Clearly, you over-estimate my abilities.

It's perverse, cause disccussions get hotter and thus climate does as well.

I don't see that the "it's our fault" step has been accepted as proven yet except in a specific area of science and other areas of science don't seem to corroborate its findings. So bankrupting the global economy to make changes that have no effect to the problem is really a waste of resources.

For information about arctic sea ice, I like this site. It has easy to read graphs created from accurate and up-to-date data, without any kind of speculation or loaded explanation.

Anyway, based on the current graphs, there's a bit more sea ice this year than last year, but it's still well below the long-term average. I wouldn't call that 'global cooling'.

I know there's some cold stuff going on in the north, but in Australia, 2013 was our hottest year on record; and the start of 2014 has been very hot so far as well. So I certainly wouldn't be betting on global cooling.

gnolam, my understanding is those charts represent the consensus of AGW among climate scientists specifically and not all scientists. If you can prove otherwise, then by all means do so.

If global warming was a certainty, there should be plenty of evidence that other sciences can regularly validate. It's hard to take either side completely seriously when the data has to be doctored to "correct" it.

I think it almost deserves being siged.
I did add it to my note of favorite quotes though.

Too many people allow their opinions to be shaped by extremist groups. It's retarded to think that something is only black, or only white.

Putting aside the precise causes of climate change, I think it's fair to say that the global climate is changing, and that the change involves generally warmer temperatures, longer draughts, bigger storms, higher sea-levels.

I think it's also fair to say that human activity contributes to this change. Maybe you think human activity accounts for 90% of the change, or maybe it's only 0.1% of the change. An important fact is that human activity is something we as humans can change, whereas other climate factors such as the earth's orbit and the energy output of the sun are not things we cannot change.

One way of looking at it is that human activity makes up 100% of the difference between the climate we have, and the climate we would have had in a world without any human activity. That's just a matter of definitions.

In any case, I think it's a good idea to try to calculate what effect human activity does have, and that's exactly what many climatologists are doing. There's not much point listening to guesses and speculation from business leaders and politicians. They only know what they've been told by experts, or what they've worked out from their high-school education and their intuition. Contributions from non-experts like that cannot be relied on as the basis for important decisions.

Here is yet another example of an expert suggesting that human-induced climate change is probably going to be a major problem for us in the future.

It really is kind of weird for a guy that is so invested in technology to cringe at the mention, but I do. I don't think that technology is going to be a quick fix. We certainly should invest in it, but I think that if we put all of our eggs in that basket then it's going to break.

"Money" is what got us into this mess. Money is a virtual thing so we need to keep that in mind. We don't need "incentives". That just sounds like padding executive officers' already inflated bonuses. I think that what we really need is governments to tax the fuels that are harming the environment, and to crack down on the corporations (and individuals!) that are getting rich from the environmental harm.

The problem is that the layman sees it as "gas prices are too high!" and the like. And frankly, we need leaders that are willing to overlook those FWP pleas and do what is needed to make actual change. We don't need to do a lot of the things that we do do. And yes, they are nice to haves, but we're at a point where we're concerned about our great grandchildren even being able to sustain themselves. Does it really matter if we have the luxuries that we do today?

Now, if by "incentives" you mean that renewable energies are given breaks, great, but ultimately the technology really isn't there yet to let those compete with the harmful fuels of our past century. And that's what people know. That is where the real power of money comes in. Start making those fuels in all forms, from the gasoline at the pump to the electricity flowing through the grid from the coal power plant too expensive to waste and people will be forced to conserve it. Of course, you run into competition issues with other nations. We need cooperation worldwide, but at the same time we really can't expect the developing nations to cooperate because they won't be suffering FWPs (even if in part it is their own fault). It's a political nightmare. Not to mention, you firstly need a transparent government so that you can be sure that the resources that are acquired are distributed intelligently instead of making public officials another form of over-paid executive officer.

I don't know. It's a complicated problem, and I don't have all of the answers, but I certainly don't trust our current politics, or economies, to solve it. We need to invest in smart people, and deter waste.

Today I watched two documentaries that I found very alarming. The first was about the inhumane treatment of orca whales (killer whales) by popular theme parts like Sea World and Sea Land. The second was (is since I'm not quite finished it, but plenty enraged) about the shortage of water in the Southern USA (e.g., California) where they begin to contemplate global warming as well as their greedy consumption of too much water for the Earth to give them. Then they dry up and start begging for water to be piped across the country to save them. My general reaction to it all is kill them all with fire. To be fair, most of the civilians are just idiots that don't know any better. Anybody making a profit should be slain, and their offspring and possibly cousins should be slain to set an example that greedy affairs are not profitable. Basically I have an extremely low opinion of humanity right now. I'm starting to think that the "terrorists" really are the good guys in all of this, but America is just an extreme example. We all need to pay attention to our wastefulness (and if you're going to waste resources waste them on exterminating the most wasteful population on the planet).

That's why you burn them with fire.