As I'm sure many of you are now aware, a NAS committee submitted its assessment on Climate Reconstruction models, as requested by Congress. It's mostly good news for the scientific community, in that it validates the overwhelming concensus of their findings, but it could still be used to politically, imo.

Based on the report, the committee concluded with "high confidence" that the "hockey stick" model, as first proposed by Michael Mann ('98) and subsequently validated by other climatology researchers, accurately depicts global warming and climate trends that has occurred over the past few decades. Generally, these studies do support evidence that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming". And specifically, it's been the fossil fuel emissions of CO2 and methane (CH4) into the atmosphere that have contributed to the highest global mean surface temperatures (ie global warming) ever recorded over the last 400 years. Of note, 2005 was the hottest year on record.

From one of the scientists at Real Climate, disgusted with something that occurred on CNN recently, saying that we need politicians who are both engaging and have a solid grasp of the science behind global warming to counter these jokers.

I think I know just the guy, ;-)... Calling Wes!

Here's what "raypierre" said in a comment (his response within the brackets):

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I like to debate the finer points of this subject, where there might be legitimate theories to explore and expand on, but when contrarians, either lay or scientist contrarians propose dumb ideas, they should be responded with the clearest logic possible. I see how bad ideas remain in the populace, how sound science gets buried, as another recent example, a contrarian proponent having the ears of millions suggests something really dumb like where are those 200,000 year old cars?