Two interesting links: There's no such thing as a 'perfect' temperature and a video: The Great Global Warming Swindle.

I'm going to be cheap and say here that this is not an endorsement against global warming. My feelings about global warming are a bit muddied...

If there's one thing I learned from my chemistry degree (as well as my economics degree), it's that science isn't as rigidly cemented as fact as I thought. Science is not absolute. There have been countless times when the prevailing scientific theory has been overthrown with some new discovery (the Bohr model for an atom as an example). On a very simple level, you can understand anything in science by simplifying its concepts and making assumptions - this is how chemistry (an incredibly complex field) is taught to college students. So, when I hear an argument starting with "Science shows..." I roll my eyes.

Economics taught me that general trends and statistics don't really mean much - you can modify any set of data to show the trend you want. Macroeconomics, in general, is a huge field where smart people try to boil down the trends of an economy into something simple so we can "benefit" from that knowledge. Look at any argument regarding supply-side economics to get understand this. The basic premise of this argument: "Cutting taxes for corporations [supply side] will actually make the economy more productive, thus providing the government with more tax revenue!" (This was a gross bastardization of what supply-side economics really is; read the wikipedia entry on supply side economics if you're really interested in it)

Whether you believe this or not, you can find loads of articles on both sides (this was Reagonomics). Of course, inherent in these arguments is the equivalent of nerds comparing the size of their manhoods: the "academic credentials." Inevitably, any scientific (or pseudo-scientific as is the case for fields like economics) theory will boil down to the credentials of the presenter... blah

My point (and I'm getting off-track here quickly) is that when I see arguments about global warming, I always see numbers of "accredited scientific organizations" support this or that position.

When I get down to trying to find scientific articles with raw data, they're always littered with huge caveats: We can only estimate temperatures for older data points. Huh? How can that be data?

Personally, I think any discussion about global warming is so pointless. Nobody has any concrete data and it always boils down into some sort of contest to prove one's intellectual superiority.

Basically, I don't worry about global warming. If it happens, it happens. That doesn't mean, however, that we should go around pissing on the environment - I think we can all strive, individually, to lower our energy on earth.

Recycle, turn off lights when you're not using them, and don't drive gas guzzlers.

And if you're wondering, my feelings on global poverty run roughly along the same lines. Throwing money and food at poverty are only futile stopgap measures.