(especially after Al Gore getting a Nobel Peace Prize)

It won't hurt to hear the other side of the debate, and you might find that they have a few truths inconvenient for Al Gore and downright embarrassing for the Nobel Prize Committee

• Video everyone should see: Al Gore vs. Climate Scientists

• Cool It: A Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming - by Bjorn Lomborg
  [Read an editorial by Bjorn Lomborg]

• David Frum writes that northern Europe and Greenland used to be much WARMER back in A.D. 1300. That was 700 years ago, long before we had cars or burned oil, and long before Al Gore's graph purportedly shows a correllation (not causality) between carbon dioxide increases and temperature increases. That is why Norseman had colonies in Greenland, etc. Read more here. These facts of the pre-industrial age would tend to support the theory that global warming and cooling are natural (possibly solar) cycles that have been going on long before human populations got large and started burning fossil fuels.

• In all the dislike of fossil fuels these days, everyone is touting "biofuel" made from sugar-cane, corn, you name it. The problem is that the amount of intensive agricultural land needed to produce usable quantities of this biofuel is actually driving the destruction of forests (to clear land for crops) as well as reducing the availability of food in poor countries and driving up the price. Read more from the BBC and the Financial Post. My friend who owns a German restaurant in Taipei said food prices are going up like crazy, on the staples -- grains and the meat that comes from livestock who eat the feed that comes from grains. Poor people's staple foods are suddenly being taken away. Biofuels can also cause other unintended consequences like increased levels of pollutants such as ozone which may be beneficial in the upper atmosphere but are destructive at ground-level where they cause lung problems, etc. and where they cannot actually get to the upper atmosphere.

• Here is more analysis regarding global warming's causes.

• And now we see the unintended consequences finally being examined -- article January 14, 2008 from BBC News.

  The problem is that they do not stop and consider other unintended consequences, but simply press on first and ask the questions after the fact like this issue with bio-fuel.

• Reports of record cooling [*] in 2008 and of glaciers growing [*], that's right, you heard it --- cooling and glacier growing.