Today's global warming story

You know that the discussion over Global Warming isn't actually over when you see an article like this one - What happened to global warming? - coming from a media source like the BBC:

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

...

The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

Obviously, they didn't let Al Gore vet it before publication...

Again, as I'm not a climate scientist, I want to make my position clear. The earth probably has warmed over the last 50 years, and it's not inconceivable that human behavior has had some impact on that. I've read enough about missing model signatures, heat islands around monitoring stations and observed warming on other planets to be extremely skeptical that human beings are responsible for anything like the majority of it. I am extremely skeptical that any of the currently proposed solutions would result in less human suffering than just dealing with whatever warming occurs.

And, as I've said before, and expect to say again,

There is a critical mass of global warming hypesters whose solutions to global warming are the same solutions they propose for every social and scientific ill. When leftists who have been telling me my entire life that Americans need to stop burning fossil fuels because America is using an "unfair" amount of the world's resources, or because exhaust fumes cause birth defects or sterility, or because it causes acid rain, or it's going to cause global cooling, decide that we need to stop burning fossil fuels because it's causing global warming, it's not easy to fight the suspicion that what they are really concerned with isn't global warming - it's Americans burning fossil fuels.