Being sure is impossible with a massive complex system the size of earth. the planet has been around for billions of years, we have a few hundred of reliable data

Good points though, this is where the debate really stands, between those who would wait and see and those who will act in case. Though your analogy is off, you know in medicine evidence will only take you so far and sometimes you have to take your best guess.

hard to compare to a sinus infection, it would really suck to fill my gas tank once a month for 25 bucks, and for my brother to get a job at the local solar panel plant.

You are absolutely right though, no one really knows doing something could be disasterous, on the other hand, doing nothing could be disasterous as well. that being the case my stand is that burning less fossil fuels and sending less money to a terrorist nation (where do you think terrorists get all thier money) is probably a good idea either way, and if we do it slowly, carefully……….well.

I must commend you first of all for the anniversary of your excellent blog, one which never fails to educate.

Secondly, I admire you for being a gentleman with the patience of a saint. I am not so blessed as you.

But to do something just in case - like, frequent chest cts to detect cancer, right? Only to find out that CTs increase the risk of hematologic malignancies.

There is far too little concern for unintended consequences. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all. To do something because you MIGHT do some good, without consideratin of the ILL that you may inadvertantly do, is just as bad (or good) as doing nothing at all.

“Doing something that effects millions to be cautious … seems better than doing nothing.”

Isn’t that just an emotional response? Are you certain that doing something, just for the sake of doing something, will lead to a better outcome? Are you certain the outcome will be better? Are you certain no harm will come from whatever action might be taken, “just in case”?

Look at Kyoto, for example. There is nothing about Kyoto that would change global climate, or global emissions. It would reduce US emissions, and US competitiveness, and so forth, while giving China, for example, carte blanche to continue to pollute as it has been doing. It would probably increase the cost of doing business in the US, cost people their jobs, livelihoods, send more jobs overseas, etc. Regulated businesses affected by the accord in the US would move offshore to places unaffected by the accord, and the impact on the environment would be nil. But of course, there will be less wealth, less productivity, and less prosperity in the US, which, it seems to me, may be it’s raison d’etre.

Then again, it might not. Are you willing to take that chance?

I also do not treat sinus infections until there is a sinus infection, though I could prescribe long term daily antibiotics, it just doesn’t SEEM like a good idea, to me.

Why? because you say so?

The earth’s environment is not a closed system - it loses heat every second to the cosmos.

I’m not taking sides here (thought I could), but should we be making judgement, and decisions that will affect peoples lives, based on speculation? Have you a study to demonstrate that auto engines raise global temperature, or is it just the conclusion based on “common sense?” Is this how medicine is practiced, that you can conclude and convince yourself that A leads to B, and make treatment decisions based on your conclusion? Or do you rely on studies that may support your theory, or demonstrate, once again, that “common sense” does not always hold in complex systems. We once thought it made perfect sense to screen for lung cancer with chest xrays, until a study showed that this seemingly simple conclusion was wrong.

Lomborg is by no means a “conservative” or even what you would no doubt call a “denier.” He does, however, show that most of the claims made by Warmists are nonsense.

He also uses cost-benefit analysis to show that the “solutions” demanded by the Stepford ecologists (including Kyoto) would do mankind precious little good.

If you read these books objectively, you’ll swear off the Kool-Aid.

One has to be careful with Wikipedia. The fact that the word “consensus” appears more than a dozen times in this article should be a tip off that contributor sympathy is not with the sceptics.

Consensus is what you get in politics. Science is what happens when falsifiable theories are confirmed by objective data. And, no matter how many times the robots repeat the word “consensus,” warmism doesn’t meet that test.