Not sure I follow you. Seems to me Darwinistic materialism is the core reason that capitalism works so good, so if liberty is defined as selfishness, then Al Gore was simply using solid capitalistic methods to further sales of his books. Unfortunately, he does not have that killer instinct that the finest of the fittest have, but liberals lack, so he may well fail as a capitalist. All the while, the ice caps melt, and the glaciers recede and calve off. President Clinton said it "was the economy, stupid". All Al Gore needs to say is that it "is the ice caps, stupid".

Funny that your chart ends in 1980... and that the third TinEye entry for the image comes from the sarahpalininformation blog. I didn't find a legit source for the whole image, but I appreciate that that the credit for the bright twinkly stuff in the background went to NASA.

There's a similar chart at http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.h... that goes up to 2009 that you might find interesting. The two lines diverge pretty dramatically from 1980 onward.

Cheers

I think the origin of coal and oil is still rather stiffly attached to what the science crowd calls theory. I have my own theory as to these origins, and they are definately part of related phenomena. With respect to this discussion, however, both these questions, and the question concerning the infidelity of the sun are well sorted and well evidenced. For starters, study the Iridium layer. Am sorry I cannot tranfuse my many hours of study on the subject so that you, too, can understand. You must study the subjects yourself to understand why the current status of a theory is what it is. Won't do for you to stand back and throw rocks at us,demanding we re-invent the wheel for you! The data is out there; furthermore, you do not have to have a doctorate to earn a generalized command of the subject matter. Forgive the tone of arrogance; any of what I said has the property of being falsifiable.

1) Coal begins as layers of plant matter accumulating at the bottom of a body of water. For the process to continue, the plant matter was protected from biodegradation and oxidization, usually by mud or acidic water. This traps the carbon in immense peat bogs that are eventually covered and deeply buried by sediments. Under this compression the plant material is metamorphosed into coal: over time, the chemical and physical properties of the plant remains are changed by geological action to create a solid material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

The important sentence here is "...traps the carbon in immense peat bogs that are eventually covered and deeply buried by sediments." All that carbon was sequested away from the surface. Now we have brought this carbon (by huge quantity) on the surface and burned it.

2) The debate about wether global warming is man made is moot anyway;
If, as you imply, the reason for climate change is the sun, then the human inteligence has lost the race against nature. We do not posses the technology yet to tame the sun of start a colony on another planet. Literally all our eggs are in the same basket. And we as a specie have lost.

But IF by any chance the cause for global warming is man made then we CAN act and do something about it.

Will there be change to our way of living? Sure; But WE get to say how theses changes will be implemented. Will some peoples loose their jobs? Of course, like all change in society some people loose some win. Think of all the recents changes in society and jobs lost/gain by the advent of the internet (postal service, fax repairman, etc). Should we stop change?

I'll remind you that economic laws, political decisions are not "natural" law (in the sense of gravity law) theses are all collections of human decisions that have shape our world. Now these decisions/laws are at best killing our ability as a civilisation to survive on Earth or at worst killing our ability as a specie to survive.