I've never said the science was settled. That's not the nature of the scientific method. However, the debate among the peer reviewed scientific elite is over. But screw that, let's talk politics:

- At one time, there was no link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

- We had a problem with acid rain in the northeast. After government intervention, corporations were required to filter sulfides out of their factory emissions and we started using unleaded gas and catalytic converters in our vehicles. It was, in fact, a cap and trade system and today, the rain is no longer killing vast tracks of US forrests.

- Then, there was the environmental problem with the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Government intervened again and we changed the types of aerosols and air conditioning agents we use. The hole now seems to be healing although there are still some annual fluctuations. But the threat of not having to spend all your time indoors and out of the sun's harmful UV is no longer as urgent as it once was.

In all three instances, corporate funded shills were screaming "junk science" because the "fix" was going to cost them a lot of money.

I'm not the only one who was struck by the false equivalency of attaching "gate" to "Climate" and the timing of this tempest in a teapot - two weeks before Copenhagen.

Forget the science for a minute and try to see the opportunity here. We don't manufacture much in this country anymore and our economy shows it. There's a large number of well paying jobs to be had building commercial windmills, solar panels, geothermal units, smartgrid etc. - not to mention the blood and treasure we can save by not stealing and guarding the oil spigot in some desert rathole.

Only a year ago, deniers were freting that addressing global climate destabilization was a fool's errand because China and India weren't going to participate. But while you were focused on cherry picked Emails lately, you may have missed that China is committed to manufacturing green technology to sell to the world and leapfrogging the US.

The longer we wait to do something about it, the more it's going to cost to fix it provided it's fixable at all at some future date. Addressing the problem now is a win-win both environmentally and economically.