[RWebb]

As Jim poined out, very very few glaciers have increased in size recently - the vast amjority have receded. The few that _have_ increased, have done so b/c of shifts in prevailing storm tracks and other such effects.

Glacial retreat is merely one effect of global warming - and is only one piece of the total evidence. There are numerous data, including sea surface measurements, depth measurements, and atmospheric measurements. We have the extraordinary CO2 series from Mauna Loa, we have fossil ice cores, and more.

nota posted an extremely brief but quite accurate summary - altho it is not completely established that we are in a solar minimum.

What is particularly humorous here is the pontification on highly technical matters by people who have NO knowledge of the area nor apparently any background in the natural sciences.

These are not policy questions. They are facts. Policy is certainly involved as we decide how much of our national resources to devote to this area and how much should go into research rather than into fixes. Or how much research should go into fixes.

Jim - here's one from the Nati'l Labs for you: a college buddy of mine (materials scientist, or as I insist on calling him - a metallurgist) was a bomb maker at Lawrence Livermore. For a while, he was working on giant solar boiler using Na. The project eventually went away.

A valid policy question is whether Congress should allocate tax dollars to revive that project; or take the same $$ and study which cities are most in need of sea walls. If you live in Miami, or New Orleans, or lower Manhattan, then you are going to be very very interested in sea walls.

However, new energy sources are a longer term solution - sea walls only solve a small part of the problem.

IF you guys want to debate, that is where you should expend your energy -- not in railing agianst established scientific facts, doubted only by Fox News and a few other biased sources.

Here is a challenge if you think otherwise: post the citation to one scientific paper stating that we are not experiencing global warming. That means a paper published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal -- not ruminations by Lord Mountbottom that so and so might not be true. Not comments froma comedian like Rush Limbo -- a scientific paper.