To "I are a modeler we_need_Abe" and "Flimflam Marc Jeric" - if you are going to present yourselves as scientists at least start with a correct definition of the system. Water vapor is in an equilibrium cycle with a rapid response time - it is not an independent variable but part of the system to be modeled. You can neither add nor remove water vapor; there are things called oceans and evaporation and all that. The CO2 and methane in living things is also rapidly recycled as dead things rot. There is storage of CO2 in the oceans but the around tens-of-years absorption cycle is slowing as the CO2 acidifies the oceans.

The CO2 we add to the atmosphere from buried carbon (coal/oil/natural gas,permafrost peat/coral/clathrates) represents hundreds of millions of years of CO2 bound in plants and covered up. Humans have never lived in such climate.

-- Oh yeah Marc Jeric, are you the same engineer who wrote such a scientific letter to the editor saying "right on" to Pat Buchanan's dismissal of evolution? Nice to see you have distinguished credentials.

In the 60's, the tobacco companies started a well-financied public relations campaign to raise doubt and discredit not just the tobacco health studies but science in general. Doubt, redirection, delay and attacks on scientist's motivations were found to be more effective than denial. Their success at delaying tobacco regulation for more than 50 years has spawned an entire industry devoted to undercutting the authority of science to help thwart regulation of pollution, energy production, work and public health and safety issues, dangerous or ineffective foods, medicines and nutritional supplements. The global warming deniers aren't surviving on public donations but money from coal, oil and at one time the car manufacturers.

An interesting example is Frederick Seitz who moved seamlessly (after retiring from real science) from tobacco denial to ozone hole denial to global climate change denial while cashing in the whole way.

Your understanding of heat transfer in the atmosphere is wrong. Look up black body radiation. You seem to understand that the earth and sun radiate photons including those in the thermal range but not what happens with CO2. At energies/wavelengths where CO2 can absorb photons it can re-emit them. CO2 is transparent at high energy (sun=hot) wavelengths but dark/black at longer wavelengths (around the earths temperature) so it tends to catch the light coming from the earth and reemit it back towards the earth.("Reflection") Incoming sunlight pretty much comes straight through until it hits the earth. (Unless it hits a cloud. Another part of the problem to understand - low clouds reflect/re-emit more light downward, high clouds more back into space.) Transfer of heat by molecular collision is relatively unimportant as it takes a long time to move the heat very far and the atmosphere is thick. The altitude temperature profile and effects of night and day are dominated by radiative processes not collisions.

Think heat lamps to understand the importance of light in heat trnsfer.

Steele The First reduces the global climate change discussion to moronic talking point by discovering that baking soda has CO2 and proposing ending baking. I'm surprised he forgot to mention beer. Similarly, Rush Limbaugh declares proof that global climate change is a hoax on every summer day that dawns chillier than normal. Of course, real scientists know that cold days in summer really disprove a different scientific concept- that summers are warm and winters are cold.

Technically the CO2 released from beer is CO2 previously removed from the atmosphere by the barley plants thus the CO2 is merely recyled. Only buried carbon such as oil,coal,natural gas,tundra peat, corals, clathrates which represent CO2 previously removed from the atmosphere over the last few hundred million years can add CO2 to the atmosphere. With baking powder it depends on the source of the CO2 gas bubbled into the manufacturing process whether there is a net addition to the atmosphere. Most CO2 comes from plant sources. This means most CO2 actually released by baking powder is generated by the fossil fuels used to power the factory.

Phillyfanatic goes off in his own direction - Would you also have said wait, don't build levees around New Orleans until you know the Hurricane is going to hit it? (Actually that's pretty much what they did.) Some of the effects of warming climate are solidly predictable such as drying in the American Southwest. Permanent drought will clearly be expensive. People live and farm where climate makes it possible now, moving cities and farms is expensive. Increased flooding of low areas is both expensive and deadly.

Also Phillyfanatic, stem cells don't come from aborted babies -do some research.