"References"? Sure, they're crucial. I'm just awash in references on global warming.

But this discussion does not come up to the level of seriousness for me to go to my directory of global warming information and pull up references and details.

The 50 US cents per KWh at the plant is okay: That's ballpark what the total cost has been in Germany that tried hard with subsidies to get farmers to install solar panels.

Sure, people can keep working on solar, wind, low head hydro, etc. power and hope to get the cost down to 20 cents or so, etc.

Still solar and wind are total made up nonsense, wind likely for centuries, and solar at least for decades. A big, huge problem is that those sources are unpredictable so need storage, and the cheap storage is not available. So, basically have to pay the CapEx twice. That is, have to pay for a coal plant to use when the wind is not blowing. Then the coal plant operator will have to raise his rates to cover his CapEx for the time his plant is not operating. Bummer.

On average in the US, at the plant, nukes have been under 2 cents per KWh and coal has been under 3 cents. In comparison, the dreams of the people pushing 'clean, renewable' energy would shoot the US economy in the gut.

For the probability, that's a silly issue: The Mayan priests who killed people to pour blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky (I have a reference to a scholarly book on the Mayans, and Google books or Amazon shows the page with the specifics) picked a good problem: The Mayans didn't know enough to debunk the priests.

Al Guru did the same: Solid science for what the climate will be in 50 years under various scenarios for human activity does not exist. In particular, about the only way we know to calculate the 'climate' is from 'first principles' of physics and chemistry, and that involves actually predicting the weather, each cubic millimeter or so, INCLUDING the oceans, all over the planet for each millisecond or so for 50 years, and we can't do that computing. [Note: All simplifications are not from first principles and are approximations of unknown accuracy. So, can't actually calculate all the clouds in detail, put in a simple model for the clouds; for the oceans, do something still simpler.]

Then for the 'climate', need to do the full calculation, do that computing for a narrow distribution of initial conditions around the conditions now. Big problem: We don't even know the initial conditions, e.g., in the depths of the oceans and their currents, accurately. Anyway, run the weather prediction a few million times and then take empirical distributions and find the climate. Then change the scenario of human activity, do it again, and compare.

Tough to do. Hasn't been done.

Similarly for a gamma ray burst blowing the atmosphere off the earth, Yellowstone wiping out much of the US, a moving black hole sucking up the earth, some microbe we don't know how to kill wiping out humanity, etc.

So, what do we do? Well, we do NOT fall for superstition and gurus like the Mayans did. We don't go for morality plays about evil humans with transgression from evil, retribution from an angry god, and redemption from sacrifice. We don't sacrifice lambs or virgins. And we don't sacrifice our coal plants, half of our electric power.

For 'global warming', first, we look at the arguments of Al Guru, Guru Ramaswamy, etc., move forward to their first absurd, outrageous, egregious, grotesquely incompetent and/or dishonest point and then flush their arguments and reject those gurus. For Al Guru, the time between the high temperatures and the high CO2 levels he didn't show in the Vostok data is enough to flush his stuff. For the IPCC and Guru Ramaswami, his 'radiative forcing' is enough to flush.

So, for the alarmists, we have nothing but superstition.

So, we have to proceed on our own.

So, we start: Is there any empirical evidence that the earth is getting warmer now? We can measure temperature with astounding accuracy, and now with satellites we can get good data for the whole planet, day by day. May I have the envelope, please? "Nope, there's no evidence."

For a little more, as far as we can tell (I'm sure you have the NAS report), the temperature now is exactly the same as it was before the start of the Little Ice Age caused, maybe, by missing sun spots for some decades. So, since then we've been pulling out of the Little Ice Age and, net, since just before the Little Ice Age, all of human activity has had zip, zilch, zero effect on temperature. Net, human caused global warming doesn't pass the sniff test.

Next, what about the science? Do we worry about CO2, methane, water vapor, chlorinated hydrocarbons, aerosols? First- cut, changes in any of these seem to be at most small and trivial.

Next, what is the record on climate variability? Well, there's been a lot of variability. So, that we see nothing going on now means, first-cut, no worries, mate.

Next, if there we do begin to see some changes, then we will address the issue again.

The idea that the climate is wildly 'unstable' (got'a stop those evil butterflies from flapping their wings) and that we are at a tipping point and point of no return, with no good evidence, we have to pass off as superstitious nonsense like the Mayans.

Net, we're not Mayans. We don't wreck our society for superstitious fears. We just don't do that.

No sale. Ain't buying.

Done.