I was away for a few days so I didn't respond to your comment immediately. Yes, AGW has become a political football. The fact that Al Gore is a democrat and p

I was away for a few days so I didn't respond to your comment immediately. Yes, AGW has become a political football. The fact that Al Gore is a democrat and popularized the issue has probably hurt the issue more than anything. But politics is beside the point. What does the science say? The peer-reviewed stuff where they publish there data and methodology? You say you don't deny that climate change is happening, yet everything you point to are talking points of deniers. Climate gate was a non-scandal. Yes, data collection is a messy and expensive business, and a lot of reconciling of various data sets has to be done. Yes, one of the people doing that work found a "trick" to figure out how the unannotated data set could be interpreted to explain why the paper which was associated with that data set arrived at the conclusion it did. That doesn't mean they were tricking the public. Then you go off on a tangent about scientists and gender issues, which makes me think that you are really trying to address some wider point than that of climate change denial. You conclude with the same FUD that the smoking lobby used -- sure there are lots of studies that seem to indicate that smoking causes cancer, but you know there are some studies (paid for by the tobacco industry) that show it isn't a problem, so geez, it seems like we don't know enough yet to do anything about it. I thoroughly reject that stance. Businesses of all kinds have to make decisions based on incomplete and even contradictory data every day; we put people in jail for life or even kill them based on evidence which is not 100.00000% proven. Why, when it comes to climate change, are some people holding out for a mathematical proof or something? Why shouldn't we proceed based on the best available information? Why should the claims of climatologists, with thousands of man-years of research and published data be insufficient, yet a nay-sayer can say without any proof that addressing climate change would be disastrous to the economy?