Oversold?

Mitch brings us a story on how the whole global warming thing may have been "over-hyped"?

"Ask a global warming enthusiast (term used advisedly) about their pet topic. They chortle with glee - and will not brook any disagreement about the theory’s supposed empirical underpinning. The more ignorant the enthusiast about current events in general, the more blinkered they are about politics, the more certain they are that global warming is here to save them and their millenarian socialist worldview.
But now, some climatologists are starting to think that global warming has been “oversold”:"

NOOOOO REALLY??????

One of the things that I have long stressed about this issue is that there is still much we don't know about the "global environment" and that is it silly to make scientific claims based on less than 100 years of charted weather on a planet that is hundreds of thousands of years old. It is only logical that we don't know everything there is to know about the planet yet and that given that there was an even warmer period of time (back before there were internal combustion engines and all the other things that are supposedly causing global warming now) a thousand years ago should be proof to any thinking person that there is more research that needs to be done. Now finally, the "scientific community" is starting to realize it.

""Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.
Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected "tension" among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties — a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public.
The science of climate change often is expressed publicly in unambiguous terms."

And whose fault do you suppose that might be?

"Scientists have substantial evidence to support the view that humans are warming the planet — as carbon dioxide levels rise, glaciers melt and global temperatures rise. Yet, for predicting the future climate, scientists must rely upon sophisticated — but not perfect — computer models. "

The very same computer models that tell us what tomorrow's weather is going to bring are the same computer models that they use to tell us about global warming - and we all know how accurate those weather forecasts are, don't we?????

"Much of the public debate, however, has dealt in absolutes. The poster for Al Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, depicts a hurricane blowing out of a smokestack. Katrina's devastation is a major theme in the film.
Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has published several research papers arguing that a link between a warmer climate and hurricane activity exists, but she admits uncertainty remains." (emphasis mine)

Does this mean we can finally put to rest the cannard that the scientific community knows exactly what is causing global warming? Does this mean we can finally go back to the table and have a sensible, logical discussion on the depths of this "problem"?

The final quote of the story says it all.

"The case for action on climate science, both for energy policy and adaptation, is overwhelming," Roger Pielke (environmental scientist at the University of Colorado) says. "But if we oversell the science, our credibility is at stake."