Global Warming - a recent development.

Global warming, and the degree to which it is man-made will have and is already having a huge impact on the course of the world economy....

First off, I should say that for most of the past 20 years I have been a firm believer in man made global warming. Not because I was any great authority on the science of it, but more because, as a scientist myself, I am included to go along with the consensus opinion of scientists unless there is very good evidence presented to the contrary. All the arguments about the financial motivations of the scientists (for or against man-made global warming) did not influence me. Also the opinions of non-scientists, journalists and politicians held no sway whatsoever. Then when I saw the "great global warming swindle" my beliefs were shaken. I was no instant convert to the other side, but it alerted me that perhaps I should look in to this.... which I duly did. After some research I gradually realized that most of what the "swindle" program was saying was either misleading or downright wrong. My faith in the mainstream view was restored... but then, when I was looking in to the subject in even more detail I came across this lecture (on video: part1, part2) by Dr Roy Spencer given in March 2008. This lecture blew me away. It seems that the climate modelers have entirely omitted a very important phenomena which I don't think they have corrected to this day. Dr Spencer believes that if these factors are added to the climate models then the effects of our added carbon dioxide are dramatically reduced. By the way Dr Spencer does not believe that global warming is not happening, he simply believes that the man-made component of it is much smaller than previously thought. Two extra aspects of this have made me more inclined to believe his views. 1. His work is relatively recent. If it was much older then I would be inclined to dismiss it because the IPCC et al would have already considered it in detail and if it was found to be correct then they would already have changed their opinions. and 2. I can not find anything anywhere giving reasons his data or his arguments are wrong. When I saw his lecture, the very first thing I did was to do a Google search on him, confidently expecting to see him described as some kind of nutcase and to find articles describing the flaws in his logic - but was amazed to find no such thing. What I find equally amazing is how few people have watched the video - only 2400 at the time of writing.

So in summary, global warming is happening and will cause mankind huge problems... but we may not have to feel so guilty about it!