[AppleAl]

It's great to worry about Big Brother, but I just don't think this is the issue that is preeminent on my list of things to worry about in that regard. Go get the FED dissolved. They have and will cause way more problems that a carbon tax would. Government is not evil, it's just extremely inefficient. As for your plot about CO2 in the atmosphere, let's look at a longer timescale. Here's a plot of CO2 in the atmosphere that shows the relative stability over the last 1000 years vs the last 100 years.

Something has clearly changed. Ignore the projections. My point is not the projection lines, but that we've broken out to the upside and there's no clear mechanism to cause it to stop going up. We stayed in the 250-300 ppm range for 900 years and now we are at 400. Is private sector going to fund basic research to investigate this? I don't think so. Is it worth researching? Probably not, if you are going to die in the next 50 years. We can start looking into it once the problem is clearer. Sorry for the sarcasm, but that's what I'm hearing from the AGW skeptics. If the increase is due to some natural cause, what is it? There's one explanation I've heard. Humans burning stuff. I am open to others, but I haven't heard any, and to say that the increase is a tiny fraction of the total at this point is just not accurate unless the data in this chart is wrong.

The problem I have with this chart and other charts purporting to show long term climate trends is the assumption that the extrapolated historical data is an accurate reflection of reality at the time. I would guess that "ice core data" is derived based on multiple assumptions concerning rate of accumulation and methods of interpretation - leaving room for introduction of biases whether conscious or not. Also, is the modern data based on ice cores? If, as I suspect, it's based on measurements by modern instrumentation then can it properly be compared to estimations from ice cores?