Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

I've noticed that when somebody start pushing really hard to sell people on something, there are often many flaws inherent in the product. I'll just call it the "Used Car Salesman Rule".

And in the past week the global warming hype has gone into overdrive with the release of the Stern Report, suggesting that global warming could result in an economic cost of $9 trillion.

Now that is a pretty standard marketing tactic. Pick the worst possible situations and calculate the maximum potential threat in economic terms, then tell the customer that by buying your solution they can save themselves that money. Only it is almost never true in a sales situation, and it probably isn't true now either. The truth is that in the best case scenario it could result in no economic loss. The secret word is always the word "could".

And of course, these reports always suggest that the majority of scientists agree that humans burning fossil fuels are the primary cause of global warming, which is patently untrue. Please show me the notarized document stating that fact, signed by any kind of majority of scientists who have actually done any research on the subject.

So it is refreshing to read an article that tries to get at the truth, though I realize that suggesting that global warming might not be true means I must be in the employ of an oil company. At any rate, The Telegraph has an excellent article that debunks a lot of the hype:

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick.

Of course if you've already made your mind up you won't care about it. Just keep in mind that I'm not saying that the earth's climate isn't changing; I'm just saying that I'd actually like to understand what the cause is and whether or not we can do anything about it. But if you want to read it you can get the whole report here.