By Ross McKitrick in the Christian Science Monitor

Climate change is one of the most complex topics in science. New insights arise every month. Key discoveries are anticipated in the next few years. Yet politicians seem to think we’ve learned everything there is to know about the climate. And they keep designing static policy plans based on that assumption.

We have seen the failure of this approach with the Kyoto Protocol. So as world leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia, this week to discuss a replacement treaty, they should keep this simple principle in mind: Good climate policy must be dynamic, not static, and this requires incorporating a learning process. Politicians like long-term commitments because they can push costs into the future. But long-term commitments are foolish when you are still awaiting key information about the nature of the problem.

Climate policy needs to shift from static to dynamic thinking. This requires tying policy to actual greenhouse warming. Anything else is like taking a shot in the dark. Read more of this sensible plan here.

By Holman W. Jenkins Jr. Wall Street Journal

The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn’t for “science.” In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the “greenhouse” effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on “availability bias,” roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind. Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: “Availability cascade” has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; “informational cascade” for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs; and “reputational cascade” for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he’s playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: “The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona.” Here’s exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged “consensus” arrived at their positions by counting heads?
Read more here.

By Christopher Alleva, American Thinker

Dr. John Brignell, a British engineering professor, runs a website called numberwatch. He has compiled what has to be the most complete collection of links to media stories ascribing the cause of everything under the sun to global warming.  He has already posted more than six-hundred links.

The site’s stated mission is to expose all the “scares, scams, junk, panics and flummery cooked up by the media, politicians, bureaucrats and so-called scientists and others that try to confuse the public with wrong numbers” Professor Brignell’s motto is “Working to Combat Math Hysteria.”

This exercise is not merely a lark to show the abject absurdity of this global warming nonsense. Brignell wrote a great book titled Sorry Wrong Number, The Abuse of Measurement on this very subject. Dr. Brignell is accepting additions to the list so if you have any send them along.  See the list of links here.