All the answers to Climate Change ... or more questions?

Todays post is brought to you by "climate change" buzz words of today! What i'm going to try to do is present both sides of this, the most heated of issues, and then tell you where i stand on it. I am hopefull that i will manage to make everyone mad enough to leave me a "nasty-gram" in the comments section below.
In my last post i made light of Al Gore and "global warming" and tied in the deaths of five unfortunate people (probably went too far with that one) which had everyting to do with my sick sence of sarcasm and nothing to do with the science of climate change.

For starters i come from a scientific family, my father is a physicist, my Uncle has a couple of PHd's in some kinda science stuff and my brother's degree is in chemical engineering ... DISCLAIMER ... i, however, am NOT a scientist. I mention the family of science not because i did any reasearch, but more that it created a mindset in me that forces me to be sceptical of information, my mind does not allow me to jump to conclusions. Blah, blah, blah, i know. So here's the example; in the late 1990's when the ozone layer and desertification were all the rage (for those of you who either forgot or wern't paying attention or wern't born yet, 10-15 years ago the gas in your refrigerator and the hairspray from New Jersey were creating a hole in the ozone layer that was going to grow huge if we didn't devolop new hair styles and then the sun would burn everything off the face of the earth, at the same time the deserts of the world were expanding by inches every year and eventually would cover the entire earth if we didn't ... i forget what the solution there was) anyway in the 90's  i read an article about the Sahara desert expanding to cover all of Africa in just a few short years in the Tuesday Science Times and i ran to my father to show him the article which he read and then asked, "When did they start measuring it?" The article didn't say and i didn't know. His point was that there may not be enough data to make a conclusion and there might be some general lack of thoroughness in the scientific community. A few years later the desert began to shrink (didn't make the paper) the ozone hole began to shrink (didn't make the paper) and some scientist figured out that both run on an 11 year cycle that coincides with the cycle of sun spots. Which is super fascinating and makes me wonder how many other things we don't understand.
On to climate change. News flash, the earth's climate is changing ... cannot be debated, it has always been changing, ice age after ice age after jungle in Canada after ice age, it changes. Here's the question, are we making it change by being irresponsible polluting bastards?!? Or is it happening all by itself?
First the argument on the side of pollution creating climate change. I'm going to allow the Environmental Defence Fund make their own argument, so here's what they say about it, "Before the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere was in a rough balance with what could be stored on Earth. Natural emissions of heat-trapping gases matched what could be absorbed in natural sinks. For example, plants take in CO2 when they grow in spring and summer, and release it back to the atmosphere when they decay and die in fall and winter. Industry took off in the mid-1700s, and people started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases. Fossil fuels were burned more and more to run our cars, trucks, factories, planes and power plants, adding to the natural supply of greenhouse gases. The gases—which can stay in the atmosphere for at least fifty years and up to centuries—are building up beyond the Earth's capacity to remove them and, in effect, creating an extra-thick heat blanket around the Earth. Already, people have increased the amount of CO2, the chief global warming pollutant, in the atmosphere to 31 percent above pre-industrial levels. There is more CO2 in the atmosphere now than at any time in the last 650,000 years. Studies of the Earth’s climate history show that even small changes in CO2 levels generally have come with significant shifts in the global average temperature. Scientists expect that, in the absence of effective policies to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, the global average temperature will increase another 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100" I even let them be in green ... wasn't that nice of me? So the obvious problems with this position is the lack of facts about actual CO2 levels and anytime someone quotes "scientists" be afraid, be very afraid.
So on to the oposition ... i thought about letting the "Mr. Burns" of coal power plants respond, but honestly, the people who try to tell you that burning stuff that pours smoke into the sky is good for the earth and should, in fact, be done more, are crazy ... and they are lying. So i found a scientist that doesn't like hippies to respond instead. This is the quote from the web site of Steven Milloy (Johns Hopkins educated science guy), "One point apparently causing confusion among our readers is the relative abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere today as compared with Earth's historical levels. Most people seem surprised when we say current levels are relatively low, at least from a long-term perspective - understandable considering the constant media/activist bleat about current levels being allegedly "catastrophically high." Even more express surprise that Earth is currently suffering one of its chilliest episodes in about six hundred million (600,000,000) years. Given that the late Ordovician suffered an ice age (with associated mass extinction) while atmospheric CO2 levels were more than 4,000ppm higher than those of today (yes, that's a full order of magnitude higher), levels at which current 'guesstimations' of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 suggest every last skerrick of ice should have been melted off the planet, we admit significant scepticism over simplistic claims of small increment in atmospheric CO2 equating to toasted planet. Granted, continental configuration now is nothing like it was then, Sol's irradiance differs, as do orbits, obliquity, etc., etc. but there is no obvious correlation between atmospheric CO2 and planetary temperature over the last 600 million years, so why would such relatively tiny amounts suddenly become a critical factor now? " I made him red because clearly he's evil and he proved it by using facts and big words! The knock on Milloy is that he's super political and preaches against global warming like he's the antiAlGore ... which he is. Plus he writes for FoxNews.com ... boo to you Steven!
Here's the problem with the climate change debate as it currently being run (here's where everyone can get mad) on one side they insist that CO2 levels are the cause of the warming of the earth and on the other side they disagree and encourage pollution and polluter-friendly legislation. CO2 levels are really low right now, not if you look at the last couple of huindred years, but if you look at the last couple of hundred million years, they were exponentially higher. A couple of different times in the earth's history spikes in atmospheric CO2 levels coincide with ice ages (not warming) and really there seems to be many more factors at play here than just carbon dioxide, i mean if CO2 was the only issue then couldn't we just get more plants and suck it right back out of the atmosphere? And the answer to that is yes by the way if you were thinking about it. The earth's climate is always changing and sometimes with catastrophic results ... certainly it could be really bad for people all over the world, but there is no way you could prove that one thing, the addition of one variable  is having an impact nor can you say to what extent that variable is changing the climate of our planet. Here are some pollution facts 1) American corporate agriculture is the largest polluter in the world (no, it's not factories or SUVs ... forget the Prius, grow your own food) 2) pollution is bad for everyone regardless of the temperature outside 3) we are creative enough and rich enough (as a group) to choose to stop polluting and to figure out a way to do it 4) God gave the earth to us and we were to be stewards of His creation, that means we were supposed to take care of it, and i don't think that he meant pave it, burn it, pour chromium in the rivers, and to just generally destroy everything we touch.
Anyway, here's where i stand; i completly agree that we need to find ways to be less wastefull and to pollute less. Treating the earth like it's an everlasting gobstopper is just plain stupid. Resources are finite and can be completly depleted, not to mention while we use water to wash our cars and fill our swimming pools there are parched people with dry cracked lips living on dry cracked soil praying for rain to come all over the world. I love those people and they are the reason that i do not water my grass or wash my car ... i just need to figure out how to send the water i'm not using to them. Burning coal (right next to my house) sucks and should be outlawed, not because of climate issues but because it's dirty and lacks creativity ... we've been burning coal for hundreds of years, we can't come up with anything better? SUVs are stupid because you don't need a school bus for you and your one child to go to the store on a Saturday afternoon, take the bus or walk or ride bikes ... then you wouldn't pollute AND your kid wouldn't be so fat ... forget the climate. Common sence should tell you to turn the lights off when you leave a room, common sence should tell you that the Ohio river catching fire is a really bad thing. Do you seriously expect me to believe that you thought the Ford Excursion was practical before Al Gore told you about the homeless polar bears. You bought a vehicle that gets 8MPG highway if you're going down hill with a tail wind and you thought it was a great idea ... but since those polar bears you're driving the Prius and loving it. Now you get to save the world and do nothing all at the same time ... 5 stars for that one.
Bush didn't need WMDs to get our support the invasion of Iraq ... all he had to say is that Sadam and his sons are killing innocents and raping virgins and we're going to stop him. I would have been 100% behind that. The "scientists" don't need climate change, let's stop polluting because it makes sence and after that if the climate reverses itself back to "normal" hooray! We don't need extra reasons to not pollute, do we? I love Africa, and Africans ... it breaks my heart that the people of that continent suffer through so much. Famine, drought, flooding, disease, war ... it is constant, and i'm sure that we can start working on some real solutions, i wish that it mattered to most people, but here's what i know; Africa had all the same problems 4000 years ago (it's in Genesis for crying out loud) and if you send them money the dictator of the minute takes it and puts it in his Swiss retirement account so when he is overthrown in two weeks he can live like a king in Paris for the rest of his life while the people of his country are left to deal with the worst the human condition has to offer. So don't pollute, don't be wasteful. Be a good steward of this beautiful planet that your God has seen fit to allow you to live on, use the resources that He has bestowed upon us, just don't abuse those resources. I'm glad that people are passionate about the world they live in, they should be, but please don't buy the simple solutions that they're selling you. Signing an accord and taxing polluters and sending money to Africa is not a solution ... revamping our entire economic (especially food) system and coming up with real, sustainable, solutions for the southern half of the earth's problems ... i mean really figuring out how to reduce milaria deaths, AIDS deaths, famine (see Joseph's solution in Egypt) drought ... and maybe rewarding "green" innovations rather than punnishing the uncreative (read "polluting bastards") is the way to go.