Well, this is about as stupid as it gets, I reckon.

First, let's deal with your anecdotal bushwah about Vermont. If a local cold snap puts an end to the idea of global warming, I guess that a local warm spell, like that we've had in California where I live, means that global warming actually is happening. And California is bigger than Vermont, so I guess we win!!!!eleven!! Hooray for science!

Second, not all ice is floating in water. Antarctica is a continent, and when that stuff melts and flows into the oceans, your frankly idiotic analogy flies out the window. The same thing with any ice in the polar regions that rests on land. There's a lot of it. Just think of Greenland. In fact, your little thought experiment is flawed to a degree that would be laughable, save for the fact that you're serious.

Third, a global change of only a few degrees will entirely destabilize worldwide agricultural patterns. Hotter is not always better. Hotter works in the tropics because the ecosystem there has evolved (oops, sorry--the "e" word) to cope with the heat. Note, however, that the tropics are not called "the breadbasket of the world." What happens when the actual breadbasket of the world isn't growing wheat or corn the way it used to? Do we start growing bananas in Iowa?

Fourth, people who are concerned about global warming aren't saying that we have to go back to the sixteenth century. That's a straw man argument. There are other ways to generate energy than burning fossil fuels, and many of them are cleaner. As things stand, they can't yet take over for hydrocarbons, but the fact is that they never will with Luddites like you standing in the way of scientific progress.

Your analysis (and I apply the term in the most charitable sense) fails on so many levels that you wind up looking like a fool.

I heard someone refer to the global warming movement as a novel way to attack capitalism. I think that's pretty accurate.

Mark Smith, that's a powerful essay.
You're gonna get under the skin of the "sky is falling !" crowd.

As far as Al Gore goes, I look at it this way.
If you really believe that "stepping on a sidewalk crack is gonna break your mother's back," you wouldn't dare step on any cracks.

By the same token, if Al Gore truly believes that all of this consumption is "causing global warming," it would be reflected in his own personal behavior---same as the guy who believes stepping on a sidewalk crack REALLY will break his mother's back.

How is that a "powerful" essay, Bad Boy? It seems to me that, to be actually powerful, what Smith wrote would have to be logical and internally consistent. Several of his main points are logical fallacies or are, frankly, bereft of scientific meaning.

An example: his "if a little is good, a lot is better" philosophy. He contrasts Antarctica with the tropics, concluding with, "Obviously, animals and plants prefer warmth to cold." Following his reasoning, Death Valley should be the garden spot of the planet. You got yerself some warmth there, baby! Oddly enough, it's not a garden of Eden. Its warmth falls outside the range of acceptability for most species.

What about the times we've all heard about over the years, when unexpected heat waves cause farmers' entire crops to crisp up and die? Were these hot spells good for the crops, or were they bad? Good, Smith would posit; it's warmth, after all. The farmer would disagree, as would the consumer later in the season when food prices rise.

And what about his foolishness about water vapor? Do you seriously believe that because the environment can accept some sources of water vapor that it can accept all the water vapor that we want to shove into it?

And what about his "who cares whether it gets warmer" cacaraca? Where I live, we depend on the Sierra Nevada snowpack for our water. The melting snow releases water throughout the year for us to use, and it is replenished each winter by more snow. If that snowpack disappears--if yearly snow is replaced by yearly rain--we won't have any water. It will flow downstream and disappear during the winter, leaving us high and dry during the summer. And make no mistake: snowpacks around the world are disappearing. In the case of water in California, warmer would definitely not be better.

I don't know how old you people are. Maybe you don't remember the sixties and seventies. Pollution in the form of littering--actual garbage along the sides of the road and floating down rivers--was a real problem. We could see it. We had to wade through it. Still, though, people dumped their crap everywhere. It took a concerted effort to get people to stop doing something that was visibly despoiling the environment in which they lived. The effects of hydrocarbon pollution are not as evident, so people like you can't believe that there are any effects. The effects of pollution are there, and they're measurable, but they're not always visible to the naked eye.

Do you all not believe that pollution is a problem? Or, if you do, do you seriously believe that economic expediency excuses every conceivable exacerbation of that problem?

There are ways to use capitalism's strengths to confront the problem of global warming. Gregg Easterbrook had a great take on the situation in the September 2006 Atlantic. He suggests using technology and our engineering know-how to solve the problem, much like we've done with acid rain, smog, and CFCs in the last 30 years. Money quote: "Americans love challenges, and preventing artificial climate change is just the sort of technological and economic challenge at which this nation excels...the only reason runaway global warming seems unstoppable is that we have not yet tried to stop it."

Colby Cosh has also written about the topic in the past. He quotes Andrew Revkin in the NY Times, who wrote that plenty of scientists agree "that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging."

Al Gore is an idiot, as are the rest of the scare-mongers who stand to make out like bandits if they get their big-government environmental schemes approved, but that doesn't mean there's not an impending problem due to climate change. If you really believe in capitalism and human ingenuity, it makes a lot of sense to push using them to improve our situation instead of simply pretending there isn't anything wrong and letting the wrong people spend billions in taxpayer money on solutions that won't work.