Is it really so difficult to comprehend that other forces can start a trend and the increase in CO2 will continue it?

No, Jim, that possibility isn’t hard to understand at all (that’s why I already mentioned it) but for one thing, it’s not what Gore said (he was making the case that the CO2 is the main driver), and for another, I still haven’t seen any proof that DECREASING levels of CO2 have ever preceded a cooling trend so unless there is some evidence of that, how are we to conclude that if we decrease the levels now it would lead to a reduction in temperatures? That is what Simon is asking in his post, and no one seems willing to answer it. I will try to look around the realclimate.org site some more but so far I haven’t seen this point addressed.

Kim,
I don’t think that the oil companies should write our energy policy but I’m becoming more cynical about people who profit from carbon offsets writing policy as well (eg, Al Gore). Are you aware that he buys offsets from his own company? Isn’t that a bit of a conflict of interest?

Rudi,
No, I’m not an atmospheric scientist, are you? Aren’t we all just people who want to understand the situation? The links to the information I stated, BTW, were in Simon’s post that was linked to here.

Maybe it is a knee-jerk lefty position, but I do believe that the oil companies have too much influence over our energy policy (they wrote it) ,our environmental policy, our elections (their Dream Team is in office now!) our contracting, and our foreign policy.

I saw an interesting documentary about the fake science industry. There are companies producing scientific looking data to discredit real science, and, apparently the oil industry are big customers. The toabacco industry was another good customer.
But, basically you can hire them to muddy the waters on anything you want; they’re not choosy.

I noticed that too, Jim S. Its basically talking points with explanations attached -

It does work both ways. I refer you to this article on realclimate that points out that the overall warming cycle was one of 5000 years and the lag is only 800 years and that the lag doesn’t inherently disprove that the balance of the warming trend was contributed to by CO2 increases. The realclimate article also provides a link to a peer reviewed paper that goes into further detail. Is it really so difficult to comprehend that other forces can start a trend and the increase in CO2 will continue it? I’ve linked to this site which in turn contains a treasure trove of links to other honest climate science web sites multiple times. Somehow the conservatives never seem to learn anything from it, dismissing completely any actual climatologists who disagree with them. One of them even dismissed them by calling the climatologists who are the founders of realclimate.org a bunch of socialists.

As far as referring to Stubborn Facts as a winger site please note that every post every made their except the comments is that of the deniers’ position. It’s all Tully ever does wherever he posts on this issue. However loudly Pat may try to deny it his site is rather predictable in the conservative viewpoints it will take.

So, I’m wondering, do you have any actual rebuttal to Simon’s argument, or is it just going to be that the question itself proves that the guys at Stubborn Facts are “wingers” (in other words, do you have anything other than ad hominen attacks?)