Mark Steyn, writing in the Australian, remarks:

One day, the world will marvel at the environmental hysteria of our time, and the deeply damaging corruption of science in the cause of an alarmist cult. The best thing this week’s conference could do is inculcate a certain modesty, not least in Senator Ian Campbell, about an issue that is almost entirely speculative. We don’t know how or why climate changes. We do know it’s changed dramatically throughout the planet’s history, including the so-called “little Ice Age” beginning in 600, when I was still driving a Ford Oxcart, and that, by comparison, the industrial age has been a time of relative climate stability. But, of course, as with that “hockey stick”, it depends how you draw the graph.

Question: Why do most global warming advocates begin their scare statistics with “since 1970”?

As in, “since 1970” there’s been global surface warming of half a degree or so.

Because from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell.

John Cole‘s commie blogmate Tim F. alerts us to what he calls an excellent commentary on global warming by Stirling Newberry which proves to be (of all places) on Daily Kos. Newberry is basically gloating over the conversion to at least one aspect of the PC position on Global Warming and storm activity by a former skeptic, and he concludes prescriptively:

The response is carbon neutrality – to move away from burning hydrocarbons and coal for energy. Carbon is a rock, most of it should be in the ground.

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Of course, speaking accurately, carbon is really a chemical element, which does make up a large percentage of the composition of a tiny proportion of the chemicallly complex kinds of things we usually speak of as rocks, and which also makes up a large portion of the composition of many other things, including, most conspicuously, all living things on the planet. The left has a talent, often remarked upon, for seeing to it that a great many of a certain kind of carbon-based animate form do wind up in the ground, so I suppose one should view a call for measures limited to one sort of fossil fuel as relatively modest in its ambitions, speaking historically. I am afraid, however, that I do find the prescriptive belief that coal should be left lying in the ground just a trifle superstitious.