Yes, it is...probably best to desist.

Your 'econuts' are retracing Douglas Mawson's expedition from 1912-13.

Look it up. You 'might' learn something and help camoflage your ignorance.

I guess 'econuts' is slightly better than 'greenpeace activists'.

Frogboy, I appreciate your responses (mainly 1704)...I mainly just wanted to make sure I fully understood your position, which I believe I do, or at least better than I did before...there is one thing I want to clarify, so I'll start with these:

Certainly of course without a heat source (like the sun or the earth's core), greenhouse gases are irrelevant...so, perhaps I should clarify that when I say "CO2 can increase temperature in and of itself" I am assuming that we already have a heat source...my reason for using that phrase "in and of itself" was to make clear that CO2 does not rely on a driver (such as Milankovitch cycles) to affect temperature...in other words, while CO2 may not have historically driven temperatures, it does not require a driver to raise temperatures...ergo, CO2 can raise temperatures in and of itself...that probably was poor word choice on my part...

I am, however, a little confused on your analogy...so we have a room that can burn when a flame is introduced, and when old newspapers are added to the room the fire is bigger than it would be other wise...in this analogy, the room would be the earth and the flame would be the sun (as it is the primary heat source)...without old newspapers, the room still burns provided you have a flame (just as the sun would still heat the earth)...of course, adding the newspapers makes the fire worse just as adding greenhouse gases makes the earth warmer...

So, with that interpretation, we are left with this comparison: just as newspapers can't start a fire without a flame, greenhouse gases can't increase temperatures without a heat source...but we (at least for several billions years) will always have a heat source, and so for the analogy to hold your room would always have to have a flame/fire...

So I guess my question is, what is the purpose of your analogy?  If used logically, it doesn't show that AGW is wrong -- if anything it shows how AGW could be right, and I don't believe that's how you intended the analogy to be used...

That analogy was/is the main source of my confusion...you acknowledge, through your statements, that simply adding greenhouse gases can in fact cause temperatures to increase (the amount of course being debatable) -- but then the way you have used the analogy suggests you believe greenhouse gases require some other force beyond a simple heat source to cause temperature increases...in other words, when I read your analogy I feel like you are denying CO2's ability to cause temperatures to increase, but that doesn't seem to be your actual position on the issue...

EDIT:

My understanding of the hypothesis is that the Milankovitch cycles caused only a fraction of the historical temperature changes, the implication then being that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations accounted for the rest of the historical temperature changes...I don't have specific numbers for this, but when I read about the hypothesis the picture coming to mind is something like 5% of the temperature change being Milankovitch cycle and the other 95% being from a feedback loop involving increases/decreases of greenhouse gases...not terribly convincing or informative, I know, but who said climatology was an exact science?

I'm afraid I have to agree with this... almost every extreme thing gets blamed on global warming, even if there's not that much global warming yet. Media hypes about record hot months and record hot summers... it's just too much.

Record setting temperatures don't work that way... they're due to a set of regional effects, like due to a temperature inversion so that heat cannot escape into the upper atmosphere. Such extremes exceed the average by a lot, like 5 degrees or more. A general 1 degree warming is just dwarfed by the other effects... so far at least.

I've read about some research in the Amazon forests. The researches claimed the forests were drying out and would be destroyed by a catastrophic wildfire... except that never happened. And they blamed it on global warming.

All of that hype... I don't like it either, it's too soon for that. There'll be plenty of time for crying when the temperatures rise a few degrees further. And sure it's possible that the Amazon will dry out and eventually disappear, but now .... it just seems to soon for that.

So far I think the global warming is mostly statistical in nature. Lots of things take place: slightly hotter summers, slightly warmer winters, more melting of glaciers... but nothing catastrophic and mind-boggling. I think it's too soon and there's plenty of time for the real disasters to take place as warming continues.

The exception may be the North Pole... that seems pretty extreme, but then again, that's an extreme environment to begin with and it seems like there's some huge warming feedback going on there. After all there's a huge difference between a situation of extensive ice-cover and very cold temperatures (high albedo and low humidity with low absorption of heat by water vapor) and open water (with low albedo and high levels of water vapor). It might still serve as an example for what's in store for us in the longer run.

Nope... must be another one of those hypes ?

Yeah must be, found a blog of this fellow who has a pretty strong opinion on the subject

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100237031/you-genuinely-have-to-be-an-idiot-to-think-that-arctic-sea-ice-is-recovering/

The global sea ice trend, however, is less steep with a mean decrease of about 4% since 1980.

As long as no evidence is required, we can accept anything as fact.

Cool... Somebody has a lab that recreates the Earth's climate under controlled conditions over millions of years.  Who knew?  We can put this thread to bed now, finally.

Don't bore me with all that 'partial pressure' stuff.  I just wanna twiddle the knobs on that thing.  

Speaking of twiddling...

This is why I enjoy the arrogance of AGW proponents who claim the models are good enough and we must act based on their predictions.

Wait for it....

                                                                IPCC3, 2001

I don't want to repeat myself, again, but ok ...

I already know that models are not perfect.

They're the best we've got for predicting the future.

And they contain the best of our knowledge.

You want to throw all that out of the window, just because they are not perfect??? Imho that's just ridiculous. I would prefer to use the results, and if they don't match reality, then it just means that our understanding of nature isn't yet good enough and they need to be tweaked.

Also... I sincerly doubt that you need to be able to model a single cloud, just to be able to predict a global phenomon. There's also something like insensitivity to small details... if you look at the greater picture. The presence of a single cloud ... while it might change the future in a chaotic system, it won't change the average of many model runs.

There's also a misconception about modeling... models are NEVER perfect and they shouldn't be.

Just suppose that someone invents a unifying theory of everything and we'd have a model that could recreate reality perfectly.... then it wouldn't tell you anything, nothing at all. You could run a simulation that looks like earth, but you don't have any understanding about this virtual Earth, in the exact same way as it's hard to understand our real Earth.

Just suppose we'd increase CO2 in such a virtual Earth...

You'd have the exact same discussion as we'd have now... you wouldn't understand shit.

He uses examples from old research... he doesn't go into any of the basic physics ... he laughs about a 1 degree warming ... he doesn't go into the issue what these observations mean for the next 100 years .. he makes a comparison of climate science with eugenics ... the only thing that I'm left wondering after looking at this video is: what's wrong with this fellow? Is he out of his mind??

Interesting, is that just one more paper on the subject or is there now less uncertainty about how clouds will respond to warming?

Here's a little article I found which discusses a paper from a researchers who obviously suffers from some serious tunnel vision.

http://www.livescience.com/15293-climate-change-cloud-cover.html

This is a nice quote from the article: "I cannot believe it got published," said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Scientists flaming other scientists... but oh well, they're only people and this is as old as science.

It is a shame that science in general is discredited by a small bunch of such losers who think they know better.

Journalists are also to blame for this.

And big egoes.

And perhaps also private sponsoring.

(The exact same goes for the extremists from the "pro" side of course).

Perhaps I'll add one more challenging statement:

If CO2 keeps being added uncontrollably to the atmosphere, its effects are predicted to out-perform any other possible mechanisms that control temperature on the earth (cloud cover, humidity feedback, the sun, oceanic circulation, ice caps and albedo, volcanism).

Do people agree with this?