As I read the newspapers and watch news shows on TV it appears that the catastrophic Global Warming Theory supporters have won the political battle. Many rent-seeking Corporations are behind the effort; there is a lot of profit to be made by insiders with little investment and no risk. Even President Bush is talking about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and there may be some success in setting up some sort of world wide governance as envisioned by Al Gore. It is ironic that this is happening as the wheels begin to fall off of the catastrophic Global Warming Theory itself. The release of the algorithms used by Hansen are being examined by skeptics and it appears that the surface air temperature (whatever that is) reconstructions are unreliable at best. The record for the US, which is clearly the most complete and best for any part of Earth shows little or no warming over the last century, after errors were recently corrected. (And this doesn't even consider the problems with the reliability of measuring stations in the US, and problems with the heat island effect correction based on Asian data used by Jones that is totally unreliable since many of the measurement sites were continually moved to the edge of the urban area. Jones won't release his data because he says people would just use it to prove him wrong. That seems to indicate a lack of confidence.) I have always thought that the effect of an increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere on temperature would be minimal. The reason is that if an IR detector is designed for a heat seeking missile, the three wavelengths at which carbon dioxide absorbs IR energy (about 2.7, 4.3, and 15 microns) would be avoided because the enegy absorbtion is about 10dB per kilometer. So 90% is absorbed in one kilometer, 99% is absorbed in two kilometers, and 99.9% is absorbed in three kilometers. So, with the atmosphere more than 10 kilometers thick, not much energy in the carbon dioxide wavelengths was escaping anyway. Thus increasing the carbon dioxide concentration would have little impact. (It is true that increasing the concentration widens the wavelength band over which energy is absorbed, and this could be important like on Venus where the density of carbon dioxide in the atmsophere is thousands of times what it is on Earth.) So, I tend to think that air temperature could increase slightly due to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, but it would probably be largely masked by natural variations.
(This is not to say that we don't need other and better energy sources, but we don't need them as urgently as Al Gore claims. It would be good to generate electricity with nuclear power as advocated by President Bush, and to develop fusion power. I always think of people living in New York in 1900, and imagine the pollution caused by all of the horses, and try to imagine how people would live there now if we still relied on horses for transportation.)

Here is a good site for information about global warming.

http://www.climate-skeptic.com/