It's funny to hear people look horrified when someone suggests we DO something that 'tinkers' with the weather.  Launch solar shades, put sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, increase cloud cover..

This is because we have, albeit unintentionally, been tinkering on a grand, ever increasing scale with the atmosphere for the last 150 years.  We now emit 1% of the global total of CO2 yearly, and have for last 40+ years.  We cut forests globally, changing albedo (sunlight, heat reflected off planet) and build black pavement colored roads that absorb heat.  We fly planes so much that on 9/11 global temperatures dropped a large amount more than usual as very few planes were spewing cloud cover versus normal days where they are crossing the US and the planet by the minute.

Star trek episodes aside, where Piccard comes back and mentioned the weather control bureau, looks like we should plan or account for the effects whether we limit them or not.  And certain weather modifying schemes are now within reach of the world's wealthiest individuals, who could perform 'weather terrorism' and decide to unilaterally build plants to spew sulfur clouds, etc.

Me, I'd just like to quietly retire to (soon to be) tropical beachfront property in Montana by 2050 :)

The government's inability to deal well with issues pertinent to America in general makes me wonder why we even try to reach international agreements that we inevitably fail to uphold.

I for one, welcome failure of such an ill-conceived
and costly(for no reason) piece of legislation.

A lot of what has been pushed about climate change
is slowly showing itself to be wrong...and contrary
to statements of some...the debate is not over.

Is this the same climate treaty I heard about that calls for the industrialized nations to pay massive reparations to the undeveloped third world nations because we fouled the atmosphere getting industrialized and they didn't? And "developing" nations like China and India are exempt because they are still developing? And the US would surrender its soverignity to the new world order body that will run this treaty compliance? And we will massively tax fossil fuels and drive up the cost of energy and manufacturing leaving us with a paper-shuffling service economy? Then I'm glad to hear this particular trteaty is doomed!!!

Kevin:

You're either unaware or glossing over recent history.  The House climate bill BARELY passed by 7 votes IIRC.  The real problem with this ridiculous legislation is that Americans see through the charade of AGW. 

As you noted in your posting, CO2 levels have been increasing, yet there has been no correlating increase in temperature to match the increase in CO2.  True, there have been minor spikes in temperature, and minor troughs as well, but overall, temperature increase has been flat relative to CO2 increase.  So the theory of AGW simply isn't holding up.  Here's hoping any further taxation of energy fails.

And if there was any real desire to keep energy costs low while not producing CO2, the proponents of AGW would look seriously at nuclear.  Since they're not, I can only conclude that they're insincere.

CO2 isn't the problem.

In Maryland, a new study in the International Journal of Climatology – by researchers from the University of Maryland, Purdue University, and the University of Colorado in Boulder – found that “most land-use changes, especially urbanization, result in warming. A clear exception is conversion of land from other uses to agriculture, which produces relative cooling, presumably because of increased evaporation.” Human-induced changes (warming) in climate have been viewed by most scientists as primarily the result of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The current paper is the latest of a number of studies in recent years that are shedding light on the climate change impact of land cover change.
“What we highlight here is that a significant trend, particularly the warming trend in terms of temperatures, can also be partially explained by land-use change,” said Niyogi, a Purdue earth and atmospheric sciences professor and the Indiana state climatologist, who is the corresponding author of the article.The study found that, the more vegetation covering an area of land, the cooler its contribution to surface temperature; Conversion to agriculture results in cooling, while conversion from agriculture generally results in warming. Deforestation generally results in warming, with the exception of a shift from forest to agriculture.
- from biofuelsdigest

And...
Landmark study re-models soot impact in climate change, rivals carbon
US researchers have remodeled soot emissions, concluding that soot is causing nearly 60 percent of the global warming impact of CO2, and because soot has a shorter lifecycle than carbon emissions (that can last for up to 100 years), tackling soot offers a “faster win” against climate change than carbon strategies.
The article, in Nature Geoscience, concluded that previous soot models had not previously accounted for the absorption of reflected sunlight. In possible confirmation of the data, significantly higher soot concentrations are found in the Arctic than Antarctic, and observations in the northern polar region show higher ice-melting rates not previously explained by the carbon emission model of climate change.
“Between 25% and 35% of black carbon in the global atmosphere comes from China and India, emitted from the burning of wood and cow dung in household cooking and through the use of coal to heat homes. Countries in Europe and elsewhere that rely heavily on diesel fuel for transportation also contribute large amounts,” commented nature.com on the sources of soot emissions.

So let's halt the CO2 legislation, and fix the real problems - aerosol pollutants, and deforestation.