You are right about one thing...

You have been making the same argument for years... and I'm telling you, you are doing it wrong.

Far, far too many conservatives utterly dismiss the premise of industry-caused global warming because they choose not to take the time or make the effort to refute it with scientifically supported facts. Instead, they make snide, sarcastic remarks (similar to Ryan's most recent "Jedidiah" crack...) that deride the entire concept as ignorant, superstitious nonsense. I'm not accusing Ryan of this now, but he certainly has done this in the past and he is still prone to dismiss these arguments as "tripe" rather than debate them with sound arguments.

Perhaps dismissing them here is fine. Our little group here is like-minded enough to understand, but when he is sitting in a breakroom in Las Vegas, surrounded by liberal "West Coast"-style offensive political views (a snide and rather poor play on Ryan's football coaching efforts), he needs to be able to clearly and calmly refute these claims and "Chicken Little" prophecies with plain facts and no emotion or hyperbole.

My point has always been this... What is the more powerful argument? To ignore or dismiss claims of man-made global warming as a waste of breath, or to show a clearer, more reasonable understanding of the SAME facts with an alternative interpretation of the data? The Earth has been far warmer than it is now, and still supported abundant and varied forms of life, and some of the most expansive periods in Earth's life-history have been when CO2 levels were FAR higher than they are now (the Cambrian era, for example). Couple this with the growing number of facts that the Earth is COOLING (due to solar cycles and axial variations), some are saying that an increase in greenhouse gases might be a long-term benefit rather than a tragedy, and now we have a reasonable and irrefutable (at least as irrefutable as any global warming argument) to counter the "Algore-ites" and their doom-and-gloom promises.

Honestly, this whole topic spills back into the problem I have seen in the "conservative" movement ever since the leadership role of this ideology moved from the hands of elected officials like Reagan and Gingrich to the microphones of radio talk show hosts like Limbaugh and Hannity... a lack of leadership in the classic sense of the word. Where is the "leader" in the GOP leadership? Who is blazing the trails for conservatives? Who is articulating the arguments for the conservative agenda? Why are we able to make these points and counter-arguments against the liberal agenda... but no one from the GOP can?

My last point is just one more example of why I think ANY conservative needs to be careful formulating our debate habits around dismissive labels and ignorant stereotypes. Ryan's "hick" reference for the uneducated, technically-challenged 19th Century "average Joe" was to call him Jedidiah. Does anyone know who the Biblical Jedidiah was?

It was the name given to Solomon by Nathan... and we all know the fabled "wisdom" of Solomon, don't we?