This may be beside the point, but I assume your reference to ice sheet sliding along lubricated by melt water refers to Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheet. Apparently that is NOT POSSIBLE See: Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia (cliffol@cyllene.uwa.edu.au) He suggests that Hansen’s models are based on a lack of understanding of how glaciers flow. Regarding clouds and positive feedback, what do you think about Roy Spencer’s observations that there is evidence of a strong negative feedback?

I have always had a difficult time understanding positive feedback. Most of what I have been told has been that there are negative feedbacks, e.g., for every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.

I read this article from the Wall Street Journal and was aggravated by it. I would be interested in hearing how you would respond:

Global View
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
By Bret Stephens
743 words
1 July 2008
The Wall Street Journal
A15
English
(Copyright (c) 2008, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it’s time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA’s Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of “99% confidence”). But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has
been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that “80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” according to a report by NPR’s Richard Harris. The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the
journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn’t evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, or that global warming
isn’t happening. It does mean it isn’t science.
So let’s stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief.
I see three mutually compatible explanations. The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore — population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations — and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific
“consensus” warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to “patriarchal” science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: “And it repented the
LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” That’s Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What’s remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about? As it turns out, a lot, at least if you’re inclined to believe that our
successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature’s great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.
In “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, “morbid-minded” religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

The carbon market was worth $64 billion last year and is expected to double this year.

Cap and trade schemes enable energy-intensive industries to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which is produced from burning fossil fuels.

The European Union launched its cap and trade scheme in 2005 while New Zealand will launch a similar initiative this year. Canada and Australia propose to launch schemes in 2010. And the US senate is scheduled next month to debate details of a proposed Federal US climate change bill that will include cap and trade.

As well, countries and companies can trade carbon offsets under three, UN-led Kyoto Protocol schemes. Richer countries can earn emission permits by investing in cuts in greenhouse gases in less wealthy countries.

The three sub-schemes of the Kyoto pact included the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) whereby rich countries can invest in clean energy projects in developing nations. Joint Implementation (JI) in which rich countries invest in clean energy projects in former communist countries, and Assigned Amount Units (AAU) that allows signatories to trade surplus emissions rights.

For more information, please visit http://www.earthcharterfoundation.com and http://dailyplanetmedia.com