Whatever the cause of global climactic change (and I am sure the Martians would like to know as well), I strongly suspect the overriding issue has very little to do with science and a very great deal with politics.
Alarmism isn't new, the "Club of Rome" made its very infamous and wrong "Limits to growth" argument back in the 1970s, and doom sayers have been threatening us with Ice ages, mass starvation, pollution, overfishing and other eco catastrophes.....There are two common features to these predictions. First is they are simple linear extrapolations usually based on limited data sets, which is not the way to make predictions with complex systems involving hundreds or thousands (or millions) of variables. The second is the proposed "solution" is always a vast expansion of government power to harness the resources of the people, the nation or the world in order to "solve" the problem.
Picture a post Kyoto Canada, where draconian "carbon" taxes and emissions limits are imposed on us all. The Government of the day would be able to control the economy by deciding who is issued these permits, and of course a vast culture of political corruption (dwarfing Adscam, the billion dollar boondoggle, Shawinigate and every other scandal combined) would come into being as politicians realized the literally life and death power they held over the population. No carbon permits would equal no production or transportation, limit agriculture and drive much of the population to a sustenance level existence.
The public would have a difficult time opposing this sort of takeover, since it is based on a poorly understood "science", and how many people would take the time and effort to check out David Suzuki's assertions about how things have gotten warmer since he was in high school in London in the 1950s? I did, accessing the weather records of London to the 1990s (when they suddenly are hidden behind a paid access database) and comparable records from Buffalo NY, and guess what? The average temperature has DROPPED almost one degree c during that period. Other so called evidence like the "hockey stick" graph proporting to show the average temperature for the last 1000 years can be debunked by using other disciplines like History to cross check the record; the graph shows a stable temperature with a dramatic upswing in the last 100 years, but we know the Earth was warmer in the time of the Vikings than it is today, and we also have records of the climate being a great deal colder from the 1600s to the late 1700s (the "Little Ice Age"). The fact that these events are missing from the public record of debates and pronouncements by these environmental activists would suggest they are not interested in science (the recording and interpretation of data).
This is very similar to the Liberal proposal to ban hand guns in Canada as a means of stopping crime. There is plenty of evidence that gun crime is a result of cross border gun smuggling, so banning and confiscating legaly owned handguns in Canada will have zero effect on the problem. Given this isn't very hard to figure out, the question becomes; are there any other reasons for doing this?
Do we use resources poorly and inefficiently? Of course we do. If we are serious about things like resource management and the environment, then we would drop industrial and agricultural subsidies and tax incentives. Once people have to start paying market prices for things, they will have a huge incentive to conserve and minimize, and no Government agency will have to tell them what to do or how to do it (or who to do it with) either. But you won't be hearing about that solution from the eco crusaders any time soon.
