Mark, there is no risk for you in sounding like a egghead. I suggest you just learn to accept it. It’s called “global” warming, not “out my window” warming. You must also believe that when it is dark outside, it is dark everywhere on this planet.

I agree with some of your points, as usual. That being said, the prevailing wisdom of the scientific community is that climate change is occuring. The question, then, is what factors are causing it, and unless someone has a science degree with a heck of a lot of research under his or her belt hanging on their wall, they are not qualified to even presume to have an answer to that question. I don’t care if someone is a former Vice President with pals in Hollywood or the Senate Minority Leader. Such a person is NOT AN EXPERT ON THIS AND NEVER WILL BE. Are these normal, cyclical changes in climate that occur over tens of thousands or even millions of years and we have not obseved the changes because we just weren’t around? (Of course this would not be an acceptable hypothesis to fundamentalist conservatives who would deny cyclical change over tens of thousands of years because they reject the scientific evidence that the world is that old). If these changes are natural and part of the history of the earth, are these otherwise natural cycles of climate change now being influenced or altered by man and his impact on the environment? If so, to what ends? If not, how do we respond to the changes? I am not a scientist, the conservative and liberal politicians who use whatever the weather happens to be doing in a given week are not scientists. Ann Coulter is not a scientist (Ann, a prominent conservative spokesperson,who said rather famously that the land was ours, we had no particular calling to take care of it, it was created for us, so we are free to “use it, rape it”), nor is Rachel Maddow or even (heaven forbid!)high school graduate Sean Hannity. Again, the scientific community knows more about this subject than politicians, citizens like me and albeit wonderfully intelligent columnists/commentators like yourself, and I defer to their knowledge on the matter. What is the prevailing opinion of the scientific community on the matter? I think we know. Of course there is dissent on the prevailing opinion, as there always is, and that dissent, if it leads to further, objective exploration of facts and evidence, is healty. Quite frequently that dissent leads to changed ideas. Laymen like us don’t try to presume to know what causes cancer. We leave that to doctors and medical researchers. So why should we feel like we have some level of knowledge or experience that qualifies us to make what are clearly SCIENTIFIC judgments regarding our climate? Or to refute with our limtied knowledge the prevailing scientific opinons of the day? I don’t know about you, but I am not going to rely on politicians to tell me why the environment is doing what it is doing and I am certainly not going to rely on Rush Limbaugh, a docmentary by Al Gore, the senate minority leader of even Sarah Palin on the subject. The scientific comminity has done a pretty good job of policing itself over the years, and changing course when it finds it has come to erroneous conclusions. That is what keeps it fresh and exciting, the continual need to explore and to prove and disprove their own hypothesis. I will leave it to them to best determine what is causing the current change in climate and what those changes mean or don’t mean. Conservatives have had an unreasonable fear and distrust of science for decades, seeing it somehow as the enemy of God, rather than a means to perhaps better understand Him, and I believe that fear of any science that conflicts with their political or moral philosphies is driving the conservative need to “debunk” what is arguably the current prevailing scientific opinion of the day on climate. Science has made tremendous strides in the past 100 years, accomplishing nothing short of miracles. We applaud those strides. So why such a fight on this? Maybe that is the REAL question to be explored, both by conservatives and liberals. Perhaps it is because the whole question goes to the very nature of man and his place in the universe. The great fights between conservatism and science usually revolve around just that question. (Copernicus and Darwin, to name a few). Leave the science to the scientists. Dont let the government,liberal or conservative, or politicians, or Fox News or CNN, meddle in or stifle science, tell scientists how to do their job or try to interpret their data, or try to tie the hands of scientists. No one wins when that is allowed to happen.