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Your demands for citations are cute. If they're not in the right format, you won't read them. I'm sure that will make them go away.

To illustrate, that we've seen both kinds of predictions, and that the climate science has a long way to go to establish its credibility. These cooling papers came after Arrhenius, did not they?

Again, we can find contrarian research published about plate tectonics decades after it was accepted science. The existence of papers is not an argument for their credibility.

Arrhenius' first paper on the subject of warming is here. His prediction was about 4-6 degrees per doubling of CO2, with greater effects at the poles. That's on the high end of current estimates, but given the amount of hand-calculation he had to do, it's still a pretty impressive result.

Most of the early work on climate change was proving that it was possible for the climate to change at all, and as you can see in Arrhenius' paper, they mostly deal with the planet in an equilibrium state, and don't account for ever-increasing levels of CO2. One early attempt at modeling the globe in order to make these sorts of predictions was Hansen et al, 1988. He overestimated warming by about 15-25%; this article gives a post-mortem on his predictions. Essentially, using the same model with one slightly different physical constant reproduces the temperature trend far more precisely. An earlier study (Plass 1956) predicted a rise of 1.1 degrees C per century, assuming 1950s emissions levels. Warming since the 1950s has been on the order of .8C, so his prediction was something of an underestimate. Sawyer's prediction in 1972 was .6C by the year 2000, which was much nearer the mark.

However, you're also reversing the burden of proof. Basic physical laws suggest that a higher partial pressure of CO2 will warm the Earth, and simple laboratory experiments show a strong positive feedback from H2O.

Great! And this was all known this for decades (if not centuries), right?

The laboratory experiments on the infrared absorption of various gases date back to Tyndall (1859), and general radiative laws derived by Boltzmann (1884). A more specific overview of radiative forcing effects can be found in Myhre et al, 1998, if you're interested. So for the general idea that CO2 affects the temperature on Earth, you can look to any of the above for confirmation, or grab an IR camera and take a photograph.

So if CO2 affects the global temperature, and CO2 is measured to be increasing (which presumably you do not dispute), then wouldn't it be obvious that temperature must also increase? Not so fast! The absorption bands of CO2 and H2O overlap, and the atmosphere is so full of water vapor that it periodically precipitates. Clearly anything CO2 could do, H2O must already be doing, right? Bzzt. The flaw in this thinking is that because H2O precipitates out before it reaches the upper atmosphere and CO2 does not, allowing the latter to build up in the upper atmosphere (Kaplan 1952). Specifically, it extends the CO2-rich layer further out into space. There are a couple more details about where emission happens at what probability for a given photon of a given energy, and how many times it can expect to hit something on its way up, but again, your IR photograph should tell you that the mean free path is pretty short. This paper gives an overview of Earth's radiative balance.

I don't have to offer my own theory — because I do not seek to convince and/or compel you to alter your way of life. You seek to do that t

My father wouldn't let me read this because it's somewhat anti-feminist.

"Somewhat"? In Flatland, the social status of men is proportional to their number of sides (triangles are the lowest class, and priests are nearly circles); women are even lower, being straight lines. Women are not allowed to walk in public spaces without swaying and emitting noises, so that men do not accidentally get impaled on them. They have to enter their houses by the back door. They are considered "wholly devoid of brain-power", driven by emotion and instinct and lacking memory, and they receive no education.

But it's social satire, not a reflection of the author's views. He was "a firm believer in equality of educational opportunity, across social classes and in particular for women", and the book is attempting to highlight a Victorian mindset that was still prevalent at that time. The women in the book act in far more complex ways than their men give them credit for. The author even says "To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our Women may seem truly deplorable, and indeed it is" - he's not happy with how they're treated, and readers in Spaceland will hopefully see that it's caused by the absurd class system holding them back, though the narrator can't avoid falling back into the prejudices of his society.

The book makes more sense when you understand the context. The Annotated Flatland is quite interesting, providing some background on the author and mathematics and the society of the time.

("more sense" doesn't mean it actually does make sense - it all still seems a bit muddled to me, with a random mixture of physical differences and social differences between people, and strange science (like Lamarckian evolution where the actions of a parent affect the number of sides (hence social status) not of themselves but of their offspring), and sections that I don't understand the point of (like the whole thing about colour being discovered and then banned - it makes sense within Flatland but is it meant to be satirising anything in real life?). Much of it is probably because the world has changed so drastically in 125 years that I just can't understand where the author was coming from. But it's an interesting book despite (or perhaps because of) that.)

You must remember that it is also the way that you count the votes that matters too. You would be surprised how a slightly different method of counting the votes can give you DIFFERENT RESULTS!

Unfortunately, a method which is "the best" does not seem to lend itself immediately.

Sure to add a touch of class to any web site.

in last year's topic on the mathematics of (mostly large scale) networks. http://www.mathaware.org/mam/04/index.html

Whois says it's not commander taco (unless he went to hella trouble):

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