Dave,

This is a really interesting post. It seems to be written in the true spirit of scientific inquiry without being dogmatic, as so many are when it comes to Global Warming issues. I am reading your post several days after it first posted, and noticed that only a single Hedge-Hogger chose to comment on it. I think because of the subjects technical nature, people might shy away from having to do some studious reading (and learning) in order to comment on the thread. It is much easier to hurl one-liner sound bytes or insults on some of our more "touchy" subjects like gun control, capitalism vs. socialism, etc...
Just wanted to let you know that at least one person here devoured the article. Thanks for posting.

Frosty, I guess you are right. In 2008, Obama received the largest amount of campaign donations from Wall Street than any President in 20 years, making up 20% of his total campaign contributions. Since the 2008 election however, there has been an enormous reversal of Wall Street giving campaign donations to Republican candidates instead, by a two to one margin. I'm not sure why they would do this since they seem to be doing better under Obama than at almost any other time in history.

ChrissColbe repeats a common misconception among people, that Wall Street is made up of conservatives. In fact Wall Street has been among the largest donors to the Democrat Party going back at least to the Clinton administration. I don't remember the exact ratio off hand, but the money contributions to Democrats from Wall Street is several times larger than their contributions to Republicans.

Trondi,

I am not so sure that you read my posting carefully. Somehow you assume that I got my information from "headline 'science facts' in the press/online". I stated clearly that I read "original science papers". To elaborate, I intentionally searched out papers and reports from the scientists themselves so that I could learn first-hand from the original sources, not from some news anchor reporting. Some of the material could only be accessed through my friend's affiliation with a major university and I even had to pay money to access certain papers.

I may be an amateur, but I have enough intelligence, math skills, statistical skills, and critical thinking skills to pour through such information and make an informed judgement. Can you say the same about where you get your knowledge about this subject?

For an amateur project, I spent two years looking at global warming data from all sorts of original science papers. My conclusion was that global warming is the greatest scientific hoax ever perpetrated on the public. I also discovered that almost everybody I encounter who believes in global warming hasn't the foggiest clue of even the most basic salient facts as evidenced by some of the posts here. For example, both Arctic and Antarctic ice are actually expanding, sea level has risen by the same rate of 8 inches per century for roughly the last thousand years and recently seems to have stalled, and there has been no significant increase in temperature world-wide in 18 years (during the entire time of this debate).
The most revealing thing about the Climate Gate scandal is that global warming advocate scientists are seeking to hide their research rather than share it. If you knew that the Earth was in peril wouldn't you want to scream it from the rooftops? Why would you be ashamed of your methodology? Surely if you have confidence in the science you could just put it all out there and everyone would understand!
In the same vein, I have noticed that many people are disappointed to hear that temperatures and sea levels have stalled. You would think that this would be the greatest news story since the fall of Nazi Germany and the Berlin Wall!