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What killed the dinosaurs?
Carbon monoxide from cars?
Factories making plutonium?

The weather changes killed.
Go kill the weather or mother nature, mr scientist.

*Spits @ brokaw and rather.
And btw is`nt rather in the unemployment line BECAUSE of his opinions and discretions?

No, he isn't there because he lied. He's there because he got caught. Subtly different concepts.

This Global Warming stuff is a hoot. The idea itself is worrisome enough. But the level of actual knowledge is about what we know about a real King Arthur or the telegraph invented by Alexander The Great.

These are possibilities:
1) the warming is real, man made, and the Gore Science is sound.
2) same but the Gore Science isn't correct.
3) warming is real, not man made, Gore Science is good but his conclusion is mistaken.
4) same but the Gore science is not good.
5) warming is not actually there. data misinterpreted.
6) same but data corrupted for political gain.

etc. etc. plenty of etc. And variations within each overall catagory.

Further. Many people and organizations are working this topic so we can be sure there are good people, liars, and incompetents for each catagory.

However it is improbable that a system as complex as global climate can be analyzed without computer Modeling. Therefore it is imperative that competing models be open for the inspection of the algorithms, the data, precision, and the rationals for data selection and exclusion. This is not being done in many cases. There are reasons including a natural desire to not give away one's product. But nearly all this work is funded by governments and foundations. The ownership of the results should be established at funding.

In contrast to Modeling, which is essentially throwing data at theories expressed mathematically, there is another approach. i.e. Prediction.

Prediction is weather forecasting. What we will have tomorrow usually resembles what we had today but tomorrow will not match yesterday quite as well, or last month at all well.

The Japanese have just launched a huge project to predict global weather in detail for years into the future. Using computers of course. It probably can't be done. But much will be learned anyway. And even failure should lead to improved short term forecasting.

I tossed in a lot of simplification. There is no "Gore Science' but Gore's views are pretty much dominant right now. Prediction and Modeling are not actually separate - they are in a spectrum of ranging from those who work from pure ideas to those working more from observations.

It's a shame because Discovery is one of my favorite networks, and they're usually pretty fair scientifically. I guess those standards don't apply when it's a 'big name' like Brokaw.

The most telling argument re global argument is the "most scientists believe in it."

That by itself speaks volumes. Scientific disputes are not settled by a show of hands, but rather by one man with dispositive data.

The very notion of invoking majority opinion proves that no one knows. No one ever says the majority of scientists believe that heavier than air machines can fly, or that gravity exists. The data for those things are available, and unequivocal. For global warming, they are neither.

By "most scientists" you're talking about practially everyone in the scientific community not on the oil industry's payroll. They're paid to argue against the obvious.

Even most scientists on corporate payrolls now agree with the idea that human activity is adding to the problem. All major auto makers agree it's happening -- and even the coal industry in this country agrees that human activity is contributing to global climate change.

Bottom line, you can't take billions of tons of black, solid matter out of the ground and let it float in the air for years without expecting something to happen. And that's exactly what's happening.

Everyone can agree until they're blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that:
1) Our output of CO2 is miniscule compared to natural variations and
2) the frequency ranges that CO2 absorbs are largely masked by water vapour, so adding CO2 to the atmosphere has very little real effect anyway.

Only an idiot would proclaim a theory on an energy system after removing any reference to teh single largest contributor to that system. The sun's natural variation is more than adequate to explain climate change.

"not on the oil industry's payroll"

As usual, Junior makes assumptions with no evidence.

Just like a good little useful idiot. Gorebot thanks you.

More liberal Marxist hot air, the real cause of global warming.

Junior must be one of those lefties who believe Harvard MBA GW Bush is an idiot, But Al Gore, who flunked out of both law and divinity school, is a genius.

The real question he should ask himself is, "How much has my bong contributed to global warming?"

Al Gore's educational ability is obviously alternatively aligned, requiring specialist treatment to cater to his particular needs, and the education system has therefore failed to accomodate his superior, but otherwise indiscernible, intellect, whereas George Bush is certainly a product of The System, and likely a subversive to boot.

After 11 shots of tequila it's all so obvious...

Mars has been experiencing global "warming", too. Maybe the sun's getting hotter?

Nah...it's those damned Martians and their SUV's! B@stards!

Yeah, and you can read how smart he was at Harvard right here:

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/09/16/tsurumi/index.html