What is this "Preposition" which you speak of?

You're not supposed to hammer those in, just push them up with your finger.

Phew.. What a topic! To the OP, ZombieRus5.. Climate change is a more accurate term than "global warming". The Earth has gone through, and will go through many, many, many more cycles of warming and cooling. The geological record shows this quite readily. Our beautiful blue world has been both a frozen wasteland all the way to the equator and a boiling hellish inferno!

Did we as humans cause the current climate trends? Maybe. Are we the sole cause? Nope. Are we making them worse? Well, physics are physics, and with that.. Yes. We are making it worse. Green house gas increases temperature. Fact. The debate shouldn't be about "who did it!?" but rather.. Let's fix it. To those that say there isn't anything to fix.. I pose this statement to you.. When I was a small child, there were these things called "polar ice caps".. Yeah, 'bout that.. Have any of you seen the images of 30+ years ago verses today? Here you go, have at it denial meets reality, finds acceptance--one hopes. 

At the end of the day, what does any of this mean for most of us? What can we do? The truth is, not much. No one wants to see any sort of global extinction event, but right now our hope lies in the hands of the scientists working on future energy technologies. What we can do is mitigate our impact until they can make clean energy a reality. Talking about a climate change, abundant clean energy, that would certainly change a lot of things.

I also saw someone in an earlier post mention something about scarce resources leading to WWIII? That simply will not happen. You may have forgotten, but I certainly haven't.. Far too many nuclear powers out there now for an actual world war to be a thing. It would be each of the Nuke Nations flipping the others off one final time after the first shot was fired, and an hour later.. just shadows on the walls.

I'd rather not have us end it there, humanity is far too interesting to just fade out. Let me grab my browncoat, then we got places to go, things to see. Right now it's just (not to trivialize) growing pains. We'll get through it, and over the last century we've built up a lot of momentum, so let us keep it up and moving forward.

In closing, PRO TIP: Do not attempt to change someone's mind via debate. It is futile. All anyone will do is further solidify their views, be they grounded in reality or delusion. Put the information out there and let people draw their own conclusions, because that is what they will do anyway. However, if you rather enjoy arguing with a wall.. Good for you! Here, have cookie.

You know your geological history, so this shouldn't be that difficult to grasp.  The ice caps are a combination of two things.  The first is regular climate shifts cause by current, orbit, etcetera.  The polar caps switch between receding and building quite regularly, this is known information.  This behavior is also true in other glacial formations around the world.  Many of them are building right now, as others shrink.  The second is the whole glacial/interglacial bit.  When we had ice down to the equator, that's when Antarctica turned into a giant block of ice over a mile thick.

They're supposed to be melting off, we have dick to do with that fact.  Are we making them melt off faster?  Water blocks about 97% of the infrared spectrum.  The "science" is claiming 20% of the greenhouse effect is from CO2.  History shows similar local climates today as there were in the 30's.  The US was, by simple observation of history, a bit hotter in the dust bowl era than it is now.  Our temperature record, before it's "corrected" by the scientists, bears this out.  After it's corrected, the temperature tracks that show an unusual warming trend over the century, instead of nearly even peaks 70 years apart.

I'll take a wild guess and say 20% is bullshit, or I'd be looking at mile after mile of dead vegetation, instead of a lush carpet of weeds that just wont die.  When they stop falsifying history in ways you can spot by googling it, I'll start paying attention.  Until then, AGW is the diatribe of people with an agenda.

And besides, for a lot of people that would constitute a brain implant, and that is the subject of an entirely different thread.

Now what gets me on the Climate Change debate is one side says -

"I'm right and you're wrong and if you don't believe my sources then you are a flat-earther, wear a tinfoil hat, wave your arms frantically and are conspiracy theorists". As well as other name-calling choices.

Hard to have any kind of honest debate with that attitude.

Nobody is disputing Climate Change. What is in dispute is the man-made contribution to Climate Change.

Have to part ways with you there, Doc.  There is ample evidence of distortion (or worse) of significant, key bits of those 'mountains of data, analysis, credentials, models, etc.' by highly vocal 'scientists actually researching the problem' in support of a political agenda, or at minimum in support of keeping the grant pipeline flowing.  I subscribe to no conspiracy theory.  But I do recognize the possibility of commonality of bias and belief and see evidence of otherwise/ostensibly objective scientists being swayed by that commonality of bias.

Furthermore, I believe you'd see less skepticism if there was no connection between climate research and a political agenda, the economic result of which would be wildly disproportionately negative for those subjected to it (and wildly profitable to its advocates and implementers).

We may or may not have a 'diagnosis'.  If we make the leap of faith and for argument's sake accept the diagnosis as correct, the proposed 'therapeutic interventions' offer unknown near- or long-term benefit but known near-term toxicity.

Dr. K's article would seem appropriate to link here.

Note - Don't know why the quote function attributes the quote to jackswift85 - it was quoted from a reply by DrJBHL (EDIT - which seems to be missing now ?!?).

Right, as opposed to the "You're wrong and I'm right and if you don't believe my rants, then you're a gullible sheep who's been hoodwinked into eating the BS climate scientists give you." that the other side says.   As far as the flat-earth label goes, I've always said that skepticism is a healthy thing and we wouldn't have gotten past a flat earth without it. In fact, one of the hoax arguers, in an attempt to portray AGW as foolish, linked to a statement saying the president of the Flat-Earth Society endorses AGW. For other name-calling shenanigans, I call tinfoil hats on people saying it's a conspiracy (of which there is quite a bit in this thread) and arm-waving on posts that have a bunch of hooey with no data to back it up (again, quite a bit in this thread). If you go back and look, most of the arguments posted by those who deny humans are causing climate change are unsupported and have no credible links to reliable data or analysis (usually with a "google it"), whereas the arguments accepting AGW have reliable facts, data, analysis and conclusions to support them. If we truly have nothing to fear and AGW is all a big scam, then science will bear that out and will convince people like me. But in the meantime, the science we have shows that this is a serious problem and we can do something about it.

It's interesting that you can see a link between climate scientists and a political agenda, yet see no political links with climate "skeptics". Even the article you linked had quite a bit of inflammatory rhetoric and an obvious political bias. Despite that I did agree with the article's premise and that it makes no sense for America to grab the climate change bull by the horns when the upcoming developing nations are building coal-fired power plants every week. It's kind of like being forced to live in a house full of chain smokers... even if you quit you'll probably get cancer anyways, so there's no point in trying. One can only hope that we can improve our technology to make greener power more profitable and not hamstring our economy. I hope there's private enterprises and government grant money going towards solving that problem. 

Don't know, Jafo.  Reports I've read say our CO2 output is back to 1992 levels.*  Should count for somethin'.

To the extent that opposing crippling our economy on, at best, dubious grounds is political, I see those links.

*EDIT: The upside of all that outsourcing of manufacturing, no?

I accept that as a given.  Nothing to do with the AGW hypothesis, however.

As for the decrease to 1992 CO2 level production - that's a bad thing?

For those that apparently love folk tales to describe issues with society- we can use Chicken Little here.

Melbourne [Australia] had its warmest July [winter] on record last month.

Annoyingly it was bloody freezing on Sunday tho .... we went on a car run with the MG Car Club 250k ..... but too cold to have the roof off....