Climate Change and "Aha!"

The often-truculent and always-interesting Carpe Diem has a link up re climate change and the tone, I think, is jubilant. "Climate warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence," reports Professor Perry, the proprietor, summarizing a new study (link). "A Very Inconvenient Peer-Reviewed Climate Study," he declares.

I admit I am not a very good a very good team player on climate change. I tend to find Al Gore's emissions exhausting, and I thought Scientific American way out of line when it refused to let Bjørn Lomborg (link) use its copy on his website as a rebuttal to charges against him ; (details here). I suspect that climate change is (the last refuge of a cowardly liberal) "a complicated issue."

Yet on the whole, I think the general proposition that we experience human-caused global warming must surely be right; it beggars all expectation that we could plunk six billion people onto this rock without some external effects. In context, therefore, Professor Perry's "aha!" attititude strikes me as at least surprising, not a little implausible. Which prompts two thoughts.

One, does Professor Perry really believe that we can plunk six billion people onto this rock without some external effect? He says he is an economist; has he no sense of limits, of choice under constraint?

Second, a more general question: has Professor Perry ever carried out a piece of research whose conclusions countered his expectations? The question is not rhetorical; I have no idea what his answer might be. But it might be a good general test for any researcher (particularly in economics). Has s/he ever had occasion to write "the results of this inquiry suprised us..."