[gwright]

> Secondly when you say that the warming is insufficient to create the run-away warming predicted in climate models you're in disagreement with the vast majority of people who have actually tried to run the numbers.

I think we are talking about two different things here. The ranges you mentioned (1.0 - 3.0) and (0.9 - 2.0) are predictions for the net change in temperature over 100 years when all mechanisms are factored in.

When I said the 'warming is insufficient' I'm talking only about one factor, the greenhouse effect caused by atmospheric CO2. This one factor has been the focus of most of the policy discussions related to global warming since it is the one most closely associated with human activities.

The CO2 greenhouse effect is a single factor that contributes to the ranges you described and by itself is insufficient to create the catastrophic warming represented by the upper end of those ranges or even the mild warming represented by the lower end of those ranges. All the models presume some sort of positive feedback that adds to the warming created by the CO2.

I'm not going to dispute your statement that the new error bars overlap with the old ones but the catostrophic scenarios are obviously associated more with one particular end of the error bars so that the shift in the error bars, while not invalidating the model in their entirety, suggest that the most severe scenarios are less and less likely and it is exactly those scenarios and the policy recommendations associated with them that has been most in dispute.