Kudos to the Farm Bureau! Is anybody tired of the lies and nonsense that continue to be spewed and relayed in the media regarding climate change? Become educated on the subject and dont be afraid to question those that are willing to pass policy changes that have nothing to do with science or facts but rhetoric and politics.

Just another way for politicians to regulate, tax, and control taxpayers, families, and businesses and has the media along for the ride.

Ever see Al Gore, Jim Martin, Al McGartland, and the likes of Marc Roberts and others at RealClimate.org actually debate anybody on the facts? If the facts are supposedly on their side why won't they openly have a debate with Dennis Avery, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, Chris Horner, Steven Milloy and many others?

Democrats, environmentalists, othe politicians and mainstream media refuse to report or consider the views of many scientists – by some accounts, most scientists – who believe global warming is not a crisis and that much of what has been used to start this movement has repeatedly been disproven as either outright wrong or flawed or highly suspect at best let alone scientific.

The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. I encourage and even urge you to do just that.

I know many people didn't really listen in High School (sorry teachers), but if you had, you would have also learned that we have just recently gotten out of what was called the mini-ice age (which is why there is ice piles in the picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware River) and with the exit of colder weather, comes warmer climate (which is why there is not ice jams on the Delaware, nor snow storms of the magnitude of those during the Revolution. Our records start mainly around an extreme short period of time and for the most part you can pretty much question anything prior extreme recent history for accuracy. I have more faith in reading a boring note from a droning scientist that anything a politician could write.... I do have to admit that he has the excitement of a technical manual about him though. That is not to say that we should not consider making an attempt to better the world for the next generation and those who follow.

Look who has been drinking the kool aid of liberal lies and environmental rhetoric.

Oh thats right anybody that disagrees with the likes of the tjeffery's of the world is just wrong right? Dr. Michaels book: Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know or Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media are must reads for those like the last poster that are caught up in all the hype.

So what makes you the decider on who has something published that has peer reviewed and not? Care to make a wager on your ridiculous assumption? I suppose you say the same thing on the scientists whom signed the letter to Congress earlier this month signed by Robert H. Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton University; William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Princeton University; S. Fred Singer, Professor of Environmental Sciences Emeritus, University of Virginia; Harold W. Lewis, Professor of Physics Emeritus, University of California at Santa Barbara; Laurence I. Gould, Professor of Physics, University of Hartford; Richard Lindzen
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the heading:

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES
YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

You post a link to the IPCC a UN body that published a report that many in the report rejected outright and had their names removed after it was published because it claimed they were in agreement with the report when they were not? If anybody on here buys the UN as an impartial organization. Yeah right!

The other group you posted was the Union of Concerned Scientists. You might as well posted the link to the White House. Heck for a $35 donation I can join that group and I am not a scientist. UCS is neither representative of the scientific community at large nor is it a gathering of top scientists. Instead, a cadre of senior staff whose credentials are steeped more in Washington policy-making than in scientific research rides herd over a grassroots membership from all walks of life.

Here is a nice little brochure of a few scientists that say there is no consensus and as you can see they are not on the fringe as tjeffrey would like you to believe: http://www.heartland.org/books/PDFs/JournalistsGuidetoGW.pdf

Here is a nice little article from the Wall Street Journal in June: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html

Patrick Michaels, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, presents a comprehensive, concise, and hard-hitting overview of global warming science. World Climate Report is categorized by date and topic, and provides citations to the current scientific literature. http://www.worldclimatereport.com/

Sure you dont like Mr. Avery because he has the most current review out there right now on peer reviewed literature which states, "A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance." He then points out that, "This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850."

So why do the few radicals out there including Gore refuse to debate openingly if the facts are on their side? Because as the Wall Street Journal article pointed out - they're not! Debate is over? I dont think so. We havent even had the debate yet.

Here are 31,000 more of those non-existent scientist who didn't get the memo that the debate was over.

http://www.petitionproject.org

Oh and quickly, without going into the agenda and funding of the Heartland Institute. That little brochure includes 45 scientists who neither knew of their inclusion in Mr. Avery's article nor agreed with any of the claims made in the article. When dozens asked to have their names removed, Heartland Institute refused. A quick google search will coroborate this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heartland_Institute

or read the actually responses from many of those scientists here
http://www.desmogblog.com/500-scientists-with-documented-doubts-about-th...

Further, nice of you to post a wiki page that anybody can update including me. You mention Richard Littlemore co-founder of the DesmogBlog web site with John Lefebvre, who pleaded guilty to federal money-laundering charges. Richard Littlemore, is a paid PR consultant who was recently thrashed in a debate on global warming by Lord Christopher Monckton, whose goal attack any organization or individual who opposes global warming alarmism. Nice reliable source there.

The DesmogBlog claims Heartland’s three international conferences on climate change were not “real” conferences at all, but rather PR stunts. In fact, nearly 200 scientists and academics spoke at the conferences and nearly 2,000 people attended. Heartland doed not script the remarks of speakers at their conferences or even see their presentations before they deliver them. People with opposing views, including Al Gore and James Hansen, are routinely invited but they boycott and refuse to attend the events, afraid to lose debates in front of their peers. (Global warming alarmists virtually always lose debates with climate realists.)

DesmogBlog is also claimed as you mentioned in your wiki post that Heartland published a list of scientists Heartlaned claimed are “skeptics” on global warming who in fact are not. This is a gross and shameless misrepresentation of the truth. Heartland posted a bibliography of peer-reviewed articles, originally produced by Dennis Avery for the Hudson Institute, that question one or more of the fundamental assumptions of the global warming alarmists – e.g., whether the Medieval Warm Period was global, whether it was warmer than the second half of the 20th century, etc. Avery subsequently published, and Heartland posted, two lists of the names and institutional affiliations of the authors of these articles, being careful to explain that “not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics, but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see.”

So I suggest you get your facts straight!

Since this started with the cap and tax postcards lets get back to what that really is. Good points by the way Robert!

Here is a good summary of what we are talking about -

A Federal Leviathan: The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009
by Kathleen Hartnett White
Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence, Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment
September 17, 2009

. . . Initially known as the Waxman-Markey bill after authors Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA), it is typically labeled as the “cap and trade” bill. ACES, however, is so much more. The cap and trade provisions comprise only 400 of the bill’s almost 1,500 pages. ACES, viewed in its entirety, contains a dizzying array of federal dictates and programs to transform and control U.S. energy production and use. The bill imposes more than 1,000 new federal dictates through 21 federal agencies. The senior attorney for the Sierra Club recently commented that ACES “is the most complex piece of legislation in the history of our country, which may make it the most complex piece of legislation in human history . . . it imposes on EPA alone approximately 600 [new] mandates.”

The colossal price tag of this massive bill is also rarely noted. CBO’s estimated federal cost in direct spending at $822 billion, another nearly trillion dollar burden on American taxpayers. CBO’s revenue estimate for ACES, however, is $846 billion. The bill is deficit neutral. The revenues to the federal treasury are from the indirect carbon tax imposed on energy users—all economic sectors and consumers.

In short, ACES sanctions 85 percent of the U.S. energy supply from fossil fuels and pours money and mandates at renewable energy and energy efficiency. Nuclear energy is barely mentioned. In so doing, the legislation wagers U.S. economic vigor on as yet untested, unproven, more expensive energy sources with inherent limitations. . . . Read the rest and source here: http://www.texaspolicy.com/pdf/2009-09-PP25-ACES-khw.pdf

Isnt it nice how the Democrats in Washington like to call this revenue and fail to disclose the billions in tax increases families, taxpayers and businesses will pay under this bill to the tune of almost a trillion more in spending and that is a conservative estimate. More fulfillment of President Obamas pledge not to raise taxes on families and businesses right? What a joke!

Reid Bryson in a 1976 interview with Plowboy.

"BRYSON: Yes. Thanks to today's environmental awareness, most of us now recognize at least part of what you've just pointed out. Dozens of scientific papers, in fact, have been published about industry's consumption of fossil fuels, its creation of carbon dioxide, and how the resultant "greenhouse effect" will cause a rise in the temperature of the atmosphere."

As to your temperatures have been level argument - that is simply wrong.

"Global temperatures have seemingly plateaued in the past 10 years. Those dubious about climate science or wary of the social implications of carbon regulations have seized on this point to argue that fears of global warming have been overblown.

However, a careful analysis of the data reveals that this decade has in fact been anomalously warm - the warmest in the history of recorded global temperatures by a fair margin - and the rate of warming is consistent with that over the prior few decades. The real question at hand is not whether warming is occurring, but rather whether the rate of warming is faster or slower than expected by climate scientists.

The world has, in fact, continued to warm over the past decade in all five available temperature series (including both satellite and surface records), though the trend for some series is statistically indistinguishable from zero. The only way to obtain a cooling trend over the period is to cherry-pick an earlier start date to include the 1997-1998 El Niño event or to look at a time span of eight years or fewer."

http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2009/08/warmest-by-fair-margin/

This next one is particularly interesting because it is one the skeptics like to cite alot. However, the conclusion of this study is that:

'Numerous websites, blogs and articles in the media have claimed that the climate is no longer warming, and is now cooling. Here we show that periods of no trend or even cooling of the globally averaged surface air temperature are found in the last 34 years of the observed record, and in climate model simulations of the 20th and 21st century forced with increasing greenhouse gases. We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer-term warming'.
Easterling, D. R., and M. F. Wehner (2009), Is the climate warming or cooling?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L08706, doi:10.1029/2009GL037810.

What you two have shown here is a nice microcosm of what the skeptic's approach is. We will attack the minutia of the overall argument. We will force them to defend one small detail of a much larger and over reaching study in the hopes that the layman will see that and say "yeah, the whole thing is wrong". Models are not predictive of every bump and turn. You cannot, and shouldn't not look at a model and try to predict what the average temperature will be in 2010. Models are limited by their defintion yet we use them all over the place and to great benefit: Potable water conveyance systems. Stormwater conveyance and treatment systems. The engineering of automobiles and airplanes. Well drilling. Silviculture.

It is the same approach taken by creation "science". Another shared tactic is to say "well why won't they debate us in an open forum". Aside from the fact that they have the scientific debate is different from the political debate. It does not occur in a crowded auditorium with two guys at a podium fielding questions from the audience. This is simply not how science works. Scientific debate takes place within the needed constraints of the scientific method. If the skeptics want to debate then all they need do is the research necessary to get published in a scholarly peer reviewed journal so that the merits of their thesis may be explored and tested and, if need be, changed.

I will leave it at that. Thank you for your time and consideration.

If you stay in the slow lane, and just barely exceed the speed limit you should be fine, the officer at the top of the hill will focus on those passing you.

I do have to admit that I sometimes get nervous on the Eden Prairie hill though.

Remember you can be fast, just don't be the fastest, and the flush feeling you'll experience isn't global warming, it will pass as the adrenalin passes.

There are plenty of politicians and members of the academia who have differing opinions on the causes and extent of of climate change and unfortunately people tend to side with those they line up with politically rather then looking objectively. I don't believe all the reasons for global warming are man made. Come on, we have had warming before industrialization as well and the size of the population and the industrialization had no effect on climate change then.

To deny that there are serious climate changes occuring is rather silly as well. I just met with a delegation of state officals from Australia who were here in America last week. They were talking about how severely the climate has changed there in the last ten years. There tempratures have risen and more importantly it has just stopped raining. Every place has the occasional drought but how about a ten year drought? One water minister said "we don't talk about climate change or global warming because people and politicians just argue about politics and point fingers, we just talk about how it doesen't rain anymore". Their rivers where most of the water comes from has been depleted by nearly 50%.
They have had to make radical decisions on water use and had to invest tens of billions in water production (desalination of ocean water)and water treatment (to recycle it). Other countries are having similar problems as well.

Regardless of which side you believe in regards to climate change many of the things that are called in order to shrink our carbon footprint make sense. 70% of the energy we use in America goes to heating/cooling our buildings and the electricity to light them.
Just designing and building our building more effienctly would go along way, and greener buildings would save all of us alot of money as well. American buildings use 3-10 times the energy that european buildings use because we build them cheaply rather then looking what the costs will be over 30 years (life cycle costs).

Don't get a more fuel efficient car because Al Gore told you to, do it because it because it sends less money to the middle east and to Chavez in Venezuela, you save some money in the process as well.

Don't let fear mongering and politics get in the way of doing the right thing.

Richard