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""According to The Simpsons, a "scientician" is "a scientist with questionable credentials who publicly supports spurious hypotheses.""

Ah, so that's what that Monckton chap who claims to be in the House of Lords ( and isn't ) and a Nobel laureate ( and isn't ) and a climate expert ( and isn't ) actually is!

And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).

Oh really? Who are these people who are predicting ice ages in the 1970s, and which of them are today predicting climate disaster?

"Scientists in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age" is a myth, based on basically one paper by Rasool and Schneider, plus some confusion with scientists talking about ice ages in thousands or tens of thousands of years.

You might read this to start.

And they're all dead wrong.

On the contrary, they reproduce temperatures quite well and precipitation decently.

The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are.

We have reasonable data for over 100 years, and even 50 years of data tells us a lot about how accurate they are, as the measurement error is quite smaller than the visible trend.

None of them are predictive.

That's nonsense. Even a simple two-equation energy balance model is decently predictive for global temperature, and the GCMs do much better, not just time trends but also spatial patterns, for atmospheric and ocean temperatures, top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes, precipitation at least at the zonal level, etc.

And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing"

You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Of course they don't match the historical data without forcing. Forcing is what makes the climate change: changes in greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, sulphate aerosols, etc. With no forcing, the climate just hovers around an equilibrium state.

You're simply saying "models can't reproduce warming temperatures unless you include a source of heating". Well duh.

and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right".

Again, duh. Pretty much every model in the world requires its parameters to be calibrated from data; you can pretty much never calculate anything from first principles, unless you're talking particle physics. That doesn't mean that models aren't predictive. The question is whether you can adjust the parameters to reproduce the observed climate without substantial input from anthropogenic forcings, and the answer is no.

Here's an interesting paper (from a real journal).

That's not a real journal, it's an un-peer reviewed newsletter, and the paper was written by a journalist, not a scientist. Monckton's "critique" is just a horrible train wreck of absurd errors, some of which are being detailed here, here, and here.

Since you quote that part specifically, I should note that his claim that the IPCC takes its feedbacks from one paper is absurd. The feedback factor is just another word for "climate sensitivity"; model based computations of the feedbacks are found in chapter 8 of the latest IPCC WG1 report, and observational estimates of the sensitivity are found in chapter 9. The relevant sections cite dozens of papers.

Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.

Let me know when you have any valid objections with supporting evidence.

What is your definition of "virtually inexhaustible"? Mine would be "more than enough to power current human activity for mind-blowing timescales". Which is a property that geothermal energy has. The total heat energy in the Earth is enough for about five billion years of current energy usage.

The numbers given aren't imaginary. They're just unachievable. My interpretation of the report is that the 40% figure would require a geothermal energy installation for each square kilometer throughout the U.S. The authors seem to think that, while geothermal is only viable in very limited geographical areas, the technology will rapidly improve to the point where all sorts of locations will be cost competitive. Once we get to the point where you could put an economical geothermal plant anywhere across, say, 1% of the continental U.S., then we have the option of replacing our entire baseload with geothermal.

It would take a very long time to cool the core significantly (given present energy usage). I'd be a bit more concerned about the effects on plate tectonics near the surface; we could certainly alter the temperatures of the first couple miles of crust if we made a concerted effort to do so.

The amount of stored energy in the Earth is huge, so worrying about draining the battery is probably useless. I'd be more worried about how individual geothermal stations alter the local geology.

I think the effects on atmospheric temperatures would be negligible. Most of the geothermal energy we'd be using would be displacing other sources of heat like coal and nuclear power. More important, all our energy usage is irrelevantly small when compared to the torrent of energy coming out of the sun. Because geothermal energy prevents CO2 from getting into the atmosphere, then that will help out enormously. The rest is just rounding errors.

But it sounds like that is what they're proposing. As far as I'm aware, the natural flow of geothermal energy from below the surface is only 45 TW, and the world already using close to 15 TW, so the total available is 3 times world energy use, not 250,000 times ???

We've all seen the talking points from the PR firms of the chemical and oil industries... your regurgitation of them adds nothing new.

If you're a "concerned citizen" who is reciting them and NOT getting paid, you're an idiot as well as a troll. Go check out Techcentralstation for how to get on the gravy train.

For real information from actual scientists working in the field, the rest of slashdot can check out:
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.altenergyaction.org/

I tend to agree with you on that one - electric powered vehicles, especially if they can be somehow grid-connected while in motion (trains do it!) would be far better than any hydrogen vehicle proposed yet. The biodiesel or other biomass suggestions of others on the board are also pretty feasible. Some analysis of all this is over at the Alternative Energy Action Network - see the articles by David Doty on projections for hydrogen cost and future fuels.

I tend to agree with you on that one - electric powered vehicles, especially if they can be somehow grid-connected while in motion (trains do it!) would be far better than any hydrogen vehicle proposed yet. The biodiesel or other biomass suggestions of others on the board are also pretty feasible. Some analysis of all this is over at the Alternative Energy Action Network - see the articles by David Doty on projections for hydrogen cost and future fuels.

I tend to agree with you on that one - electric powered vehicles, especially if they can be somehow grid-connected while in motion (trains do it!) would be far better than any hydrogen vehicle proposed yet. The biodiesel or other biomass suggestions of others on the board are also pretty feasible. Some analysis of all this is over at the Alternative Energy Action Network - see the articles by David Doty on projections for hydrogen cost and future fuels.

the cost of energy from nuclear is only slightly higher than from coal, taking into account all capital, repair, and fuel costs.

That depends on what you assume for the effective cost of capital, and the estimates for capital cost itself - nuclear advocates paint pictures as low as $1500/kW, but it's not clear that's really achievable in a modern western nation. All the nuclear plants in the US were built at least 30 years ago, so we don't really have good numbers for the modern cost of building a plant.

And what people are talking about now are completely new designs, so you have to factor in prorated R&D costs as well, for proper comparison.

In any case, if you really want nuclear to replace fossil fuels (not just for electric production, but for transportation as well) we're not just doubling or tripling the number of plants in the world - we'd have to go to a world with tens of thousands of power-plant-scale fission reactors. Why do you suppose nuclear advocates never mention that actual scale that would be needed?