Look!!
President Obama will propose a sweeping plan to address climate change on Tuesday, setting ambitious goals and timetables for a series of executive actions to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and prepare the nation for the ravages of a warming planet.
After 15 years of flat global temperatures, it's about time we got on that. After all, what else does the president have to do?
Yeah, this is going to work out swell.
UPDATE: I think this is a reasonable statement of the state of the science on increased temperatures over the period of several centuries:
There are a whole lot of different things that might explain it:
•Human-generated greenhouse gases might be doing it.
•Human changes in land use — like lots of asphalt highways, which are pretty black — might be causing the Earth to absorb more heat.
•There might be measurement error — we have to estimate the temperature based on thermometers around the world. Some of these thermometers themselves have had some pretty significant changes in their environments, like having a parking lot built around them, that would make the temperature higher locally. This would increase the measured average temperature, which would make it harder to find a natural explanation.
•There might be variations in the Sun’s output that cause the changes.
•There could be other factors than greenhouse gases that cause the Earth to retain more heat. (One interesting possibility that’s being explored is that more cosmic radiation might be causing cloud cover to change.)
And yet we are jumping ahead to a "solution" based on one hypothesis (human production of CO2 is the cause of whatever warming there has been). This is going to work out swell.
