Well the scientific "Fat Lady" has already sung on his ridiculous claims that man is what's causing global warming, so I guess an opera is kind of approriate.

Bob, get a life. You one of maybe 6% of freaks who don't know man is causing global warming. And no one proved him wrong. Where do you even get your facts. twit.

Tracey -

(This is modified from something I put in a comment over on Wizbangblue.)

Global warming, as pushed by Al Gore, can supposedly be alleviated by buying carbon credits... also, oddly enough, handled by a company Al Gore invests heavily in. You don't find that just a trifle... convenient?

I'm not a global warming denier - quite the contrary, Tracey. However - as pushed by the global warming advocates these days, I'm against it as they model it. I think it started much longer ago than the GW folks would want to even admit - and it's a damn good thing.

If you take a look at Ruddiman's paper on Anthropogenic Global Warming, you'll see a number of interesting graphs. Figure 1, Graph B shows the methane levels in the atmosphere departed their normal curve in a big way about 7,000 years ago - about the time man invented agriculture. If they hadn't - we'd be in the middle of an ice age due to global cooling and reduced heating from the sun. (It does vary a fair amount, over a fairly regular schedule.)

On page 20 (or 280, if you take the number in the corner of the page) on figure 7, you'll see a correlation between massive epidemics and CO2 declines. Those declines were followed by decades or centuries of significantly colder weather.

Page 27 (or 287) shows that the climate in Northeast Canada has been kept warm enough to avoid glaciation - which should have started 5000 years ago.

Global warming? I'm all for it. The alternative, if we were at the temperatures that would seem to be indicated in Ruddiman's work, would be for polar bears to be snacking on penguins around Panama. (Sounds good, but they'd probably be a thousand miles or so apart. I don't think we'd have a Snowball Earth scenario.)

(Then follows political blather.)

I'm reasonably certain that the course of history would not have gone anywhere near the way it did had not mankind instigated global warming through the development of agriculture and the resulting methane releases seven, eight thousand years ago. There are even indications that we may well be going into a severe cold cycle - sea ice up in the Arctic is much thicker than usual. Thick enough, even at this late date, to trap an icebreaker.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080524.TRIPPING24/TPStory/

It's been 12 years since the last solar sunspot maximum. It's supposedly about a 11 year cycle. There's very few sunspots to be found, which may well indicate a real cooling trend.

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/solarcyclestory.pdf

http://spaceweather.com/ has a daily sunspot count. There's been very few - which means less heat from the sun. Usually this is a precursor to a couple of chilly centuries.

So though Bob may not believe in recent human-caused global warming, I think that long-term it's been something quite necessary to civilization as a whole - and will be for about another eight thousand years to come.

Sorry for the long-winded comment here...

An Australian TV show The Mansion has kindly created what they think An Inconvenient Opera would look like: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=PkkrfrISqwY