I got a couple of interesting responses to my “Anti-Greens” piece. So I want to say that, yes, Kyoto is a joke, it does almost nothing to halt global warming because it would need to be about 10 times stronger to work at all. But Kyoto is not really about fixing global warming, but starting a process of confidence building to start to fix global warming. Setting up fora, dedicating resources, defining the issues, that sort of thing. Hopefully it will move onto the real stuff before too long.
As for global warming and the weather, the problem is that global warming theory predicts a period of strange weather before it settles into hotter weather. So while any particular anomolous weather event could be anything, it is the pattern of strangeness that is relevant.
The environmentally conscious types (such as the Greens) may be wrong about global warming, because the science may be wrong, but at least they are paying attention to a potentially disastrous situation. If they sometimes get a little overwrought, it may be because new ideas always need a little energy to get heard, especially when there are such powerful interests trying to drown them out and hog the world stage.