[MD] Clouds

[Case]

[Platt]
> How come the world was hotter during the Middle Ages?

[SA]
Where did you source this from?  I've been hearing that the hottest years on
record have been within the last 10-15 years.  I'm open to the actual facts,
so, if you have a more accurate source I'd like to see for myself, thanks.

[Case]
The period of warming Platt refers to was followed by the Little Ice Age in
Europe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

The vital point Platt misses is that climate is a chaotic system.
Disturbances in the system can have far reaching, unpredictable and long
lasting effects. Since what we are talking about, climate, is basic to all
life on the planet it would seem that knowingly mucking about it would be
regarded as a bad thing.

But the arguments Platt makes for shrugging this off are political not
scientific. They are the same kind of arguments that led his hero Ronald
Raygun to decry the influence of government living outside of its means
while at the same time inflicting more debt on our grandchildren than all of
his predecessors combined. It is this "me first", screw the kids attitude
that led us to replace a nuclear physicist with a "B" movie actor in the
first place. It is a culture of political distortion that makes people vote
for an AWOL coke head over war heroes in both parties.

Since the American people have knowingly voted in this way for the past 20
years it is hard to work up much shock that things are heading the way they
are. Until we vote for elections reform. Until we remove the media from the
hands of a few. Until we reduce the influence of multi-national corporate
manipulation of public policy. I, for one, am having a hard time pretending
to be shocked at what happens any more. So until folks start to wise up I
plan to bury my head in the sand and "Party Like It's 1999", a tune title
that looks like it will work much better as nostalgia than it ever did as
futurism.