Later On

Just received this email:

Yesterday, in a classic "Swift Boat" move, the Weekly Standard magazine – dubbed the "neocon bible" by The Economist - launched an attack on our conference and the whole pro-Israel, pro-peace movement. [1]

They’re working the phones – calling the offices of every one of the 150-plus members of Congress on our Gala’s Honorary Host Committee to frighten them away from associating with J Street. The most infuriating part is that their thuggish smear tactics are having an impact — already 5 members of Congress have pulled off of our Host Committee.

This is exactly how the neoconservative far-right of the pro-Israel community has – for decades – imposed strict boundaries of acceptable political conversation on Israel in this country. Cross them and prepare to feel the full effect of their smear machine.

Enough. Not this time. Today, the mainstream majority goes on offense.

If you’re getting this email, you’ve got a Senator or Representative on our Honorary Host Committee. Will you call them right now to thank them for signing on to our Host Committee before the Weekly Standard guys get to them?

Click here to call your member(s) of Congress using our easy-to-use call-in tool. We’ll connect your phone directly for no hassle and no extra cost.

So what’s causing our political opponents to become so totally unhinged?

It’s the whole pro-Israel, pro-peace movement’s growing influence.

We’ve got an exciting conference planned that starts in just 9 days, and over 1,000 people are slated to attend.

The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy profile on us, showing that even top national media outlets are recognizing the change that’s coming to our issue. [2]

We’re showing Congress that political support exists from those of us that believe supporting Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic homeland means supporting President Obama’s balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Don’t let these neoconservatives and their Swift Boat tactics win the day. Call your representative today and make sure they hear from the mainstream majority.

Click here to call your member(s) of Congress right now. Our easy-to-use tool will connect your phone directly for no hassle and no extra cost.

Thanks so much for all you do.

Last night I was watching Film Geek (well worth a look), an indie comedy: "This quirky independent comedy from writer-director James Westby is based in part on Westby’s own experiences working in a video store."

It is definitely a niche comedy, and it struck me that even quirkier and more individualistic movies are coming as we start getting movies made for streaming.

Consider: first we had movies, seen only in theaters. Then TV came along, and it undercut the reproduction and distribution costs of the traditional scheme, and pretty soon we had movies "made for TV": a movie that might not justify the expense of theatrical release, but was okay for the lower costs of TV distribution. Next came movie rentals (cassettes and then DVD), and we started seeing "direct to DVD" movies: movies that couldn’t justify theatrical release costs but could be distributed as rentals.

Now we have streaming movies, and unlike DVD movies, the reproduction and distribution costs are close to zero. This justifies even quirkier and more niche movies than before. As The Wife pointed out, it’s like print-on-demand, that released in inner author of millions: browse through the CreateSpace stores and you’ll see books for which the market is probably just the immediate family or perhaps a specific classroom—but that can be done because POD means the distribution and printings costs are incredibly low compared to the traditional book-run and bookstore distribution model. Indeed, Amazon itself benefits from this "long tail" phenomenon: it can carry very obscure titles because there’s no associated shelf-space or warehousing costs.

So as Roku-like devices proliferate, I would expect some entrepreneur to do a "CreateSpace" for movies that are available only in streaming format. Then we’ll see some truly odd movies.

I made the kale, chorizo, and butternut soup last night. Extremely tasty, but a little spicy for The Wife. However, a big spoonful of yogurt on top fixed that up fine (not quite as much yogurt as soup, but enough so that every bite can contain some spice-quelling yogurt).

I noticed in the recipe link (to the original) that she inexplicably peels the butternut squash. Totally unnecessary: rinse off the squash, cut it up, and cook it: the peeling will be soft and edible.

The Wife and I are going to Toastie’s for breakfast, so a certain pause in posting will ensue.

Roku allows you to browse Amazon special deals and find, for example, rentals for $2.99. Very nice if there’s some movie that Netflix doesn’t have (either at all or as Watch Instantly) and you want to see it now.

Kell’s Original Hemp Blend Amber has a wonderful fragrance, and Kell’s Original soaps make great lather, though it struck me that the lather this morning was not quite so good as the Hemp-Aloe Vera blend. I’ll do a bit of experimentation with different brushes and the two blends to see if it was just a fluke.

Certainly it was a fine lather for a shave, and the Gillette English open-comb Aristocrat with a previously used Astra Keramik Platinum blade did a great job: total smoothness. And Parfums de Nicolaï’s New York was a fine aftershave—certainly a favorite as well.

I have to say that the razor in person doesn’t look nearly so cruddy as in the photo—but still, I would say it’s past time for a clean and polish. I’ll do that and use the razor again so we can see any improvement.

Rich Weiss in Science News:

For several years, Alzheimer’s disease has been a much-discussed and somewhat controversial topic among neuroscientists. The progressively debilitating disease is now the fourth–and may soon be the third–leading cause of death in the United States, yet its underlying biology remains largely a mystery.

Because many of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease resemble those of normal aging, much of the current research effort is aimed at finding biochemical "markers’ that are unique to Alzheimer patients. Peter Davies, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, reported last year the first (and still the only) such marker–a protein found in the brain tissue of Alzheimer patients but absent in the normal elderly (SN: 11/22/86, p.327). Researchers still don’t know what role the protein plays in the course of the disease, but more information should be forthcoming once its amino acid sequence is determined. That process may be completed in a matter of months, Davies says.

Meanwhile, Davies last week presented some surprising new evidence that the protein in question, called A68, is not entirely unique to Alzheimer patients, but is found in the normal developing fetus and infant. "It appears around 32 weeks of fetal life and disappears by age 2,’ Davies says. "This suggests that the protein normally has a function to assist in brain development.’

One intriguing possibility, he says, is …

Continue reading.

Jeff Gerth of ProPublica:

In May 2006, medical regulators in Denmark issued a warning that signaled trouble for General Electric. Danish researchers noted that, over a four-year period, 25 patients in Denmark and Austria had suffered a rare and crippling disease after undergoing an MRI, the scanning procedure used to diagnose everything from brain tumors to blown knees. The patients had been injected with a GE dye that makes images more distinct. They all had weak kidneys before receiving the dye. 

The GE product, Omniscan [1], has since been linked to other cases of the disease, which appears to affect only MRI patients who have kidney problems. Similar drugs made by Bayer and others have also been tied to the sometimes fatal ailment, nephrogenic systemic fibrosis [2] (NSF).

Some regulators and researchers in the U.S. and Europe have found that a disproportionate number of NSF cases are associated with GE’s Omniscan [3]. That threatens to create a costly liability mess for the company’s growing $17 billion health-care division, which GE promotes heavily with its "Healthymagination [4]" ad campaign. The company’s diagnostic products generate about $1.8 billion in sales. GE doesn’t provide financial figures on Omniscan.

People with NSF, or relatives of those who have died, have filed more than 400 lawsuits in U.S. federal courts against GE, Bayer, and two other makers of similar drugs in the past several years. About 100 cases don’t concern Omniscan. Of the roughly 300 that do involve the GE drug, about 70 percent relate exclusively to Omniscan, according to court records and lawyers on both sides. Bayer HealthCare has some 50% of the U.S. market, regulators estimate. GE is next, with about 30%.

While GE says it is investigating concerns about Omniscan, the company maintains there is no proof that the drug, known as a contrast agent, causes disease….  [In other words, they don't have to investigate because they've already reach their conclusion. – LG]

Continue reading.

Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic:

It’s been almost a hundred years since progressives began the campaign to make health care a right. And never before has the campaign come this far. Five congressional committees have now had their say about health care reform. And, as of Tuesday afternoon, all five have said “aye.”

At this point, passage and enactment of health care reform seems not just likely but very likely. Barring unforeseen calamity, insiders say it should all be done by New Year’s and, just maybe, Thanksgiving, although the president’s trip to Asia in November could slow things down.

But if it’s hard to imagine a scenario under which health reform falls apart, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario under which health reform turns out to be something that makes reformers wince.

In order to get legislation out of the Finance Committee with not just Democrats but one precious Republican vote as well, chairman Max Baucus had to make many compromises. He had to deliver a bill that would spend no more than $900 billion, because his committee members wouldn’t support the revenue and savings measures necessary to spend more. As readers of this space know, that meant reducing what the bill provided–covering fewer people and promising those who are covered lesser insurance–at least relative to the promises made by three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committees in the summer.

To be sure, the Finance bill has its virtues. Alone among the measures going through Congress, the Baucus bill is projected to reduce federal expenditures relative to current projections, both in the immediate ten-year planning window and beyond.

The projections come from the Congressional Budget Office, which, like any group of well-intentioned experts, could be wrong. I still think CBO didn’t give enough credit on cost savings to the House bill. But most experts seem to think that the Finance bill’s chances of bending the curve are better than those of its counterparts. And that seems like a reasonable judgment.

As deliberations continue, in the floor debate and eventually in the House-Senate conference committee, the question is how these bills will come together. The best case scenario is that we get the best of both approaches–the far-reaching coverage and insurance reforms in the House and HELP bills, combined with the CBO-certified cost control of Finance. The worst case is that we get cost control like House and HELP, with coverage that looks like Finance.

As a friend recently suggested to me, the choices are best understood in the language of grade school math. Will we get the union of the two approaches–or the intersection?

The former could be pretty good. The latter? A serious disappointment.

Most likely, of course, we’ll get something in between, worse than the best-case scenario and better than the worst. And that raises a question: What elements of reform are most important at this point? What needs fixing–and saving?

Below is my list of priorities, for whatever that is worth. (Click here for another wish list, from Timothy Jost.) Each one is somewhere within the universe of political possibility, at least according to the administration and Capitol Hill sources I consulted. But that’s only if you consider the priorities individually. Getting Congress to embrace many of them, let alone all, seems highly unlikely.

Read the rest of this entry »

Even denialists will have to recognize the facts. Treehugger notes:

New UNEP analysis serves as an update to the last IPCC report on climate change from two years ago and really should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks climate change isn’t happening and fast: After reviewing more than 400 studies done in the past two years, the report concludes that because of faster-than-predicted carbon emissions growth we are now committed to at least 1.4°C of warming by 2100 and as much as 4.3°C.

Saying that the "pace and the scale of climate change is accelerating, along with the confidence among researchers in their forecasts," the UNEP stresses that scientists are increasingly saying that some climate changes are really becoming commitments. In other words, even once we stabilize emissions these changes will still occur:

Faster and Sooner Than Expected Changes Happening
Citing the continued expansion of a globalized economy dependent on high-carbon fuels, and increasing signs that carbon sinks like oceans and forests are becoming less capable of absorbing more carbon, the report says,

…these changes characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing, including faster sea-level rise, ocean acidification, melting Arctic sea ice cover, warming polar land masses, freshening ocean currents, and shifts in circulation patterns in the atmosphere and oceans.

OK, that’s the grim part. The report also concludes that the worst possible scenarios can be prevented by "immediate, cohesive and decisive action to both cut emissions and assist vulnerable countries adapt." …

Continue reading. Of course, those who live in denial that human activity is causing the problem will fight the changes necessary—they are totally convinced that the scientists are wrong, so convinced that they see no need to play it safe.

For the satire-blind: it’s a joke.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Notwithstanding Rep. Louise Slaughter’s (D-N.Y.) impassioned plea, the House this afternoon passed that amendment to alter the Freedom of Information Act and hide detainee abuse photos — and to keep the question of what’s secret and what’s not away from the courts.

Here’s what Jameel Jaffer, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, which has been fighting for release of those photos, had to say about the vote:

We are deeply disappointed that the House voted to give the Defense Department the authority to hide evidence of its own misconduct, and we hope the Senate will not follow suit. If this bill does become law, the Secretary of Defense should not invoke it. Instead, Secretary Gates should be guided by the importance of transparency to the democratic process, the extraordinary importance of these photos to the ongoing debate about the treatment of prisoners and the likelihood that the suppression of these photos will ultimately be far more damaging to national security than their disclosure would be. The last administration’s decision to endorse torture undermined the United States’ moral authority and compromised its security. The failure of the current administration to fully confront the abuses of the last administration will only compound these harms.

You can find the roll call here.

Take a look. I’m just awaiting the delivery of my meat grinder. Megs is waiting, too, though she’s now so well adjusted to canned food only (no kibble) that I’ve been able to discontinue the FortiFlora seasoning.

DougJ at Balloon Juice:

I’ve mostly grown weary of birtherism, but there are some real gems in some of the recent court filings.

On page 27, explaining why it’s good that Congress, not the courts, are in charge of removing presidents from office:

“Or perhaps an eccentric citizen has become convinced that the President is an alien from Mars, and the courts should order DNA testing to enforce the Constitution [7] …”

“[7] The Court does not make this observation simply as a rhetorical device for emphasis; the Court has actually received correspondence assailing its previous order in which the sender, who, incidentally, challenged the undersigned to a “round of fisticuffs on the Courthouse Square,” asserted that the President is not human.”

Some communities try very hard to unify church and state. It doesn’t really work all that well. See this article by Paul Vitello in the NY Times. It begins:

For decades, prosecutors in Brooklyn routinely pursued child molesters from every major ethnic and religious segment of the borough’s diverse population. Except one.

Of some 700 child sexual abuse cases brought in an average year, few involved members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — about 180,000 followers of Hasidic and other sects who make up the largest such cluster outside Israel. Some years, there were one or two arrests, or none.

But in the past year, there have been 26. District Attorney Charles J. Hynes has brought charges against a variety of men — yeshiva teachers, rabbis, camp counselors, merchants and relatives of children. Eight have been convicted; 18 await trial.

If the sudden spike in prosecutions is startling, even more surprising is the apparent reason: ultra-Orthodox Jews, long forbidden to inform on one another without permission from the rabbis who lead them, are going to the police and prosecutors on their own.

Members of this close-knit community, who refer to themselves as the “haredim,” meaning those who fear God, reject modern secular culture and keep strict control over what they consider internal affairs. For centuries, disputes involving children, marriage and business have been decided by rabbinical courts called beth dins, which do not report their findings to the secular authorities, even when they judge someone guilty. Taboos codified long ago during times of persecution discourage community members from informing on other Jews; violations can result in ostracism.

Now, a growing number of haredi Jews in Brooklyn say they do not think they can get justice from the rabbinical courts, which in several high-profile cases have exonerated people who were later criminally convicted of child abuse. And although some advocates for victims contend that the district attorney has been too accommodating of the rabbinical hierarchy — a charge that Mr. Hynes denies — more families are turning to his office for help…

Continue reading.

Since I use Chrome on occasion, I was delighted to see these extensions.

From The Consumerist.

Interesting post by Matthew Yglesias:

I’ve seen a fair amount of commentary on the part of Ryan Lizza’s profile of the Obama economic team where Christina Romer recommends a $1.2 trillion stimulus proposal and they wind up with just a bit more than half of that out of deference to the tender sensibilities of the United States Senate. I’ve seen less commentary on this other part, where basically the same thing happen on financial system policy:

Romer believed that the banks wouldn’t lend again until they were well capitalized. For banks in severe stress, she favored creating a government-backed “bad bank” to take the toxic assets off the banks’ books and then recapitalize them with government funds—essentially a version of nationalization, and what the Swedish government had done during that nation’s financial crisis of the early nineties. This argument was quickly rendered moot because of the cost. There wasn’t much money left in the TARP kitty, and any chance of getting more from Congress had ended with that morning’s news: A.I.G., which had received a hundred and seventy billion dollars in federal money, had handed out multimillion-dollar bonuses to the executives responsible for the company’s demise. Axelrod said, “The one thing that was absolutely clear was, we were not in a position to go back to Congress.”

Axelrod’s argument seems absolutely sound. And Rahm Emanuel’s argument on the stimulus that congress wouldn’t appropriate $1.2 trillion also seems absolutely sound. But of course Romer’s arguments weren’t arguments about feasible legislative strategies. Of all the senior members of the Obama administration, Romer has by far the least experience with practical legislative politics and also has the job that’s the least concerned with practical legislative politics. And I think that it was in a lot of ways a masterstroke to appoint a very policy-focused academic with no practical legislative experience to the CEA job. When people work too long in Washington, their notions of what would be good policy in principle tend to become unduly corrupted by their knowledge of what’s possible in practice.

But what Lizza is telling us is that on the two biggest pieces of macroeconomic management, the Obama administration is pursuing policies that its in-house expert on macroeconomic crisis management believed were far too timid. He’s also telling us that this was done primarily not because people disagreed with her analysis, but because they felt it wasn’t possible, legislatively speaking, to do what was objectively necessary. It’s a bit of a scary situation.

There’s probably something to it. I would never have thought that 30 (male, Republican) Senators would vote against a raped woman’s right to a day in court, but it happened—even though almost all of those Senators have daughters (who no doubt now view at their fathers in a new light.

Not much change from Bush to Obama in how torture cases are treated. Obama, like Bush, works hard to quash them. Accountability? That’s not for the powerful and wealthy, just for hoi polloi. Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

When he took office, President Obama made clear that torture is illegal and that the United States would not abuse detainees in its custody. He immediately ordered the CIA as well as the rest of the U.S. government to adhere to the rules set out in the Army Field Manual, which forbid the torture, abuse or humiliation of prisoners.

But when it comes to those tortured during the Bush administration, the Obama administration refuses to say that Bush officials violated existing law. In fact, in litigation over the torture and abuse of detainees that in some cases may have resulted in their deaths, the Obama administration has surprisingly endorsed the same legal positions as its predecessor, insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred.

Several cases making their way through the courts now are challenging that position. In each, the Obama administration is taking essentially the same legal positions as did the Bush Justice Department before it.

The case of Al-Zahrani v. Rumsfeld, brought on behalf of two former Guantanamo detainees found dead in their cells in June 2006, is among the most recent filed. It’s now being actively litigated in a Washington, D.C. federal court. Neither Yasser Al-Zahrani nor Salah Al-Salami was ever charged with a crime, but both were deemed “enemy combatants” by a Defense Department procedure that the Supreme Court later declared inadequate. They spent four years in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay without charge, without seeing the evidence against them, and without ever even meeting with a lawyer who could press their case. On June 10, 2006, the men were found hanged in their cells on a rope made from bed sheets and T-shirts. The military declared both deaths suicides. Al-Zahrani was 17 years old when he was transferred to Guantanamo and 22 when he died. Al-Salami died at age 37.

Read the rest of this entry »

You really should click through to this post: Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming. In it, John Cook clearly summarizes the empirical evidence.

• First: the evidence that humans are responsible for the increase in CO2 levels
• Second: the evidence that CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere traps heat
• Third: the evidence that our plant is accumulating heat

In the first argument, he shows a graph that compares anthrogenic CO2 emissions with the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This graph confused some readers, so I’ll take some care to explain it.

To make the comparison valid (apples-to-apples), he must plot both the anthrogenic emissions and the total atmospheric CO2 on the same scale. As he explains in this post:

In an earlier post on the human contribution to CO2 levels, cbrock suggested integrating CO2 emissions to obtain the cumulative CO2 emissions. This would allow a direct comparison between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the amount of CO2 we’ve emitted into the atmosphere. Now I never pass up the opportunity to plot new graphs and this was no exception. The only problem was the data available for CO2 emissions (gigatonnes carbon) used different units to the data for CO2 levels (parts per million by volume).

To compare the two time series, I decided to convert both sets of data to gigatonnes of CO2. The CO2 emissions data is expressed in gigatonnes carbon (GtC). This means they’ve only included the carbon element of the carbon dioxide molecule. The atomic mass of carbon is 12, while the atomic mass of CO2 is 44. Therefore, to convert from gigatonnes carbon to gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, you simply multiply 44 over 12. In other words, 1 gigatonne of carbon equals 3.67 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide.

Atmospheric CO2 levels are expressed in parts per million by volume (ppm). To convert from ppm to gigatonne of carbon, I consulted the conversion tables of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. 1 part per million of atmospheric CO2 is equivalent to 2.13 Gigatonnes Carbon. Using our 44 over 12 rule, this means 1ppm = 7.81 Gigatonnes of Carbon Dioxide.

This conversion to allow direct comparison is completely reasonable, especially since anthrogenic CO2 emissions cannot really be stated in ppm: we know how much carbon we’re releasing into the atmosphere, but not all of that carbon remains in the atmosphere: some is recycled through natural processes. So for a valid comparison the ONLY choice is to compare gigatonnes of CO2 in the total atmosphere to the gigatonnes of CO2 that humanity creates and releases. That is what he did.

The concluding paragraph to Cook’s argument:

So we see a clear chain of evidence that starts with human CO2 emissions far outstripping the observed rise in CO2 levels. Surface and satellite observations confirm that adding more CO2 produces an enhanced greenhouse effect. The planet’s accumulation of heat is confirmed by ocean heat observations. The empirical evidence is clear. It’s time to move on from the question of whether we’re causing global warming and focus on how best to reduce our CO2 emissions.

I don’t know how denialists can avoid understanding his argument. It’s quite clear.

This post is especially for conservative09, who finds it difficult to believe that a seemingly small change in CO2 levels in the atmosphere (from 280 ppm in pre-industrial history to 387 ppm today—the highest level in 15 million years, a jump of 38%) could cause global warming. John Cook, in Skeptical Science:

We’ve just perused the empirical evidence that humans are raising atmospheric CO2 levels. In earlier posts, we noted that tallying up the planet’s heat content shows that our climate is accumulating heat, proof of global warming. But is there any evidence that links the two? Is there empirical data proving that increased CO2 contributes to the energy imbalance that causes global warming?

The greenhouse gas qualities of CO2 have been known for over a century. In 1861, John Tyndal published laboratory results identifying CO2 as a greenhouse gas that absorbed heat rays (longwave radiation). Since then, the absorptive qualities of CO2 have been more precisely measured and quantified by laboratory results and radiative physics theory (Herzberg 1953, Burch 1962, Burch 1970, etc).

Satellite measurements of the change in outgoing longwave radiation

So according to lab results and radiative physics, we expect that increasing atmospheric CO2 should absorb more longwave radiation as it escapes back out to space. Has this effect been observed? The paper Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997 (Harries 2001) attempts to find out. In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite that measured infrared spectra between 400 cm-1 to 1600 cm-1. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations. Harries 2001 compared both sets of data to discern any changes in outgoing radiation over the 26 year period. The resultant change in outgoing radiation was as follows:

Figure 1: Change in spectrum from 1970 to 1996 due to trace gases. ‘Brightness temperature’ indicates equivalent blackbody temperature (Harries 2001).

What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation over CO2 bands was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect".

This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using the latest satellite data. Griggs 2004 compares the 1970 and 1997 spectra with additional satellite data from the NASA AIRS satellite launched in 2003. Chen 2007 extends this analysis to 2006 using data from the AURA satellite launched in 2004. Both papers found the observed differences in CO2 bands matched the expected changes based on rising CO2 levels. Thus we have empirical evidence that increased CO2 is preventing longwave radiation from escaping out to space.

Measurements of downward longwave radiation

What happens to longwave radiation that gets absorbed by greenhouse gases? The energy heats the atmosphere which in turn re-radiates longwave radiation. This re-radiated energy goes in all directions. Some of it makes its way back to the surface of the earth. Hence we expect to find increasing downward longwave radiation as CO2 levels increase.

Philipona 2004 finds that this is indeed the case – that downward longwave radiation is increasing due to an enhanced greenhouse effect. Evans 2006 takes this analysis further. By analysing high resolution spectral data, the increase in downward radiation can be quantitatively attributed to each of several anthropogenic gases. The results lead the authors to conclude that "these experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming."

So we have multiple lines of empirical evidence for CO2 warming. Lab tests show CO2 absorbing longwave radiation. Satellite measurements confirm that less longwave radiation is escaping to space. Surface measurements detect increased longwave radiation returning back to Earth at wavelengths matching increased CO2 warming. And of course the result of this energy imbalance is the accumulation of heat over the last 40 years.

And, if you’re still not convinced, you need to explain why: the empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that global warming is due to anthrogenic causes. See also:

David Adam writes in the Guardian in May 2008:

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to new figures that renew fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control.

Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

The figures, published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on its website, also confirm that carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than expected. The annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm – the fourth year in the past six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 2.1ppm.

Scientists say the shift could indicate that the Earth is losing its natural ability to soak up billions of tons of carbon each year. Climate models assume that about half our future emissions will be re-absorbed by forests and oceans, but the new figures confirm this may be too optimistic. If more of our carbon pollution stays in the atmosphere, it means emissions will have to be cut by more than currently projected to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.

Martin Parry, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s working group on impacts, said: "Despite all the talk, the situation is getting worse. Levels of greenhouse gases continue to rise in the atmosphere and the rate of that rise is accelerating. We are already seeing the impacts of climate change and the scale of those impacts will also accelerate, until we decide to do something about it."