The argument over global warming, or climate change, becomes even more real as True Believer President-elect Barack Obama is about to take office surrounded by other leaders like Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi.  Today’s Washington Post warns us of another potential problem from our current head-in-the-sand policy, military conflict over repositioned resources.

This is actually old news. The military recognized global warming as a potential danger years ago and the report on its war gaming gave the new threat its first real publicity. As the climate changes storms, rising seas, new optimal growing areas and scarce water will cause migratration and battles over water and food.

Response to the global warming issue has ranged from Senator Inhofe’s outright denial to Bush actively trying to subvert the issue to Gore attempting to convert the world.

People hear global warming compared to regular weather patterns, ice age, and to climate change. Maybe I can make the issue a little clearer.

Weather is the day to day change in what you experience outside. Climate is the larger migration of patterns over time. So you can have a heat wave today, an el nino pattern this year,  and an ice age all at the same time affecting weather.

But really, what’s global warming? It’s a long term trend in weather that could last centuries. Many think it is man made due to our use of lots of fires, and gases from that fire that prevent the heat from escaping the earth and going out into space.

It’s a climate change, so it isn’t going to make a lot of difference in the weather you experience today or maybe even over this year. But in a long term view of weather the nudges from global warming will cause weather to trend in a direction over time.

People talk about warming and temperatures, but really, warming is heat is energy. Storms are nature’s attempt to equalize high’s and low’s in pockets of energy, or heat, around the world.

Winds are a constant  and consistent shift of energy, that’s why you have high and low pressure areas. As air warms and rises, it creates a lower pressure area just like taking a pitcher of water out of a lake. The surrounding area rushes in to fill that empty area and that movement is wind.

Hurricanes are an extreme example of energy being moved. That’s why they happen in late summer when water temperatures are the highest. Even while technology is starting to give us the ability to regulate hurricanes, many people fear the prevention even more as energy would build even higher in some areas.

So how do we know global warming is real? We can measure the temperature of many areas and see if it changes, but this only gives us a very short period to compare against.

We can estimate by looking at what goes in and comes out of the system. We know approximately how much petroleum, natural gas, coal, and wood is burned every year. We know how much heat is released (remember calories?) when you burn these products.

Of course the major source of energy is the sun. The energy coming in varies day-to-day in small cycles, there’s an 11 years solar cycle, and longer term temperature changes. We’re at solar minimum right now and sunspots are scarce. A very inactive sunspot cycle even created an iceage during the middle ages, creating crop and food shortages and strife in the population.

Surely with all the satellites we have in space we can measure the energy coming in from the sun. Along with that, we can look at infrared light (more heat) coming off the earth and get an idea of how much heat is leaving from all of this accumulation.

That infrared light carries a lot of heat. Since air rarely leaves the earch (thank goodness) light is about the only medium that can carry energy and heat out passed the atmosphere. It’s that infrared light being blocked that we worry about. CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases block infrared light from getting out. Just like a car with rolled up windows gets hot in the summer, these gases prevent cooling as light bounces off them and back to earth. But since most light from the sun comes in as visible or ultraviolet light, the higher cycle speed lets it zip right through the gases down to the earth’s surface.

Now we have an idea of what produces heat. Coal, wood, petroleum, natural gas, sunlight and other forms of solar energy. We can guess how much heat is produced from what is burned or comes in to the earth.

We know how we lose energy, mostly through infrared light, and we know what regulates the amount of energy that escapes the earth, the upper atmosphere and green house gases.

We can monitor our temperature to see if our calculations are correct, checking temperature from tens of thousands of locations around the world.

What happens is that the global temperature calculations don’t track to estimates very well unless you include carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. We know greenhouse gasses are connected to carbon fuels use and have gone up since the start of the industrial age, especially in the northern hemisphere.

Since temperatures are going up, and our estimates work well if greenhouse gases are included, and we know greenhouse gases are heavily affected by human activity, it’s a small leap to guess that humans are a large contributor to global warming.

Does that mean we’re just going to get hotter? No. Remember heat is energy, and storms are the movement of energy from areas high in energy to areas low in energy. What it means is that there’s more energy to move. Global warming is much like the carrier on old AM radios, with weather being the smaller waves riding on the carrier like music and thick headed conservative talk show hosts that deny global warming.

So colds will be colder, hots will be hotter, storms will be bigger, winds will be stronger, and everything will be less predictable because us short lived humans haven’t seen this condition before but we’ll still see variations in short term weather patters that don’t look anything like a warmer earth.

Tomorrow it may rain or it may not. But we’ll start seeing bigger hurricanes, more tornadoes, and shifting jet streams which mean different dry areas and different wet areas.

Those talk show hosts without a clue like Lou Dobbs think a year of cold weather means no global warming. They’re wrong and either stupid or deliberately misleading people for their own personal gain.

What I think we need to do is take global warming out of the hands of politicians and put it into the hands of scientists and engineers. We have a lot of smart people around the world, if we let them I have little doubt that we could quickly solve this problem. But so far we have the clueless leading the nation. Surely that means the end is  near.