And @syphax, you are the embarrassing one, given your tendencies towards ridiculing someone for attemping [sic] to extend their own understanding.

That's rich. You've been throwing thunderbolts all over this forum, and now you are but a humble soul simply seeking knowledge? Priceless. You are truly a victim.

You titled one of your posts "Arguments need facts." I was helping by correcting some of your incorrect facts.

Why not summarize the answer to my question as @kirpi so ably did?

Because he's a nicer guy? You should also note that I never insulted you- I just pointed out several times that your understanding of climate science and basic physics is poor. Which it is. That's not an insult, it's an observation. I never called you names, and I gave you some pointers, including a link to one of my favorite scientific papers.

Is an advanced Science degree a prequisite for debunking hokum and exaggeration and commenting on the reality of conflicting views amongst bona fida experts?

It sure helps with the quality of said activities.

Seriously, I think people on both sides of this issue need to cool down and do some self-assessment. Some of the gloom-and-doomers exaggerate way too much. And almost all skeptics primarily rely on arguments that contain bad facts and/or bad logic. Note that I am not demonizing skeptics or saying that they are all 100% wrong- hardly. But most of the skepticism (and much of the advocacy) is driven by ideological biases, rather than rational analysis of the facts.

The null hypothesis, based on basic physics, has to be that we are making the climate warmer. The precautionary principle suggests that we should do something about it. If Lindzen's iris (or similar) comes through and shows that our climate is 95% likely to save us from ourselves through some sort of strong negative feedback, good news! There's lots of other problems in the world to worry about without global warming.

So Santos, my good friend. Let's sing a round of kumbaya, hold hands, and crack open the IPCC report, shall we? It may be an imperfect document, but it's damn well a good place to start.

chromehawk, thanks for providing a working example!

Mars: Dust: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070404-mars-warming.html

Triton: It's getting to be summer there: http://science.nasa.gov/current/event/mit.htm

And so on. Talk about cherry-picking data.

You seem to be inferring that the sun is causing all this warming. But yet direct observation of the sun doesn't support that. See: http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant

Where's the sharp upward trend? Crikey.

Also, here's another logical flaw in your approach. Let's say the sun was increasing its output. Without demonstrating that CO2 doesn't cause warming, which you haven't, all that means is that our situation is more dire (because we are facing warming from the sun and from CO2), so more aggressive action is required.

If you want to maintain business as usual, what you should do is find some data that says the sun is actually decreasing output long-term, so we need the CO2 to keep us comfy. BTW it has decreased over the past few years, as part of the 11 year cycle...

That, or find the negative feedback that will minimize the warming from CO2. That's the missing link for arguing against CO2.

People act like the heat-trapping aspect of increase CO2 is unproven or speculative. It's not: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#S2

Yeah, some of the climate feedbacks are pretty uncertain, and could be found to be game-changing (one way or the other). Meanwhile, hurry up and wait may not be a good bet.

... at least until Greenpeace kept shutting down our field experiments (first in Hawaii, then in Norway). I then bailed from academia (for that and other reasons).

Putting CO2 in the deep ocean (not what Statoil is doing) itself is not a hot idea, but it's arguably less worse than emitting to the atmosphere (from whence the excess goes into the oceans' surface waters, lowering the pH- at least in the deep ocean the CO2 is more likely to interact with mineral carbonate, nature's antacid).

Putting CO2 under the seabed like Statoil is doing is probably pretty safe. Certain geological structures have proven to be very effective at trapping stuff like, you know, oil and gas for long periods of time.

Sequestration doesn't feel like an elegant solution, and it's not. But given that the magic solar pixie isn't going to give us $1/W solar at industrial volumes any time really soon, we need to keep all options on the table. I personally like biochar-based organic sequestration (biomass to terra preta), but that's not exactly ready for prime time at any scale just yet.

Hey, Long Term Capital Management wasn't investing in crazy stuff, they were vaccuming up nickels as spreads between various instruments fluttered about.

But they were leveraged out the wazoo to make their schemes sufficiently profitable.

And yes, that eventually bit them in the ass, and they nearly took down half of Wall Street with them.

I realize a little leverage here and there can be useful. But it seems like every Wall Street clusterf--- has too much leverage as a root cause.

I'm not a huge fan of onerous regulations on stuff like hedge funds, but crikey, this pattern has repeated itself enough to show that something is broken.