Citing Woods Hole looks good on the surface, and they've got some very competent scientists working there.

Before taking everything you see on their site at face value, you might dig a little deeper into some background.....like for instance, "...As the American Geophysical Union recently concluded: "It is scientifically inconceivable that - after changing forest into cities, putting dust and soot into the atmosphere, putting millions of acres of desert into irrigated agriculture, and putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - humans have not altered the natural course of the climate system."

Does that represent the ENTIRE body of the AGU??? No, it does not. Neither is it taken in context. How many respected readers here actually KNOW an AGU member, much less have experienced discussing climate issues and specifics with an AGU member with expertise in the subject????

The chair of AGU's focus group on global environmental change is Dr. Roni Avissar, and he has some problems with GCMs(which the IPCC uses to base it's alarms on)...He said back in '98 that current GCMs only paramterize the effects of one important process, that is, the effects of turbulent heat fluxes close to the surface, which are dominant there. They fail however, to include the mesoscale heat fluxes that are dominant in the middle and upper parts of the boundry layer. Apparently it's still a problem, as evidenced in his PowePoint presentation in May of '05.

http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/cgc/gro...05-amazon.html


Thought it might be of interest to note some of his recent work, since it's been suggested here that trees are the answer.....

Durham, N.C. -- Growing tree plantations to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to mitigate global warming -- so called "carbon sequestration" -- could trigger environmental changes that outweigh some of the benefits, a multi-institutional team led by Duke University suggested in a new report. Those effects include water and nutrient depletion and increased soil salinity and acidity, said the researchers.

"We believe that decreased stream flow and changes in soil and water quality are likely as plantations are increasingly grown for biological carbon sequestration," the 10 authors wrote in a paper published in the Friday, Dec. 23, 2005, issue of the journal Science.

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/12/carbontrade.html