A Titus "caveat", if you please...

I know we have discussed this at length, again and again over the last 4 or 5 years, but I want to say that while Ryan may be incorporating some of his patented sarcasm in his last, I do believe the numbers and the ability of the scientific community to determine such measurements as CO2 levels over the last 500 years... perhaps even longer.

This aspect of scientific study isn't as complicated as we might imagine. Testing samples of ice (coming from glaciers that we know to have existed at least as long as we want to go back) is pretty straight-forward stuff. Take enough samples from varied areas of the world, and you get a fairly good representation of levels of any gases within the atmosphere.

My problem with the climate disaster crowd doesn't stem from the "data", but instead on the interpretation of the data and how it effects climate today and into the future. The classic example (and one that Ryan himself has used) is when Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, killing 75,000 people and pumping enough ash and debris into the atmosphere to cause "the year without a summer" and ushering in the worst series of famines and plagues in the 19th Century. That single eruption was the equivalent contributor of "greenhouse gases" as all of industrialized Europe for the last 75 years... and (according to Ryan's figures) was a HUGE contributor of CO2 for the measurements of "pre-industrial" levels. These facts alone seem to make any attempts to mark a point of "pre-industrial" levels as questionable, at best.

Go back as far as 20,000 years (from deep-core samples of polar ice) and we find CO2 at levels as high as 25% greater than those we find today, yet we know it wasn't MAN that could have effected those levels, and that those "very high" levels didn't usher in a period of global warming, but instead heralded a 10 to 15 thousand year period of global ice ages... the last of which didn't end until the turn of the 19th Century.

Like I said, though... I'm not picking fights with Ryan (or anyone else here). The issue is no clearer now than it was 5, 10, or 25 years ago... but it has now reached a point that its proponents can effect global politics in ways they never could have even 10 years ago, so it is a serious issue. I stand firm in my position that ignoring or dismissing the problem is the WORST thing to do. Counter the arguments with rational, well-researched FACTS that either prove the point or the conclussions WRONG... but don't think they'll just go away.