Here's a little global warming round-up, covering the range from the fools and dupes to some real science. 

In the fools and dupes category, we have Robert Redford, with an op-ed in USA Today of June 11.  Redford is sorely disappointed at the lack of action from the President and Congress on the issue.  He calls for action to shut down coal-fired power plants and to set state-specific limits on carbon emissions.  (Somehow he doesn't mention my proposal to ban Hollywood actors from flying on private jets or owning more than one home of no more than 5000 square feet.)  After all, he's so smart that he knows that the weather is controlled by mankind's use of carbon-based fuel to generate electricity.

Pouring more carbon pollution into the sky is setting the table for growing intensity of extreme weather, with more persistent drought, devastating wildfires, costly floods, scorching summers and storms that punish more with each punch.

Of course, there isn't the slightest evidence that increased carbon in the atmosphere has anything to do with extreme weather, but why should that interfere with his program to take away electricity from the little people? 

In the somewhat less of a fool and dupe category, we have Mayor Bloomberg of New York putting out on June 11 a 400 page report called "A Stronger, More Resilient New York," proposing some $20 billion of new government spending initiatives to strengthen New York's defenses against coastal flooding.  Coastal flooding is a bona fide risk for New York City (we are on the coast, after all), but this report is filled with endless drivel about global warming and wildly ridiculous projections of sea level rise from the UN IPCC reports.  Well, to Mayor Bloomberg's great credit, at least he doesn't propose to fix the supposed problem by doubling everyone's cost of electricity, which is the utterly nonsensical approach taken by California.  Anyway, in the highly likely event that the sea level continues to rise a few inches a century as it has since the last ice age, and even if the sea level doesn't rise at all, some of these additional defenses could well be a good idea.  Of course, the ability to spend money on such projects is probably going to be eliminated by increasing costs of public employee pensions and benefits, so we probably don't need to pay much attention to this.

If you have some tolerance for actual science on this subject, there is a video on the web of a lecture, about an hour in length, delivered in Hamburg, Germany in April by Professor Murry Salby of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.  Here is a guy who, in my humble view, knows what he is talking about.  The presentation is fairly mathematical, but at base is a comparison of IPCC models, and their predictions of disaster, with observations.  The takeaway is his quote at the very end from Richard Feynmann:  "If it disagrees with the observations, it's wrong."  The divergence between observations and the IPCC models is becoming rather too great to ignore at this point.

And on the same point, here is a post today at Watts Up With That from Christopher Monckton of Benchley titled "No significant warming for 17 years 4 months."   Monckton's post is filled with lots of good data and graphs, although there are plenty of other good ones out there as well.  How people like Redford could still believe in the direct CO2-temperature link when we now have over 17 years of the most recent data disproving it, is beyond me.

Here is a link to the video of Salby's presentation: 

http://youtu.be/2ROw_cDKwc0