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There is no anthropogenic hypothesis. That argument is a red herring and a perfect example of a tragedy of the commons. Just because your actions alone do not influence climate, that does not mean it is inconceivable for the collective efforts of humanity to influence climate. The Northern Atlantic cod fishery collapse is a contemporary example of the phenomenon. But to address your question:

The Earth has well known indicated and inferred reserves of coal, gas, and oil. They are not currently part of the short term carbon cycle. As we oxidise these reserves, we add a known quantity of carbon to the atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been measured over several decades, and has been increasing. If the carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere, the Earth has to warm (physics). Up to this point, I have been stating facts that you--personally--can verify in your kitchen; the hypothesizing begins here:
1. Is there a mechanism that can offset the heating or buffer the carbon dioxide?
2. Is there a mechanism that can remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

The falsifiable, hypothetical answer to those two questions is "no". Our best understanding of climate does not offer any obvious short term carbon sinks or heat sinks. If you want to put a time-scale on it, the Ocean could potentially buffer the atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide on the order of maybe 1000 years. Unless another buffer exists, significant consequences should manifest in the next 50-100 years.

I hope you are being serious, because those are actually important questions and strike at the core of the science (not the politics) of Global Warming.

3/4 of the world is water how many consistent accurate readings do we have from the oceans before say 1950.

Sea surface temperature is a good global thermometer and was first systematically recorded during the Challenger Expedition from 1872-1876. Read "135 years of global ocean warming between the Challenger expedition and the Argo Programme" for more detail.

So we have sixty years of accurate readings world wide could there possibly be a 70 year trend that we are missing ?

The simple answer is: Yes, there could be a 70 year trend we are missing. The El Nino cycle was arguably only first described in detail in 1969, so it is possible there are other trends we do not know about.

The planet is 4 billion years old, the last ice age was 10,000 years ago I don't think the sample is large enough for us to make a good decision.

There are temperature paleo-proxies that can be used as thermometers for the deep past. Some examples include sediment cores, ice cores, corals, tree rings, and leaf remains which provide a variety of information about the climate based on stable isotopes and other indicators. Ice cores give us a continuous record going back hundreds of thousands of years, while other proxies give incomplete records from millions of years in the past. I encourage you to challenge the validity of these proxies and learn about stable isotope fractionation.

How much of the atmosphere is CO2... not 90 percent but less than one percent correct and what is the the human contribution to that only a small fraction.

The atmosphere contains about 820 Pg of carbon, approximately 0.04% by volume. Each year, the net flux of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuels and land use changes is estimated at approximately 4.1(±0.04) Pg -- only 0.5% increase per year.

We are not the cause.

While the Earth's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide has a disproportionately large effect on controlling temperature. To prove it to yourself, you can do a physical experiment with two soda bottles and some alka-seltzer. We are measurably the cause of a small net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (see above); however, if you want to be sceptical you should ask whether that short term increase will lead to a long term temperature change.

The IPCC directs no funding for research. The pay the expenses of scientists and others when they get together to discuss what to put in the reports.

The Amazon claims in the IPCC did have scientific research to back them up. To quote the author of the studies, Daniel Nepstad:

"In sum, the IPCC statement on the Amazon was correct. The report that is cited in support of the IPCC statement (Rowell and Moore 2000) omitted some citations in support of the 40% value statement."

Rowell and Moore 2000 was the non-peer reviewed paper that the IPCC cited for the Amazon claims.

Here are the citations of peer reviewed literature that should have been in there to back it up:

Nepstad 1994
Nepstad 1997
Nepstad 2004

And other studies since the IPCC report:

Nepstad 2007
Phillips 2009

So the IPCC's claims about the Amazon weren't wrong, just poorly referenced.

It's nothing new, either. Remember that Russia is one of the major oil-exporting countries, and significantly dependent on oil exports for its budget. Furthermore, it's a major provider of gas, too, particularly to Europe. If, under the guise of combating climate change, Europe moves to greener power generating and heating tech - solar, wind, or better yet, nuclear - that will leave Russia out in the cold, with no well-paying customers for its only valuable exports.

On the other hand, Russia actually stands to benefit a lot from rapid climate change, if current models are to be believed. For one, it has a legitimate claim to a huge chunk of resources under the polar cap, should the latter melt - that even leaving the disputed areas aside. Furthermore, Siberia would be one of the regions for which climate change would indeed be a regional warming - it is already heating up much faster than any other part of the globe, and if it keeps doing so, it will become much more prospective for human settlement and agriculture, and in short-term perspective provide for easier access to the vast natural resources of the region.

At the same time, there are relatively few important coastal cities that would be threatened by ocean level rise - vast majority of the population is living deep inland.

So Russia would have much less trouble coping with the effects. The icing on the cake is that U.S. (because of its heavily populated coastal cities) and quite a few European countries would be in a very tough position, and those are perceived as historical global opponents, especially the U.S.

So, yeah. There are a lot of political reasons for Russia to downplay effects of climate change, specifically so that other countries reduce their efforts to combat it.

Vostok ice core data: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/ vostok/vostok.html
CO2 concentrations over the last 600000 years: http://www.realclimate.org/epica.jpg

Sadly, I can't find the graph that superposes the temperature record over the CO2 record. I'm sure another 30 minutes of googling for it will yield it.

The spike is over the last 150 years or so, and basic modeling techniques show you that it is abnormal. All your questions can be answered by looking through the two graphs I provided you.

Alright, I exaggerated when I said that our CO2 output dwarfs all natural emissions. You're right, that's probably wrong. However, our emissions are currently not being absorbed as fast as they are generated, and total concentrations are rising quite nicely. That's the key part - we are putting stuff into the regular cycle that doesn't get absorbed.

I know you don't think that it's affecting the earth. You still haven't given a reason why, despite the well known physics of infrared absorption, which are described quite nicely here: http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/hwb/chemistry/tutorials/ molspec/irspec1.htm
The data about CO2 affecting infrared radiation from earth can be found here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=142, and at the Wikipedia article about greenhouse gases. If you object to the sources, you can always check the referenced literature.

I've got plenty of data. I can pull data for days. Where's yours? Where's your peer reviewed article? All you have is a few people who had to get a BBC documentary made, because people kept laughing at their theories and wouldn't bother publishing their papers. BTW, I've seen the BBC documentary - the data referenced in there, as well as the analysis thereof, has been widely discredited. For something real, read the IPCC reports: start here (http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/pub.htm), and don't stop until the end. Then come back.

Oh, and just for the heck of it, because I like Woods Hole and a friend of mine worked there, here's a little summary they threw together about the CO2 data collected: http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/ warming_earth/scientific_evidence.htm

Again - where's your data?

Amount of C burnt by the USA in 2003: ~1.5*10^12 kg (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/emis_mon/emis_mo n_usaoxid.dat)
Avg amount of C in 1 hectare of the Amazon: ~1.75*10^5 kg (http://www.whrc.org/resources/published_literatur e/pdf/CarvalhoEnvDevtSust.04.pdf)
Annual growth of Amazon required to offset burnt C by USA: 8.6*10^6 hectares = 86,000 km^2 = an area greater than Lake Superior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_E10_m%C2%B2)

That's growth per year.
Good luck.

Wow. You just managed to prove his point in one blindingly arrogant sentence.

At least he provided data. You provide only babble.

I'm starting to think that babble for you is stuff that disturbs your happiness while driving your SUV. 2 minutes of googling brings up the next link. There's about 2 million more out there, thanks to a strong consensus by people who do this for a living. But I'm sure it's just babble to you. http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/ warming_earth/scientific_evidence.htm/

A similar picture is here .

The IPCC report explicitly shows volcanic input as less than 0.1 petagrams/year, or less than 2 % of human input. (See the figure on p. 188.

Another way of looking at it is that over long time scales limestone formation must essentially balance vulcanism. So the net of those two phenomena must have been near zero before the anthropogenic input.

Hope this helps you in your consideration of the matter.

but seriously, i agree that it's all almost irrelevant, since we're going to find out sooner than we expect.

Very large rocks have hit the earth before, killing most higher life forms. That's a natural phenomenon. Should we gladly accept the next one or try to stop it? Where do you draw the line? Are you advocating that it's OK for humans to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere but not try to reduce the levels again because it would be interfering with natural processes? This does not make sense to me. If you're wary about messing with mother Nature, you should abhor increasing the emissions in the first place, not steps taken to reduce them back to natural levels.

My whole point is that NOTHING says that what we're seeing is unnatural, caused by humans, or even dangerous.

I can't really argue against the first[1], only the other two points. Changes in the climate are indeed naturally occuring. Does this mean that we have to help them along, especially since we will not have time to adapt our lifestyles nor bodies to them? I don't think so. If you're on a bus going downhill with no brakes, would you step on the accelerator instead of at least trying to stop it somehow?

Yes, of course I am advocating changing those 'natural' behaviours since they are indeed extremely dangerous: Stopping the Ocean Conveyor would put an end to the Gulf Stream, throwing large parts of the eastern north Americas and north Europe into the same kind of weather patters and temperatures currently seen in Siberia. There would be catastrophic droughts in the entire American midwest and other areas of the world which are today regarded as farm land would be turned into deserts for possibly decades, probably centuries. As long as there's even a minute risk that we're causing it this time, we'd need to stop and back up, real fast. What kind of evidence would you accept, BTW?

And yes, if there was a conceivable way of stopping the magnetic poles from shifting, I'd advocate that too. Holding back the next ice age to keep people from starving? Yep. Building a dam to generate electricity? Sure. Strip-mining foreign countries to make steel for the frame in my motorcycle? I'd rather not. Accepting minor environmental impact so I can have a computer and sit on Slashdot debating crap all day long? Hell yes! I'm not really keen on living in a cave, never knowing if I'll have or be lunch, which basically is what your idea of allowing all natural occurences have their path leads to in the end.

The weather changes are ALREADY dangerous as thousands of people are killed, directly or indirectly, by the changes in climate. The last decade has seen no less than TWO so called 100-year floods in the Midwestern US. Just look at the recent weather in Sweden. The last five winters we've had bears no resemblance to the winters of my childhood.

[1] I can't argue against it in the sense that there's inconclusive evidence that says we're doing it, but just consider the timing: Is it reasonable to assume that the emergence of our increase of greenhouse gas emissions and changing weather patterns at the same time is simply a coincidence?

Where we live, it's illegal to think about that. ;-) We don't need that many new nukular plants, what we need is an awareness that it's time (for a lot of reasons) to stop spending resources we don't have and it's time to think about rebuilding our energy systems to adapt to the circumstances. When the oil runs out, it's too late.

Look, it's very simple, logically: You detect an adverse effect which we shall call E. Just before this effect was noticed, possible causes A, B, C and D also occured. A, B and C are beyond our control, but D isn't. Now, is it logical to keep doing D just because E could be caused by any of the other three reasons, in combination or alone? I put it to you that the logical conclusion must be to stop doing D and see if it helps E any. Going on about an imaginary "risk" that would suddenly appear when stopping D is just silly, after all we did just fine not doing D just moments ago.

Cows are more likely to cause any effects compared to cars.

And rows upon rows of millions of cows (Dr. Seuss would be proud of me) are a natural phenomenon since when, exactly? Humans do other things than drive cars, you know. For example, I drive a bike. ;-)

(Not to mention that 65 million years ago the mean temperature of the earth was 10 degrees celsius higher. I guess the dinos drove a lot of SUVs ...)

So you are advocating not only that we skip cutting back on emissions, but also that we deliberately increase them, try to create a few thousand more active volcanoes, killing off all the large mammals (including ourselves) and crawl back into the holes we lived in before we took to the trees? Is this a plan to manufacture more crude oil?

Well, I don't think Gaia would mind, but there are a few billion others that may have a problem with that plan. While we're at it, 4 billion years ago, it was waaay warmer than that. Let's go there instead, shall we?

The current increase in temperature is a bit drastic to be natural. We're not talking 10 degrees in 65 million years here (and just look at the changes in climate we've had since then) but in the range of tens of degrees in the last decade. At this rate, we will not have time to adapt.

Wood's Hole Research Center - The Warming of the Earth

Why then are the most recent increases of such concern? First, because the most recent increases are occurring at rates that have not been observed since the last ice age (IPCC 1995) and have only previously been observed in association with dramatic shifts in climate. Second, the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere over the past 150 years (from about 280 parts per million to about 360 parts per million) is largely due to anthropogenic (human-caused) effects (IPCC 1995).

Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute - Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?

In an important paper published in 2002 in Nature, oceanographers monitoring and analyzing conditions in the North Atlantic concluded that the North Atlantic has been freshening dramatically--continuously for the past 40 years but especially in the past decade.4 The new data show that since the mid-1960s, the subpolar seas feeding the North Atlantic have steadily and noticeably become less salty to depths of 1,000 to 4,000 meters. This is the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments.

At present the influx of fresher water has been distributed throughout the water column. But at some point, fresh water may begin to pile up at the surface of the North Atlantic. When that occurs, the Conveyor could slow down or cease operating.

Signs of a possible slowdown already exist. A 2001 report in Nature indicates that the flow of cold, dense water from the Norwegian and Greenland Seas into the North Atlantic has diminished by at least 20 percent since 1950.