I actually agree with him. Of course we should try to reduce pollution and everything else, but the alarmism i've seen in these last days is just IMHO fool.

At the same time, Hypocrisy Central, aka. the US Government promotes the usage of gasoline hybrid cars that are not only less economical and environment friendly than modern european diesels, they also have less performance and a higher initial price tag. Meanwhile, european car makers are making powerful environmnent-friendly diesels that only need residual fumes to run a 100 km.

The main reason why diesel cars are so unheard-of in the US is, I guess, that the american car makers really suck at making them, so they'll do (= market and lobby) anything they need to in order to keep cheap and clean european diesel power from hitting the streets and totally decimating domestic sales of american made passenger vehicles.

For example:

Ford had to give in as 60% of all new cars bought in europe are diesel-powered and their own disel technology, well honestly, has always sucked major donkey anus. Now they (and Mazda too, being a wholly owned subsidiary,) buy their diesel engines from Peugeot. Officially the engine line was co-developed but that's only a facade of marketing PR so ford engineers wouldn't lose face. The Ford Duratorq line is only a minor development over then existing Peugeot HDi technology and the engines are in fact built at Peugeot's plant.

GM has gained modern diesel technology only recently. Their own diesels were so massively outdated that in 2005 GM bought rights to the JTD diesel engine from Fiat.

Mercedes-Benz had some good diesels back in the mid 90's but after the DaimlerChrysler merger their disel development stagnated. That's peculiar since back in the mid 90's Mercedes diesels were know as the epitome or reliability. These days, I wouldn't trust one to take me to school. In the meantime Mercedes has began producing cars with even bigger and stronger gasoline engines. During DaimlerChrysler's brief ownership of Mitsubishi, even their diesel development was almost stopped, which leads to believe the Chrysler half of DaimlerChrysler would most likely want to sweep the whole idea of diesel power under the rug. (Nevermind that, it seems the daimlerchrysler merger was infact daimler-benz ag' takeover of chrysler so they just dropped the ball.)

I'm liking how the vehicle taxes are developing in our beloved land of envy^H^H^Hquality - tax value dependant on emissions. Actual tax burden per vehicle would decrease for newer (=cleaner) vehicles and that would bring a concrete benefit into buying a less polluting car.

I suggest all of you worrying over the climate should stop and learn a little about the subject. Global warming alarmism is one of the largest scams in the modern world. Let's do a real quick primer on climate history.

The earth is warming. It has been since around 1850. Yes, 1850. Not 1950. Not 2000. There was a massive warm up in the 1930s, followed by a cooling in the 1940s-1970s. During the 1970s, climate scientists had reached a "consensus" that we were going into an Ice Age caused by humans. Because of our use of aerosols, we were going to freeze to death if we didn't starve because of the massive crop failures that would happen in the 1980s. Odd. I don't remember massive crop failures.

Now, is mankind at fault for the warming? Let's look a little farther into the past to get some trending information.

There was a period from ~1400 to ~1850 normally referred to as the Little Ice Age. It was colder than it was now – substantially colder. There were famines due to crop failure. There was plenty of misery for most human life, and other life, for that matter.

Prior to the LIA was the Medieval Warm Period, stretching ~1000 to ~1400. It was WARMER during the MWP than it was today. Yes, warmer. English monasteries were renowned for their wines. The vineyards in England were quite bountiful and successful. I don't recall that England has been known for wine production any time recently.

Prior to the MWP was the Dark Ages cool period. While not as severe as the LIA, it was still substantial enough to appear in paleoclimatological studies. Prior to the Dark Ages cooling was the Roman Warm Period. And, if we get into larger time periods, there were a couple of Ice Ages a few thousand years ago, when it was REALLY cold. And there was the warm periods of the dinosaurs.

So, what's my point so far? Climate is not stable, and it never has been.

Now, let's look at the earth's temperature. Climate scientists can't agree on a temperature for the earth. They have different methods for computing it, and the general idea is that the earth's temp is around 288K, +/- 0.6K. Climate models claim that we will see warming somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.5-6K, which means maybe as much as 2% warmer than it is now.

However, there is a problem with climate models. They have no forecasting skill. If you take any of those models, set its parameters to the known values in 1900, and run it up to the present, it will be nowhere near accurate. If it can't predict current temperatures using real world data and trends, why should we believe its claims of the future? Quite frankly, we here at allego.cc can make climate forecasting models that are every bit as skillful at predicting the future as the ones being used to make the global warming alarmism claims.

Let's glance at the bugbear of global warming, carbon dioxide. Here in the US, there is a Supreme Court case because some environmentalists want to classify carbon dioxide as a "pollutant". What about this pollutant? It comes from cars. It comes from industry. It is a side effect of almost every form of energy production. Where else does it come from? Every single man, woman, and child on the planet. And every single living, breathing animal on the planet. So, if it's a pollutant, it must be all bad, right? For those of you who didn't pay attention in high school biology, carbon dioxide is the main ingredient in the photosynthesis cycle. Without CO2, plants don't live. And, more importantly, with higher CO2 concentrations, plants grow better, and crops have higher yields. CO2, the horrifying pollutant that we must regulate, is the best, most environmentally friendly fertilizer there is. When I hear people claim that we must regulate CO2 output to stop global warming, the conclusion I reach is that either the person is ignorant about the carbon cycle, or the person wants famine from reduced yields and crop failures.

And what about the "It's too critical to do nothing! Spare no expenses!" argument? Quick – what will the Kyoto Protocol do to stop global warming, assuming all the signatories actually meet the goals of reducing CO2 output? Anyone? Something like 0.5K. So, we are going to spend billions of dollars (or whatever your local currency is) to prevent an amount of warming that falls within the margin of error of the current temperature. Is that rational? Severely limiting our economic output – keeping people impoverished, to do something that no one can detect?

By the way, CO2 levels have been far higher than they are today in the distant past – and yet life on earth survived. And thrived.

There are far, far more important things to worry about than having warmer winters, people. Do yourselves a favor and get the facts. Now excuse me while I finish getting my house ready for the subfreezing weather that is due to arrive in the next day or so. I hate winter cold snaps.

@gnolam:

Ice cores? What about them? Ice cores from where? There's plenty of evidence in the ice cores to show temperature and CO2 levels have been higher and lower than they are today. Or is there some other evidence in them that you wish to bring up?

Straw man? The implicit and explicit claim of the antrhopogenic global warming crowd is that CO2 is responsible for global warming. Even though current science suggests that CO2 is responsible for 25% of the warming - all of the CO2 delta, not just what mankind emits industrially. And ignoring the role CO2 plays in the carbon cycle of life, and the effects of increased CO2 levels on plant life is disingenious.

Global Warming is terrifying. But sadly, no one will address a problem until it's knocking on their door. These men will all be dead before we run into any life-threatening problems, as a result of Global Warming. I'm sure that I'll be dead, as well. But that doesn't mean we aren't already feeling the heat (quite literally).

Here's a question for people who probably know a lot more about the logistics of it: with the planned population of the moon, is there hope for re-population on foreign planets? It's rather sad, but I'm quite confident that this is what it'll come to, eventually.

US car manufacturers also suck at gas-electric hyrids. That doesn't mean those cars aren't being sold like hot-cakes in the US.

FWIW, the VW Jetta Diesel is available in most VW dealers in the US.

Why does it matter? That's like saying "we didn't create AIDS, so we don't have to do anything to stop it either". I agree with what Evert said. Going "OMG we're all gonna die" is stupid and pointless, but it's not like the climate change is made-up or just going to disappear if we don't think about it.

I just love this. You can really see the Chrysler influence in that statement. You don't have to be an economist to figure out that doing something right now is going to be cheaper than doing it further down the line. Maybe not $10 trillion cheaper, but that's hardly the issue.

I said "aerosols", not "greenhouse gases". If you prefer the term "opaque pollutants" over "aerosols", we can use "opaque pollutants". It doesn't change the fact that we were told we were heading into an Ice Age before the end of the century.

The Medieval Warm Period Project certainly indicates a much larger span than just Europe.

Maybe I didn't explain myself clearly - the whole point is that you do feed in historical data to see if the climate model maps to reality. If you put historical data in to the model and it comes up with a result significantly different than what we measure in the real world, then we can reasonably conclude that the model isn't generating sound results. And, unfortunately, that is what the models currently do.

Actually, the USA general media supports the anthropogenic global warming meme. One has to look outside of the media to find any dissenting positions.

Anyway, folks - sorry to stir the hornets' nest here. I just figured I'd give myself something to do waiting for work to get busy. My boss just showed up. Gotta work

What I care most is the living quality of people. Because the of the ice melting, Manhattan might be soon under water, as well as many costal cities. People would loose their homes. Poor people from the third world countries who have the least to do with the global warming loose the most (they can't afroid to build flood blocks).

I don't care how many dollars that makes up, but it's not the important thing. Still, $10 trillion sounds like nothing, considering how many big cities are located at the coast.

Most likely mankind will survive, there's no doubt, but considering that my house might be one of the first to be flooded, and that it might actually become freezingly cold here in Finland if the golf stream changes its course, it really might worry me a bit.

Because... they chose poor sites for cites... Venice sunk into the sea and people keep on living there.

Not in the US. Diesel is more expensive. Average US East Coast price is $2.59, while 87 Octane is $2.15 as of yesterday night. On a side note: E85 looks to be interesting--being basically street-legal race gas with an octane rating of around 100.

If that's true, the current fuel has worked for semi-trucks for say >30 years. So to magically switch something that's worked and been established for all this time definitely wouldn't be easy.

That's a very bad business decision and still falls under untapped markets for a competitor to swoop in and make tons of money. And there are plenty of fuels that are more expensive than gasoline but we don't use those.

Oh, a meme eh? Ok, let's see what global temperature averages look like, shall we?
For instance:
{"name":"nhshgl.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/b\/bb3a8b3ddc96be822595c4744992a0a3.gif","w":629,"h":726,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/b\/bb3a8b3ddc96be822595c4744992a0a3"}
(from http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/)
Or
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Annual/HadCRUG.gif
(from http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/globaltemperature.html)
Or, if you prefer a USA-based source,
{"name":"image001.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/2\/22b961fd0fcb0378fee32836236007d4.gif","w":600,"h":370,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/2\/22b961fd0fcb0378fee32836236007d4"}
(from http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap15/global_temp.html).
If you consider it reliable enough, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record.

Don't think you're getting off that easily.