Honda Publishes Cradle To Grave Greenhouse Gas Totals

And the Randian nutjobs hate it because it might require cooperation to keep civilization going, which interferes with their Superman fantasies. The entrenched industrial interests hate it because other industries could emerge and eclipse them over time. The fossil fuel industries hate it because it will erode their profits to charge them for the real costs of their product. In fact, the real scientific debate is OVER. Global temp is up in line with predictions made over 100 years ago by a guy named Arrhenius, a more detailed prediction by a guy named Callender working in the '30s and another prediction made in the '80's by a guy named Hansen. The physical properties of CO2 are well understood and the basic atmospheric physics are quite sound. At the most recent Fartland Institute "conference" on Global Warming (notable for its near total failure to attract speakers who actually do any kind of climate research), one speaker got up and actually made sense. He told the assembled Rightards that they should forget arguing the science and start engaging the debate on the plicy solutions. People who understand that ACC is real and a serious threat don't have a particular agenda for how CO2 is reduced, they just want action. The simplest way to do this is to tax carbon at the sources and let the free markets figure the rest of the solution out. No complicated rebates, no game-able CAFE regulations, no government-enforced restrictions on particular activities, just simple market pressure to find non-CO2 emitting ways to get things done. The longer you wait to do something about this, the more draconian the changes are going to have to be to achieve any kind of success and the more likely you are to have highly invasive totalitarian solutions enacted.

GS650G: You wrote 'Biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor'. A warmer climate would necessarily have more water vapor in the atmosphere. If you believe water vapor is the biggest contributor to global warming, wouldn't that imply a positive reinforcing feedback loop? Whereby a warmer climate creates more water vapor, which in turn creates more warming, which creates more vapor, and so on. In other words, this feedback loop would make global warming far more severe than scientists realize today.