2% of the total energy generated in the United States. There is no way we can depend on renewable energy for all of our energy needs in the near future. Forcing a rapid conversion to all renewable energy would be prohibitively expensive. The only way we might get to much lower emissions in the intermediate term is with nuclear power. However, tree huggers like you don't want that either. We're left with horses, which I can tell you from personal experience are not all that much fun to clean up after. You are a victim of group think. Whether you watch MSNBC or not, you really are spouting the party line on global warming. The models that predict increasing temperatures due to CO2 emissions are not statistically significant. Temperatures in the last 15-20 years have not moved in a statistically significant way. Math is hard for Liberals, but it still is there even if you ignore it. Just to be crystal clear, the burden of proof is that you have to show 1) a significant increase in temperature and 2) a direct provable link to burning fossil fuel. Since you haven't shown either one, you've got no case that would warrant scrapping the Constitution to save the planet. In order to remediate your total ignorance of economics, please consider watching some video here:

(This is a link to Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose PBS TV Series.  It is a great introduction to Supply Side Economics.)

http://www.freetochoose.tv/

This is the article I was reacting to:

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/011615-735156-2014-not-the-hottest-year-on-record.htm

Democrats' Problems Dealing With Reality

This article in Politico (see link below) shows how Democrats have a problem seeing and dealing with reality. Their policies are destroying the economy and endangering the country. Oil and gas prices have come down in spite of Democrats' efforts to stop drilling, stop pipelines and limit emissions in the name of saving the planet from global warming. Unfortunately, their climate models don't match their data with any statistical significance, so we get expensive energy and Al Gore makes millions off of his Mean Green agenda. The end results of Liberal policies can be found in Detroit, where their one party rule lead to a spiral of decay and finally bankruptcy. The reason Liberals see a war on women and pervasive racism is that they really have nothing else to offer. As Mark "Uterus" Udall found out in Colorado, the war on women doesn't work anymore. The facts of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner refused to cooperate with the Liberal narrative. The evidence showed Brown was the aggressor. Brown tried to grab the officer's gun while the officer was inside his car and Brown was charging the officer on foot when the fatal shot was fired. The supervising police sergeant at Garner's arrest, a black woman, had to be edited out of the picture. The Garner arrest turned out to be a cigarette tax enforcement action, which got a lot of Conservatives to say that nobody should die for cigarette taxes and that big government requires intrusive tax enforcement. The election of Tim Scott, a Black Tea Party Republican, as Senator in South Carolina was not covered at all. The Liberal narrative says Republicans, the Tea Party and redneck whites in the South are all racist. Tim Scott couldn't possibly exist, so he had to be ignored. The President said Al Qaeda is on the run. So the Benghazi attack was a demonstration that turned into a riot, not an organized terrorist attack by an Al Qaeda affiliate. The Iraq War was over because the President said so. The administration then ignored ISIS until it got so big it overran over half of Iraq. This article reads like a pep talk by the coach of a 20 point underdog team before the big game. It ignores the insults and injuries Democrats have inflicted on angry white rednecks like me. Maybe they don't understand that why we are angry has a lot to do with what Democrats said and did to us.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-democrats-2016-blue-collar-unmarried-women-voters-114313.html

Pinky and The Brain Use the Threat of Global Warming

The Global Warming Alarmists are hitting the guest editorial circuits again in the buildup to the next climate talks.  Dr. Michael E. Mann, the ringleader of the Alarmists, has declared that 2014 was the hottest year on record.  What statistical level of significance did these results have? How far back does the temperature record go? If part of the temperature record is estimated using other data, what is the statistical accuracy of the estimates used? We have a 36 year global weather history based on satellite observations. Prior to that we have mercury thermometer records for a few locations going back to what, 1800? Prior to that we have the Climate Research Unit's estimates, for which they refused to release their raw data and their methods in 2009. The CRU fought off a Freedom of Information request by saying that they had "accidentally" erased the data, the scientific equivalent of the dog ate their homework. There may or may not be global warming, but the Alarmists have to prove that it's caused by man or there's not much we can do. Their models involve solving huge systems of difference equations, which require a massive amount of parallel computing power. We have had enough power to do this for perhaps 30 years at most. Don't you think Dr. Mann and his friends are being a little hasty to demand that government take control of all energy sources? What is the statistical accuracy of these models of the effect of carbon dioxide concentrations on global temperatures? Is any of this worth totally reverting to an Amish paradise where we get a meager output from renewable energy and do without carbon based energy to make up the difference? Having grown up around horses, I can tell you they are not much fun when you have to shovel up after them. The people who tell you we can get the same amount of energy from renewable sources with no cost increases are the same folks who told you, "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." I think the best way to look at this is as a real world episode of Pinky and the Brain. The Brain has decided to use the scary threat of melting ice caps to take over the world. 

Whenever you ask these Global Warming Alarmists for the statistical significance of their results, they start talking about thousands of papers, but they want you to find them for yourself. If they're so easy to find, why don't the Global Warming Alarmists find them and provide links? The fact that they don't leads me to believe this is all an exercise in Jonathan Gruber style over complication to conceal a huge power grab without any real justification. Global warming alarmists are the guys asking for big changes. The burden of proof is on them. Us rednecks are fine clinging to our guns and private property. We already know we don't get to keep our doctors and our plans. We don't believe the seas are going to rise 30 feet and swamp both coasts. Besides, most of us don't live on the coasts anyway. Maybe the rich folks who do live on the coasts should pay for dikes to protect their property themselves. Most of the 1% live on the coasts anyway, so they should have to pay and leave the rest of us alone in our SUVs with rifle racks. 

http://mobile.philly.com/news/opinion?wss=/philly/opinion&id=284836651

Why should we lift the US oil export ban?

Why should we lift the US oil export ban?  The short answer is that we have a mismatch between refineries in Louisiana and the crude from fracking shale.  The refineries are built to handle heavy crude from Latin America.  The crude from shale is very light crude, which means it has a very different chemical composition than heavy crude.  Heavy crude refineries can't refine light crude.  So why not modify our existing refineries to handle light crude?  It would be cheaper to build a new refinery. However, the environmental reviews required make building a new refinery prohibitively expensive. There's also the Jones Act, which requires all shipping from one US port to another be on US flag ships with US crews. This makes moving the light crude from Louisiana, where all the pipelines go, to New Jersey, where there are some light crude refineries, too expensive to be worth it. Global warming alarmists don't want more oil produced, so they will fight any change in any of these laws and regulations. Remember, the Keystone pipeline was fought because of its potential contribution to global warming. Speaking of Keystone, the Louisiana refineries would be able to refine the very heavy Canadian crude from the Keystone pipeline easily.

 

Article I was reacting to:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-samuelson-lets-export-us-oil/2014/09/28/e1285890-45d2-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html

Liberals: Control Your Personal Carbon Emissions!

Unfortunately, the Prevaricator in Chief and his buddies in the Pravda Press are not interested in helping the world avoid Jihadist chaos. There has been no global warming for 17 years, but global warming true believers don't want to be bothered with the facts. Their minds are already made up. It seems that our Dear Leader thinks the theoretical possibility of global warming is much more dangerous than the actual risks of terrorist attacks, or worse, Iran with nukes. I think the place for global warming true believers to start controlling carbon dioxide emissions is with their personal exhalations of CO2. They should try to hold their breath for as long as possible. Liberals need to remember, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." 
Link for global warming:

http://www.climatedepot.com/20...

My High Hopes For Global Warming Have Been Crushed

I had such high hopes for Global Warming.  I expected to be much more comfortable in Chicago winters as our climate warmed up.  However, there is a 35 foot high pile of snow stretching about 100 feet along the south side of the parking lot where I work.  It was so cold and snowy that I sent out an email to my co-workers from Mumbai explaining how to layer up to keep warm.  It seems to me that the fallacy of using 150 years worth of solid temperature data, and proxy data to estimate earlier temperatures, has become obvious to a lot of people.  If you are trying to understand how temperatures vary over tens of thousands of years, you need a lot more solid data.  Further, it looks to me like these models try to explain everything using only atmospheric conditions.  Don't you think the variability of the Sun's energy output might be a major part of any explanation?  Finally, I'm old enough to remember the global cooling scare of the 1970's.  It seems like politics are decisive in the formulation of climate models that justify more concentrated government power. The grant seeking scientists can't even get straight which way temperatures are going to move.  The only thing they consistently agree on is that the climate situation is dire and they need more government money to investigate. 

Wouldn't it be fun if Republicans promised, " If you like your climate change, you can keep your climate change, period.".

Does Man Made Global Warming Ignore Science?

Here's a little test for liberals who consider Human Caused Global Warming is "settled science."  It helps identify who's really denying scientific findings.  Do you deny that the Earth went through periodic ice ages followed by warming periods before man evolved? Do you deny that using 135 years of solid temperature measurements to predict climate changes that take place over thousands or millions of years is statistically absurd? Do you deny the worst ice age occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago (the Cryogenian period) and may have produced a Snowball Earth in which glacial ice sheets reached the equator? Do you deny that global warming occurred to end that ice age 630 million years ago and that man had not evolved yet? Do you deny that there was a Medieval Warm Period from about 850 AD to 1250 AD? Do you deny that human activity was not responsible for the the Medieval Warm Period? Do you deny that the Medieval Warm Period was followed by a Little Ice Age from about 1350 AD to 1800 AD? Do you deny that your liberal education left you ignorant of all of these events?   Liberals, face facts.  You are denying a lot more science than you even knew existed to believe the climate alarmists who basically created a doomsday cult to gain more government funded research grants.  

Intellectual Roller Derby

I think “the debate is over” is really the intellectual equivalent of roller derby.  In roller derby, the leading skater can halt play by putting their hands on their hips.  Of course they do this only when it benefits their team.  So saying “the debate is over” is the equivalent of saying that the liberals will be in a much worse position if the debate continues.

Settled Science = Oxymoron

Progressive Liberals like to say that man made global warming is "settled science."  "Settled science" is an oxymoron. Scientific theory is always open to change due to new experimental results. Global Warming's scientific foundation is rotten to the core. The raw, unadjusted, data supporting the initial "hockey stick" graph of global temperature was "accidentally" erased. Only the "adjusted" data remains. This is the scientific equivalent of the dog ate my homework. Models predicting global warming have a uniformly dismal record in predicting future temperature averages in the real world. Global Warming is a cult, not a scientific result.

Remember that the original climate hockey stick work depended on raw data that was "accidentally" erased. To this ignorant red neck, that sounds like the scientific equivalent of the dog ate my homework. As someone with a little bit of statistics training, I have always been amazed that climate scientists are willing to use less than 150 years of rigorous temperature records and proxies for earlier observations to predict temperature patterns that unfold over thousands and tens of thousands of years. For just one example, look up the patterns of Lake Missoula glacial floods over time. During a 2000 year period between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, ice dams would build up a huge amount of water, then burst. Geological evidence indicates that this happened at least 25 times. Missoula is a town of about 45,000 people today. There is no lake. (I used to live in Missoula.) It's clear that temperatures varied widely over the period of time before man was a factor. Anthropomorphic global warming has always struck me as extreme hubris. 

Mean Greens want to prohibit the use of petroleum products and natural gas.  However, we can't go back to whale oil lamps, as you might suggest, because we have to save the whales. Animal tallow lamps offend animal rights folks in PETA, so they are out. I think the only solution is a banner I saw on a college dorm window years ago. It said, "US OUT of North America."

Climate Change, Statistical Folly

Settled science is an oxymoron. Remember that the original climate hockey stick work depended on raw data that was "accidentally" erased. To this ignorant red neck, that sounds like the scientific equivalent of the dog ate my homework. As someone with a little bit of statistics training, I have always been amazed that climate scientists are willing to use less than 150 years of rigorous temperature records and proxies for earlier observations to predict temperature patterns that unfold over thousands and tens of thousands of years. For just one example, look up the patterns of Lake Missoula glacial floods over time. During a 2000 year period between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, ice dams would build up a huge amount of water, then burst. Geological evidence indicates that this happened at least 25 times. Missoula is a town of about 45,000 people today. There is no lake. (I used to live in Missoula.) It's clear that temperatures varied widely over the period of time before man was a factor. Anthropomorphic global warming has always struck me as extreme hubris. 

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100257206/climate-science-is-for-second-raters-says-worlds-greatest-atmospheric-physicist/

Lake Missoula

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods

Global Cooling, The Big Climate Threat of the 70's

I'm old enough to remember Global Cooling being touted as a big threat in the 1970's. The cooling was supposed to occur due to man made changes in the upper atmosphere.  (Check wikipedia. I am not making this up.) Now popular reports of weather science have switched to Global Warming, the latest fad in weather. However, most of the current models do not predict into the future with any accuracy. I think the sun's energy output has much more to do with climate than atmospheric conditions. When I visited Exit Glacier, near Seward, Alaska, I noticed that the glacier has been receding since 1815. Park Service personnel recently discovered evidence of a buried forest dating back to at least 1170 AD near the current glacier’s edge.  I don't think the cooling of the Little Ice Age between 1300 and 1870 had much to do with a switch to renewable energy.  Basing predictions of weather trends over geologic time scales using the last 150 years of data is statistically ridiculous.  Imposing costs on society based on Global Warming hysteria will only harm the poor, who benefit most from cheap energy. 

http://www.nationaljournal.com/energy/why-obama-can-t-fix-climate-change-20131111

http://www.nps.gov/kefj/naturescience/upload/The%20Retreat%20of%20Exit%20Glacier.pdf

http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_lia.html   Little Ice Age Article

Global Warming: No Feasible Liberal Way Out

The global warming article in the link below and most of the comments are magical thinking in the extreme.  From geological and fossil evidence, we know that climate has varied from tropical to ice ages over the 4.5 billion years of geologic time.  This means that observations over the 10,000 year existence of man would be too short a time to make statistically valid predictions.  So even if the models favored by the warmists were accurately predicting world temperature levels, which they are not, it would seem that the length of time in the models would mean predictions subject to an extremely wide margin of error.  I don’t see how anyone can conclude that any pattern of global warming we observe over the past 150 years is man caused.  Even worse, although the warmists are willing to inflict a lot of economic damage to stop carbon emissions, their actions are not consistent with their beliefs.  Assuming that any global warming we see is man-caused, the answer is nuclear power, which emits no carbon at all.  But warmists don’t like nuclear power.  Assuming you don't like nuclear power, then we have to build a lot of dams, probably killing a lot of snail darters and other endangered fish.  We also have to carpet sunny places like Death Valley with solar collectors without regard to the possible extinction of obscure lizards.  We also have to build wind turbines and kill literally tons of migratory birds and ruin the view from Martha's Vineyard.  We also have to build a lot of high voltage transmission lines through everybody's back yards to move the renewable power from where it’s generated to where it’s used.  But the environmentalists, who fervently believe in global warming, fight all of these things.  Assuming you don't like any of these options, you have to assume a miracle happens in order to stop the carbon.  Or we can go back to 19th century technology.  The expense of all of this gets obscene.  The flimsy justification for the economic ruin that fighting global warming will cause is a statistically insignificant anomaly.  Good luck with the politics of flimsy justification, miracles and economic ruin! 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/matthew-stepp-overlooking-the-limits-of-renewable-energy/2013/04/04/d6df6666-9adf-11e2-9a79-eb5280c81c63_story_1.html