My God, you are sensitive...

First and foremost, I wasn't beating you up. I admitted that "dismissive" comments and such are probably perfectly acceptable here at the Bund... we know what you mean. My comments were general in nature, and it was my intention that the remarks reflect the failings of the GOP and conservative leadership... not F. Ryan. You have presented evidence in the past... copious amounts of it, I'm sure... but if you are going to tell me that when I have heard you (with my own ears) defend your position at work or in a "neutral" setting, you have had pie charts and graphs ready-at-hand to make your point, I'm going to argue with you.

Too many conservative thinkers (including you, but not ONLY you) use the argument that no amount of human activity can effect global climate change, to any degree. This is a patently false statement... so why make it? Why wouldn't it be easier to say that there is no consensus... in fact, no agreement at all... on the degree of human impact on the global environment? Rather than make unsupportable arguments FOR your point, why not show the unsupportable nature of THEIR arguments? That's why I used Tambora as an example, rather than Pinatubo... Pinatubo reduced global temperatures by nearly one-half of a degree because of the vast amounts of particulate ejected into the atmosphere. Tambora had less ejecta, but far more gaseous injection... possibility as much as 100x the amount of SO2, CO and CO2 as Pinatubo... but did not measurably INCREASE the hemispheric or global temps due to greenhouse effects, and to the best of our knowledge, the ozone layer recovered quite nicely. The numbers associated with Tambora totally REFUTE the conjecture that man-made CO2 can be expected to dramatically effect global climate, where Pinatubo shows little more than the vast amounts of variables in projecting global climate shifts.

One side note, though... just as a quick aside: Pinatubo dumped millions of tons of heavy metals onto the Philippine Islands. Zinc, Arsenic, Lead, Mercury, Copper, Cadmium and Chromium, each measured in hundreds of thousands of tons, fell from the sky with the choking, toxic ash over an area of more than 60,000 sq miles... millions of times greater than what the EPA here in the US says is hazardous... and both the environment and the people have suffered minimal heavy metal toxicity problems and the effects were far shorter lived than ever projected, too. So, don't think I'm not saying Pinatubo is a good tool to refute liberal claims for the need of militant environmentalism. It certainly is!

So, when I refer to your past arguments against man-made global warming, I'm referring to your employment of the argument that it was the "height of human pretension" to presume that we can do anything, as a species, to effect the global climate. You have stopped making that claim (to the best of my knowledge) but not every pundit has, and those pundits do the conservative cause no good by arguing against unsupportable claims with unsupportable claims of their own.