Jake Syma: Climate Change and AGW

I believe in climate change; it's man-made global warming (AGW, or "Anthropogenic Global Warming") I'm not so sure about.

For the most part, my hesitancy is based on consideration of exactly how much humans are to blame (100%, 80%, 50%, 20%, etc) and the knee-jerk response that we must [therefore] "do something" (which is always and ever the rallying cry of those trying to restrict our liberties, be they civil or economic).

As a conservative friend relayed to me last year, neocon talk show host Mark Levin once challenged a caller to "Tell me what the ideal temperature of the earth is."

Maybe he (Levin) is human after all...

Disclosure: I'm not a climate scientist, so I'm not going to pretend that I'm actually fluent with the scientific literature in this field.

I'm not particularly interested in meteorology or climate science, either... as I am in politics, economics, and law, so I'm also probably not going to go out of my way to read a lot of the literature of my own volition, like I do with the aforementioned subjects. Feel free to suggest some, though...

As I recently put it to a friend:

"I'm a skeptic (as opposed to denier), as I must be about any issue where special interests seek to use government to restrict individual liberty and I don't completely understand the science behind it... and that's probably about as honest of an answer as you're ever going to get from someone using that label."

I'm sorry (not really), but if you're going to use scare stories to restrict my liberty and/or push for more government involvement in (and control of) my life... it's incumbent upon you to make the case for it to my satisfaction.

The recent "Climategate" controversy is a good example of some of my skepticism.
(I couch the term in finger-quotes because I don't think it's nearly the controversy it's been made out to be)

After apparently keeping much of their internal operations close to the vest, someone hacked/cracked a bunch of emails from East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and published them on WikiLeaks.

According to Newsweek and others, the criticism was unfounded. But for skeptics like me, questions still remain.

See the "Citations" section below (#s 3-8) for some of them.

Citations