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This set of book pages is here, on a GNU/Linux advocacy site for the sole purpose of helping me organize a set of data to help people that are misinformed regarding the sometimes fairly obtuse science that has gone into determining the reality of what is Global Warming. This is to help me(and anyone else that finds them useful), organize the huge quantity of private, public, and educational sites that have solid information regarding the phenomenon of AGW.

In my private life I don't mind entering into debates regarding AGW among other things, but I am not going to waste my time or anyone else's by turning on comments for this thread.

I want to make one more thing clear. The so called 'climate-gate' is bullshit. Sorry to be blunt, but there it is. An educational institution was criminally hacked(burglarized), and the email files that were taken(theft) were scanned for words and phrases that could be used out of context in an attempt to cast doubt on the researchers themselves. This is burglary, theft, and I am sure there is a crime in publicly displaying of private correspondence. As a GNU/Linux advocate I am no stranger to responding to FUD(Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) regarding truths and myths of Free Software, nor how damaging a story that can be regardless of it's accuracy or merit. And how easily it can be picked up and carried from one source to another, further spreading the purposeful misinformation.

If this were in any other area, there would have been some sort of criminal investigation and an attempt to at least get an idea of the individual(s) responsible for the burglary and theft of the private data. In the mainstream media the fact that the a criminal act was used to obtain the email data that everyone was talking about was totally sidestepped for days.

The most disheartening thing is that if you actually read the emails in order, and put the emails with the 'smoking gun' phrases back into context, not only do you no longer have a smoking gun, you have no gun at all. NOTHING was out of order.

The most damaging statement about ignoring data was regarding tree rings that up until 1960 had growth patterns that very closely mirrored the warmer years...after 1960 however they began to vary and in unpredictable ways. All the other avenues of data still agreed with one another, and since some felt that the tree-rings growth patterns were not the best indicator available any way, they were removed. THIS is the data that was ignored. Yeah, that's it. And the email is to let the other researchers know that the using the data was discontinued and why. There was no attempt to hide anything!

The take away here is simply this. There is nothing on the denial side of AGW that goes anywhere near discrediting the data, the methods applied to the data to come up with usable facts, nor the people doing the research. There hasn't been anything on the denial side for like 40 years now; ever since Al Gore as an elected government official asked for official governmental hearings to review the data on climate change from the 70s and 80s. So the deniers stoop to larceny to try to come up with dirt to try to smear the people doing the actual research. Didn't work very well, because they still have a bag completely empty of facts to compare to the full bag and a half showing that we are in the process of killing ourselves.

Want bad news? Read on.

Temperatures are still going up, ice caps are melting, oceans are rising and are becoming increasingly acidic, animals are needlessly dying and entire ecosystems are getting stressed to near breaking. We are leaving the solar minimum part of the 11 year solar cycle now and the energy from the sun will be increasing. This is likely one of the reasons we have not had more catastrophically hot years in the last decade. We are not in a decline. Temperatures have not been going down for the last 10 years. It's just that 1998 had the most exaggerated El-Nino in the century so the global temp spiked so high that the year that it ended as the hottest single year ever, so far. Remember the heat waves that killed hundreds in Europe and here in the U.S. in 1998? As the sun grows stronger, coupled with the fact that another 10 years worth of accumulated CO2 is in the air will make for some wild times in the years to come.

How many thousands of people will need to die due to heat and outrageous storms before we stop trying to hide from it and all get on with some kind of effort to save the humans. This is going to sound bad, so please understand where it's coming from: Screw save the polar bears. Screw save the coral reefs. What it is really all about is save the humans. Because as these species and ecosystems go down one by one, we loose valuable parts of the things we need to survive!