Responding to John Bullard's April 24 view, although I am not the president of a Sea Education Association, I am indeed an environmental conservationist. My automobile (endorsed by the Sierra Club) and my home stand as my evidence. My trash consists of one small bag weekly, often bi-weekly, but my recycling bins are always full. While this doesn't make me a scientist, it does show I care for our environment.

Not being a scientist and caring for our environment doesn't preclude an average person from being able to think or know when they are being deceived.

As stated previously, I believe we should take care of the environment because it's the right thing to do.

Australia, the land where sinks drain the other way, has alerted Americans that we see Earth’s climate upside down: We’re not warming. We’re cooling.

“Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.” Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. “All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.”

Chapman neither can be caricatured as an oil lobbyist nor dismissed as a Flat-Earther. He was an MIT physicist, NASA’s first Australian-born astronaut and Apollo 14’s mission scientist.

In Gen. Tommy Franks book "An American Soldier," he quotes his dad as saying: "Remember this, son, You don't necessarily need to know anything to have an opinion." I think of this quote every time I read one of Roger Ray's "Opinions" in the News-Leader. (His latest 4/30/08 is about global climate change.)

No, Mr. Ray, the time for disputes over the causes of global climate changes has not ended. I will guarantee anyone who wants to take time to investigate that the more you read the more questions you will have.

Maybe we could all start by agreeing on one point: This Earth has been warming up or cooling off through its entire history. The idea that we can stop these cycles is ludicrous.

Nigel Lawson winces when he hears me talk of climate change: "It is a propagandist's term, it trips off the tongue nicely," he says. He will only refer to global warming, and even then with big qualifications. Almost 20 years after Margaret Thatcher's chancellor walked out of government, Lawson is back, defying scientists and politicians in a punchy book challenging what he calls "the global warming nonsense".

He makes an unlikely Dr Strangelove: a slimmed-down, pachyderm-skinned version of the face of Thatcherism, after a diet that he turned into a bestselling book. But like Peter Sellers' nuclear scientist, Lawson has learned to stop worrying and love a warmer world.

His argument boils down to two parts: climate change is not the threat we believe and efforts to stop it are doomed and dangerous. Everyone who says otherwise is either lying or ill-informed.

Writing in Science, Met Office researchers project that at least half of the years between 2009 and 2014 are likely to exceed existing records.

However, the Hadley Centre researchers said that the influence of natural climatic variations were likely to dampen the effects of emissions from human activities between now and 2009.

But over the decade as a whole, they project the global average temperature in 2014 to be 0.3C warmer than 2004.

Currently, 1998 is the warmest year on record, when the global mean surface temperature was 14.54C (58.17F).

BBC August 2007: Ten-year climate model unveiled

More than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change, according to a new poll.

The survey also reveals that most Britons believe "green" taxes on 4x4s, plastic bags and other consumer goods have been imposed to raise cash rather than change our behaviour, while two-thirds of Britons think the entire green agenda has been hijacked as a ploy to increase taxes.

The findings make depressing reading for green campaigners, who have spent recent months urging the Government to take far more radical action to reduce Britain's carbon footprint. The UK is committed to reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, a target that most experts believe will be difficult to reach. The results of the poll by Opinium, a leading research company, indicate that maintaining popular support for green policies may be a difficult act to pull off, and attempts in the future to curb car use and publicly fund investment in renewable resources will prove deeply unpopular.

As we were saying only last month, the motto du jour is get your rationalisation in first. The latest wheeze among the doomsayers is that hell fire is being postponed. Of course, it would have been more impressive if it had been published before the recent decade of measurements showing no warming at all. As it stands, it is nothing more than a testament to the infinite tunability of computer models. The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.

OK, so maybe the "Climate Change" crowd is having trouble proving the existence of the problem. But surely, at least their solution, expensive as it is, would take us in the right direction?

Not really:

For graphics view full article here

A paper published in scientific journal Nature this week has reignited the debate about Global Warming, by predicting that the earth won’t be getting any warmer until 2015. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences have factored in cyclical oceanic into their climate model, and produced a different forecast to the “consensus” models which don’t.

But how will we know whether the earth is warming or cooling? Today, it all depends on the data source.

Two authorities provide us with analysis of long-term surface temperature trends. Both agree on the global temperature trend until 1998, at which time a sharp divergence occurred. The UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Center for Climate Studies Had-Crut data shows worldwide temperatures declining since 1998. According to Hadley’s data, the earth is not much warmer now than it was than it was in 1878 or 1941.

Don Young, R-Alaska, (pictured) ranking member of the Committee on Natural Resources sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to members of both parties of the House to remind them that, as energy prices rise steadily, “Congress is doing nothing to ease the pain at the pump.”

As Rep. Young put it, up to now the policy has been to:

Say NO to ANWR’s 30-year, one million barrels a day supply of American oil.

So NO to an estimated two trillion barrels of American shale oil.

Say NO to clean-burning natural gas.