Well, welcome back. I think someone should double-check how out of context Barbara's quotes on William Gray are. OK, I did check: Barbara is right, but see the link. This is not a published paper: Gray can say whatever nonsense he wants. Actually, I'm shocked..I wonder if he is one of the 4 out of 1000 climate scientists who don't believe this. Actually, only Cathryn agreed that Gore was deserving on the thread below. Gore got his peace prize not just for making a movie, but for his life's work on communicating climate change...especially for traveling the world to present his slide show.
In the last year I was both shocked and fascinated by how many geologists, mainly petroleum geologists, don't believe that man is responsible for significant and damaging climate change...most to come. I found this out directly at a dinner where I sat with a bunch of petroleum geolgists. One of my college roomates was a Biology major and the next time I visited him, him and his brothers were creationists. Look, it's simple: the Greenhouse effect has been understood for about 200 years (?). CO2 is measured and it is now 380 parts per million, and was 280 "pre-industrial". I don't know if it is true, but I've heard in the last week on news items that CO2 is being released at triple the rate of the 1990s. I work with paleo-climatologists and have seen talks that show the CO2 levels in the past, and the worst case this century is the highest levels since the Eocene (50 million years).

Really, this is ridiculous: saying man's effect on the atmosphere has no important effect on climate is very much like denying Plate Tectonics during, say, the 1980s. Hey, I have one of my graduate degrees from France (Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6; D.E.A.), and those students had a (ex?) Soviet professor who believed in sea floor spreading but not in subduction, so he taught the expanding earth hypothesis. I was taught in Elementary school...somewhere between grade 1 and 3, by an old visiting geologist, or maybe just a nutcase, that mountains were forming because the earth was shrinking like an apple as it cooled.

So, yes, be skeptical of what you hear, but don't be ridiculous about it. There are some things that may be misleading in Gore's film but they are not wrong. As I've posted here, I'm concerned about exaggerations: I don't believe that sea level will rise 8 m this century (or was is 6 m = 20 feet shown in the film): the consensus is 1 m or a bit less (although changes the last few years suggest it will be the high end). So, the maps Gore showed of drowning coastlines aplied to a couple or few centuries, not next year, or this century. I also believe that the Greenland ice cap is doomed or soon will be, but that it will take a while to melt. I don't know about West Antartica (I published a paper on when the West Antarctic ice cap formed in "Geology" in May.)

So, lots of interesting things to discuss, but it may be a waste of time to discuss this with people who confuse politics/the messenger with science.
Did anyone see the recent satellite images of the Arctic Ocean?
egotistical and foolish Chris

P.S.: When historians look back after 100 years, they will find this denial and the fact that we re-elected the president to be astounding.

• Gray and muddy thinking