I would like to hear more about this also.

I have heard about this more than once before. One of the other TOD contributors has researched the issue, and is leaning toward the global cooling conclusion. Also, one talk I heard by a meteorologist early this year made a fairly good case (from a layman's perspective) that the melting of the area around the North pole would change snow patterns and kick us into the next ice age. There were various interactions which I don't remember, but one of them was that having more reflective snow (as the winds moved over the open North Pole area and made "lake effect snow") would reflect heat back, and kick us into the next ice age.

You may have read the post that gave Charlie Hall's comments on the huge International Geology Congress in Norway. He reported that about two-thirds of those present disagreed with the IPCC report.

9) The plenaries, especially the climate session and somewhat the energy sessions, were designed for a more general scientific audience. They tended to be moderately interesting, optimistic about resources and technology and often extremely contentious. About two thirds of the presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the IPCC (International panel on climate change) and the idea that the Earth's climate was responding to human influences. This was rather shocking to me who knows of several other such scientists but had no idea there were so many. They talked about Milankovich Cycles of course, but also sunspot cycles and other possible climate forcings. These were linked to some pretty bizarre (to me) ways of influencing the climate: e.g. making cloud condensation nuclei through ionizing radiation from sun spots or slowing or speeding the Earth's rate of spin in response to cosmic rays. These were apparently very serious scientists but presented far more correlation than clear and convincing mechanism, at least I thought. An atmospheric physicist sitting next to me said that there was no correlation between cosmic rays and clouds as he had made all the measurements. The IPCC folks were adamant that there model was built on first principles, could reproduce past changes in climate and was making proper predictions. The plenary had at the end a "debate" but it was really two ships passing in the might---each side presented its arguments-–usually using different types of logic, often arrogantly, and said the other side could not possible be right. The moderators could have done us all a service by guiding the debate to specific issues "what do each of you think about sun spot correlations even when their effect appears trivial" but that did not happen.

10) I could not at first figure out why there was so much hostility between the two climate groups. At first I thought it empiricists vs modelers, although each group was somewhat mixed. Then I concluded that it is the geologists, used to studying constant climate change over very long time periods of Earth's history, who think that basically the climate of the earth is always changing due to various forcings, and what's the big deal now? The IPCCers respond that the Earth has never seen CO2 levels such as we are headed for and that the CO2 changes produce a strong enough signal to change the climate. And on and on. John Holdren has recently prepared a point by point response to the anti IPCCers which I will try to send out. Then we can expect a rebuttal to that and so on.