Well, I got tired of reading about Nova Scotia so I thought I'd look into my fiver year prediction, which has about three years left on it.  I'm glad I said "within" five years because it may be less after all...the whole thing's falling apart on a molecular level in terms a high-schooler can understand.  There's a "perfect storm" of scientific findings converging that will blast it all into the dust.

Not soon enough for the House bill... probably not soon enough for the Senate bill either... maybe soon enough to VOTE in 2010 and almost certainly by 2012 though.

(My objections to the Waxman-Markey screw-up are 95% procedural and not so much related to the science/dearth thereof.  Anybody who voted "Yes" on a 1200pp-- oops, suddenly 1500pp-- bill they were neither allowed to nor able to read is a screw-up, end of story.  But onward...)

You know from spectrometry that atoms and molecules are very specific as to what wavelengths they absorb and what wavelengths they emit.  In fact you can identify any "stuff" by observing that.  The plain fact is that once there's "enough" CO2 in the atmosphere, virtually all the specific infrared wavelengths it absorbs are going to BE absorbed and the warming effects of CO2 come to a halt, or a drastic decline, even as the amount of CO2 doubles.

I mean, this is simple shit, folks.  I can think of 15 analogies that even a Democrat can understand.

Also there's some wavelength overlap between CO2 and water vapour, such that the hotter it is and the more water vapour there is, the more CO2 is beaten out of the game.  CO2 is somewhat to vastly outnumbered by H2O in most locations.

Also, at some point even the dimmest bulbs are going to understand that there is an immense difference in the heat-carrying and heat-conducting capacities of the atmosphere and the oceans; that's too obvious to ignore much longer.  To say-- as "they" are-- that the atmosphere is heating up the ocean instead of the other way around has sounded inane from the start to anyone with half a brain.  Those with smaller fractions of brain will catch up eventually.  All the moaning about "sea ice" and its observed reduction is going to backfire.

(Much as all the rhetoric designed to panic people into favouring the stimulus bill and getting it passed before the economy recovered naturally...actually scared people into making decisions that deepened and lengthened the recession far more than the stimulus helped it, but that's another
story...)

You can survive in 5ºC air a LOT longer than you can survive in 5ºC water. Everyone who watched "Titanic" knows that.

It's about the same with dissolved CO2 content between ocean and atmosphere, but that one's even easier to understand because it involves beer.  A cold beer goes flat as it warms.  Even UAW members know that.
When they "get" that it's the dreaded CO2 making those tiny bubbles in their beer they may also "get" that "warming" increases the amount of CO2 the oceans (and soils) emit, rather than CO2 causing ocean warming.

Finally, what happens when you "backcast"-- that is, run a forecasting model backwards so as to arrive at conditions 100 years ago, then compare to recorded reality-- is other than convincing.  Also easy to understand.  All that fact needs to do is to become more widely known.

Is it any wonder that the urgency for "climate change measures" looks so desperate...?  Like to get Government-increasing legislation done before the truth of things catches up?

Really all that remains now is to review media trends and predict when they're going to start screaming about the coming Ice Age-- again.

###

More facts:

1.  Currently CO2 = 0.0378% of the atmosphere
2.  Before the industrial revolution = 0.0280% of the atmosphere
3.  AGW advocates argue that a CO2 concentration increase of 0.009% has heated the world over a half a degree C

As C and F are less useful for this next step let's go to Kelvin. Average global temperature is about 290K (0C = 273K so add the 2007 average 57F/13.9C to make 287K).  Round this to 300K, such that up one
K is a +0.33% difference.  Let's call the warming so far +0.2%...

...so what they're saying is that a less than 0.01% increase in CO2 has resulted in a +0.2% increase in temperature.

That's a 200X effect.

Man.  Can we use that to generate electricity somehow?  CO2 (burned carbon) looks like a better energy source than coal (unburned carbon)...(!) How could we have got that backwards?

—Ron Copis