Global Warming, the World is Growing Cool to Ya...

From a friend:

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I had an interesting conversation with a neighbor at a block Christmas party last week. He is a very highly paid private environmental consultant, and does work for governments around the world. He's been an ardent supporter of the UN IPCC global warming predictions, Al Gore, etc. I've avoided talking to him about global warming for several years because it turns into an argument that spoils the party - but I couldn't resist this year. I said I'd been reading some very creditable information that nature, not man, is causing warming. He said, "interesting, tell me what you've read."

So, I mentioned that increased solar output was primarily warming the earth, that warmer oceans were releasing dissolved CO2 & contributing more than burning fossil fuels, and that recent models including the effects of water vapor and clouds show their influence to be 20X greater than that of CO2. He said "wow, you read that, I'm surprised! I just happen to have spent the last week at a scientific conference where those and other results were reported - it appears the previous dire warnings of man's influence have been really overstated!"

He said this was a very mainstream scientific meeting, not something funded by petroleum or groups in denial. He said in addition, two other factors were in play: 1) the earths orbit, tilt, and wobble were all aligned to bring the earth closer to the sun than it has been for 30k years, 2) the solar warming was melting large areas of permafrost in Siberia, and the decaying peat was generating huge amounts of methane, which of course is 23X more potent than CO2.

He said despite this trend in the scientific community away from anthropogenic warming, it was not likely you'd hear much about this in the media anytime soon. In fact, he said the scientists were not eager to make it widely known, because as long as they can tie their research to global warming it is much easier to get research funded.