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- Re-edited this introductory text for better clarity on 8/23/2010
- I will be adding more to these pages soon, not much of it is good news though.

This set of book pages is here, on a GNU/Linux advocacy site, for the purpose of helping me organize a set of data to help people that are misinformed regarding the sometimes fairly obtuse science that has gone into determining the reality of what is Anthropogenic Global Warming. This is to help me(and anyone else that finds them useful), gather and organize the huge quantity of private, public, and educational sites that have solid information regarding the phenomenon of AGW.

In my private life I don't mind entering into debates regarding AGW among other things, but I am not going to waste my time or anyone else's by turning on comments for this thread.

Re:Climate-Gate:
I want to make one more thing clear from the start, the so called 'climate-gate' is total bullshit. Sorry to be so blunt and a little vulgar, but there it is. An educational institution was criminally hacked(burglarized), and the email files that were taken(theft) were scanned for words and phrases that could be used out of context in an attempt to cast doubt on the researchers themselves. This is effective because the media outlets have trained the general public to accept two to three word sound bites to describe things.

As a GNU/Linux advocate I am no stranger to responding to FUD(Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) or purposeful misinformation regarding the facts and myths of Free Software. I completely realize how damaging any reported story can be regardless of it's accuracy or merit, and how easily it can be picked up and carried from one source to another, further spreading the purposeful misinformation.These are the same tactics, only here they are used in an attempt to stifle what is likely the single most important idea that the human race needs to understand and act on. We are polluting our atmosphere in a way that is causing it to heat up, this will cause global climatic changes that will be devastating to various ecosystems and humans alike. "Of Biblical Proportions" doesn't even measure up when you look only at the scope of the mid-line of what is 'likely' to occur...if you look at the far side of what 'might' occur you wind up with a near extinction of humanity and almost a total loss of civilization.

The crimes of burglary and theft were committed here. I am pretty sure there is also a crime in publicly displaying the private correspondence. If this were in any other area, there would have been some sort of criminal investigation and an attempt to at least get an idea of the individual(s) responsible for the burglary and theft of the private data. In the mainstream media however, the fact that the a criminal act was used to obtain the email data that everyone was talking about was totally sidestepped for days.

The most disheartening thing is that if you actually read the emails in order, and put the 'smoking gun' phrases back into context, not only do you no longer have a smoking gun you have no gun at all. NOTHING was out of order. The only thing that could be said about the researchers was that they didn't release the data they used to every single entity that asked for it, and that they often had a sour and/or adversarial tone with many organizations that were desperately trying to poke holes in the science. I understand why; basically any information given to these adversarial organizations would be scanned for something that could be used to discredit the data, not finding that, anything that could be used in a sound bite in the court of public opinion to

The most damaging statement about ignoring data was regarding tree rings that up until 1960 had growth patterns that very closely mirrored the warmer years...after 1960 however they began to vary in unpredictable ways. All the other avenues of data still agreed with one another, and since some felt that the tree-rings growth patterns were not the best indicator available any way, they were removed. THIS is the data that was ignored. Yeah, that's it. And the email is to let the other researchers know that the using the data was discontinued and why. There was no attempt to hide anything!

The take away here is simply this. There is nothing on the denial side of AGW that goes anywhere near discrediting the data, the methods applied to the data to come up with usable facts, nor the people doing the research. There hasn't been anything on the denial side for like 40 years now; ever since Al Gore as an elected government official asked for official governmental hearings to review the data on climate change from the 70s and 80s. So the deniers stoop to larceny to try to come up with dirt to try to smear the people doing the actual research. Didn't work very well, because they still have a bag completely empty of facts to compare to the full bag and a half showing that we are in the process of killing ourselves.

Want bad news? Read on.

Temperatures are still going up, ice caps are melting, oceans are rising and are becoming increasingly acidic, animals are needlessly dying and entire ecosystems are getting stressed to near breaking. We are leaving the solar minimum part of the 11 year solar cycle now and the energy from the sun will be increasing. This is likely one of the reasons we have not had more catastrophically hot years in the last decade.

Many on the adversarial side of AGW say that we are in a decline, that temperatures have been going down for the last 10 years. Well, temperatures have not been going down, it's just that 1998 had the most exaggerated El-Nino in the century so the global temp spiked so high that the year that it ended as the hottest single year ever globally! Remember the heat waves that killed hundreds in Europe and here in the U.S. in 1998? Well we are onto the rising part of the solar cycle now and the sun grows stronger, couple this with the fact that 10 more years worth of CO2 & methane is in the air. Together this will make for some wild times in the years to come.

How many thousands of people will need to die due to heat and outrageous storms, floods, and droughts before we stop trying to hide from this and finally get on with some kind of effort to save ourselves? This is going to sound bad, so please understand where it's coming from: Forget the scenes of drowning polar bears, this is not about them. Pay no attention to the dying coral reefs, this is not about them either. This has never been about saving all the cute animals. What it is really all about is saving us, saving the humans! But because as these indicator species die off, and as various ocean and forest ecosystems go down one by one, we loose valuable parts of the things we need to survive. We need to start protecting them in any way possible if we want to have any chance of lasting through the chaos that is coming.