At least in the U.S. (and judging by material on the net, increasingly in Canada and Australia as well), debate about climate change long ago left the scientific arena, and entered the world of politics. As a result, if you're trying to figure out for yourself where the truth lies, you're confronted with a confusing mess of information -- some of it is scientific, but much of it is pure garbage packaged as science. In the interest of helping people sort out solid science from the deliberate misinformation (as well as from well-intentioned but poorly-informed material), I'm going to be doing a series of episodes on climate in general, and climate change in particular. This episode is the first in that series, and is intended to give everybody a very quick background in some terminology and concepts involved in climate science. In upcoming weeks, I'll be lining up all the arguments I can find on all sides of the climate change argument, then essentially throwing bricks at them all. The idea is to subject all arguments to a scientific "acid test," then once the arguments are reduced to a subset with a reasonably sound scientific basis, we'll see what the "surviving" data has to tell us.