You're injecting the assumptions that man is the cause for global warming and that CO2 has a serious effect in trace quantities.
These are not "assumptions", they are strongly supported by a great deal of evidence.
You've only got two facts. One, CO2 level is up. Two, man is creating more CO2 than he used to.
We have many more facts than that, including measurements of the other climate forcings (solar, volcanism, etc.), measurements of many climate effects, and laws of physics which relate the two.
From this, you are assuming man is warming the planet
This is not an assumption, this is a conclusion based on evidence.
and that a warmer planet is either all bad or more bad than good.
This is also not an assumption, it is a conclusion based on climate projections and economic studies.
The rest of your 'facts' are BS.
Really? Then I am sure you will be able to easily refute them. I wonder why you didn't.
About the climate, it can only be said that the planet is currently warming, cooling or remaining the same and that it will either continue to do what it is doing or it will change directions, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly.
This is nothing more than gross ignorance.
All the evidence you have to say it is warming is actually inconclusive when it comes to predicting what is going to be happening over even the next few decades.
Of course, you will dismiss without justification an unlimited amount of evidence as "inconclusive". This is not an actual counterargument.
Suffice to say that the models have been grossly incomplete with primary causes of temperature change being ignored in the calculations as having uncertain consequences on the climate while secondary and tertiary factors have been played to the hilt.
To the contrary, many proposed causes have been investigated in detail, including the ones you propose. Anthropogenic sources are the dominant effect.
CO2 is not the primary green house gas, it's a tiny fraction of the whole. Water vapor alone makes up 96%.
You have been corrected on this silly claim before on Slashdot. I wonder why you keep repeating it.
What is relevant to global warming is the change in GHG concentration, not the absolute fraction.
Natural greenhouse gases provide the baseline greenhouse effect, and warm the planet some 50 degrees. Global warming is so far only a 1 degree change above that, and is due to a small increase in greenhouse gases. Almost all of that increase is due to anthropogenic emissions, mostly CO2. Our GHG emissions comprise a small fraction of the total greenhouse effect, but that is irrelevant: they are responsible for almost all of the change in GHG concentrations from pre-industrial times, and are correspondingly responsible for most of the change in temperature since pre-industrial times, which is what we refer to as "global warming".
Methane is 20 times more effective than CO2.
There is also much less of it. Methane is not insignificant as a GHG, but most of the change in greenhouse warming has been due to CO2. Furthermore, most of those changes are also due to human activity, from transportation, animal husbandry, land use changes, etc.
And when water vapor forms into clouds - there is a massive change in the arrival of solar energy.
Yes, this is well known. However, water vapor cannot drive a climate trend, it can only amplify or suppress an existing trend. (See here.)
The only reason that the man made global warming scare made it this far was the lack of scientific research tying the very close short term relationship of the sun's magnetic activities to that of temperature effects via cloud formation.
CO2 is not the only forcing function. There are other greenhouse gases, there are aerosols and particulate matter, there are solar variations, and so on. CO2 is by far the largest forcing; the second and third largest are other greenhouse gases and aerosols.
1. Most of RealClimate's posts are by people other than Mann. 2. Mann's posts aren't any less correct than theirs. 3. Mann's "hockey stick" study has not been discredited. In fact, independent checks by the NRC and the NAS both found that the overall shape of the hockey stick is a correct and robust feature, although the NAS thought Mann underestimated the size of the error bars on his reconstruction. Also, many other temperature reconstructions have been performed by other groups using different methods which also reproduce the hockey stick shape. 4. ClimateAudit? "Unbiased"? Don't make me laugh. If by "unbiased" you mean "in stark disagreement with virtually everything published by anyone in the climatology community", and run by the now discredited Stephen McIntyre, sure.
hehe, try no, I have read the propaganda, and I have read the truth? The TRUTH is, there is NO direct link to man's activity and this is a normal cycle. I can tell I'm dealing with a rational person here. No, you don't know anything about the science, but you know the TRUTH.
The facts, however, differ. There is a direct link to man's activity, natural effects are not large enough to produce the observed changes, and the historical record indicates that we are not due for a "cycle" of warming that looks anything like what we are experiencing.
Ah, great comeback. Is that as in depth as you get? I already indicated in detail why you were wrong, but you didn't read the links.
Come on, I want a debate. No, you don't. Your whole post is entirely free of scientific content.
Both deal with the climate, therefore, they are in the same field. This is false. They are not in the same field, they often don't even work in the same department, and most importantly, prediction of the climate is totally different from prediction of the weather for reasons I already gave, which you ignored.
You and your crowd wants to upset the world economy on less than 50 years of studies. Don't tell me what me or "my crowd" thinks. And I note that you are as ignorant of the economics of climate change as you are of the science.
This world is, some say, billions of years old, we study it for less than 50 years and we know what is going on??? So that's it, your big argument, the basis of debate? "I don't believe that science works, therefore it's wrong." Great. Good argument there.
Then the scientist realize that if there is no problem, there is no money...hence, there will always be a problem as long as there is a grant to pay for the study of it. And your second big argument is a global conspiracy theory. No, what happens in reality is that if somebody publishes dodgy work they get torn apart by the scientific community and nobody ever cites their work again.
I am not worried about the polar ice caps melting. This will pass. Sure, because it's all "natural", and not just "natural" but a "natural cycle" which will soon reverse itself, and therefore you don't have to worry about anything. Pretty convenient.
If you didn't hear, February was one of the COLDEST on record...can you explain that? It doesn't contradict global warming in any way, so I'm not sure what there is to "explain".
If you want to talk about the 2007 global average temperature, that is somewhat more relevant.
That's my biggest beef with the global climate change models. It's also wholly untrue. GCMs take into account numerous forcing mechanisms.
One of the results of the three day 'no-fly' over the US in Sep 2001 was that nights were about 1C cooler due to the lack of contrails - clear skies have a lower sky temperature than cloudy skies. The cloud contrail effect is a feedback mechanism, not a forcing agent. GCMs do take into account many feedbacks, but not contrails. They are left out because a number of followup studies on the 9/11 results have indicated that the global average contrail forcing is rather small on an annual basis. I can try to dig up some of those studies if you like.
What I'd like to see is some consistent estimates of how much warming is caused by CO2, how much by methane, how much by CFC's, how much by contrails and for good measure, how much by reducing particulates. Usually those figures are given in terms of forcings, not in terms of warming. You can see such results in Figure SPM-2 of the recent IPCC report.
(a) disagree with one another by a factor of three, In the main climate variables like temperature, modern GCMs do better than that as far as the global means are concerned.
(b) even their least pessimistic predictions have been substantially in excess of the observed temperature rise, Untrue. See, for instance, Figure SPM-4 of the recent IPCC report.
(c) depend upon the fine tuning of a large number of parameters Only partially true. They no longer rely on things like flux corrections. They do parametrize local physics like clouds. However, their parametrization does not allow them to fit any possible data set, which is what you would expect if they are overfitting the data. Notably, you cannot realistically fine tune them to fit the data if you leave out either natural or anthropogenic forcings.
(d) do not calculate error bars, Untrue. Ensemble runs of GCMs are now routine, and when quantification of uncertainty is important, you can turn to EMICs.
(e) are calibrated against a temperature record that is fraught with error (e.g.: weather stations largely cover only the relatively small area of well inhabited areas of the globe; Weather stations demonstrably do well at reconstructing global means as compared with data taken from remote land and sea locations by weather stations as well as other instruments.
there is the urban heat island effect; Shown in numerous studies to be utterly negligible to global means.
there is disagreement between satellite, balloon,and weather staion records; Most of that disagreement has been resolved since the last IPCC report. In particular, the discrepancies noted in the last report regarding balloon-borne and satellite measurements of tropospheric temperature are now consistent with the surface temperature record.
temperature records do not go back very far; results obtained via proxies such as tree rings are very questionable and hard to connect to the instrumental record), Proxy results are not hard to connect to the instrumental record, and multiproxy methods lead to consistent reconstructions.
(f) essentially assume that CO2 is the *only* climate forcing agent, Untrue to the point of being an outright lie. Modern AOGCMs take into account all major GHGs from both natural and anthropogenic sources, solar variations, volcanic forcings, anthropogenic aerosols and particulate matter, and so on, not to mention the numerous feedback effects at work.
(g) assume vastly more pessimistic population and economic future growth than professional demographers and economists support. The SRES scenarios are out of date, I agree. But they are also not "vastly" inaccurate, and not everybody uses the SRES scenarios anymore. (The GCMs mostly do, though.)
It sounds like most of your criticisms are themselves outdated by 5-10 years.
If man-made CO2 emissions are driving global warming, then the period from around 1940 to around 1970, when major increases in industrialization drove CO2 production upward, would show a steady increase in temperature... pity that the actual recorded temperatures declined during that period, though; it casts the whole premise into doubt. You are ignoring the massive emissions of aerosols and particulate matter (air pollution) during that period, which suppressed the CO2-based warming. When emissions controls were put into place, the aerosols dropped out of the atmosphere (their residence time is just a few years). CO2, however, keeps building up (and has a residence time of decades to centuries).
If increasing CO2 levels cause increased global temperatures, then the historical record would show that the CO2 levels increased before the temperature rise. No.
What happens in the ice age cycles is thought to be more like this:
1. Variations in the Earth's orbit cause the Earth's temperature to temporarily rise. 2. This warms the oceans, causing CO2 to come out of solution and into the atmosphere after a period of about 800 years. 3. The greenhouse effect of this excess CO2 continues the orbitally-induced warming long past what the warming trend would be in the absence of the CO2.
Climate feedbacks matter.
Other than that, it is a physical fact that CO2 causes warming. What's under debate is how much other climate feedbacks alter that warming.
Oh please. You start out by comparing climate skeptics to Galileo? That already tells me how seriously you should be taken.
I'm a geologist (a scientist that studies the earth, mostly as very ancient history). That's nice. How much do you know about climate science?
Sea level rises and falls naturally over a range of 400-600 ft. Yes, we know. Climatologists are not ignorant of the fact that the climate has been different in the past. That has nothing to do with the large amounts of evidence that the recent global warming is not natural.
There's lots of scientific literature to contradict the anthropogenic assumption about global warming, but it doesn't seem fashionable for people to read or reference it. By all means, cite this literature.
Global warming is probably natural. Upon which facts is this conclusion based?
Back testing is not infallible (as many despondent investors can tell you). True. Nothing is infallible. It does, however, give a measure of confidence.
I'm not even sure we completely understand all of the basic principles (for instance interactions of ocean currents and the atmosphere). We don't understand all of the effects fully, but we have refined them enough that the models have converged with each other as far as main climate indices like temperature are concerned.
Furthermore, chaotic systems are notoriously difficult to accurately model. The global climate does not appear to be chaotic on decadal time scales. There are some sub-decadal regional phenomena which may be chaotic, like the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Past a century or so, the global climate may be chaotic.
The UN predicts several centimeters of raised sea-level over the coming century. They predict 9 to 88 centimeters, with a mean of 45 centimeters. Also, regional sea level rise can be up to twice that of the global mean: some places get no rise, some get double rise.
Other "stakes" include the potential for: more heat waves, more flooding, monsoons, blizzards, and hurricanes, droughts, less runoff (stress on water supplies), regional climates becoming less suitable for agriculture (including reduced crop yields, altered growing cycles, reduce nutritional content), impacts on fishing, invasive species and pests, new disease vectors, species extinction and ecosystem collapse, and other effects, including secondary effects of population displacement, economic damages, and consequent implications for geopolitics.
That's what you're concerned about? What? The fact that fertile growing regions might shift north by a few hundred miles? The fact that a few new shipping lanes might be opened up? The fact that Tundra wildlife might explode? I, for one, would be very concerned about exploding wildlife.
Well temperatures certainly have changed, and humans have been active, yet still there is a big stretch between causality and coincidence. Fortunately we have laws of physics which provide a link between cause and effect, upon which climate models can be constructed.
We also know we had an ice age a while back and it'd about due to hit the warming peak any century now and then it'll start get back down to normal and on toward another ice age. Actually, we hit the warming peak about 10,000 years ago. We will eventually head toward another ice age, but it won't be for thousands of years.
There is a theory that once the sea temperature reaches a certain level that it will stop the Gulf Stream. That would cause more ice to form at the north pole and a global cooling. Actually, it's predicted to cause a local cooling in the North Atlantic and warming most other places. And this takes place after a great deal of warming due to CO2 has already occurred.
Or to put it a different way. We just don't know. Or to put it a different way, we don't know everything, but we know a lot of things.
Am I the only person wondering what happened to the concept of experimental feedback here? Given that the point at issue is whether or not human activity has substantially contributed to global warming, would it not be a good idea to embark on a global experiment - to temporarily tone down those activities and see what happens? You're right. Climate "probing" has been discussed in the recent literature. It's not easy to do right, though, and it takes a long time for the results to be known. But it may be worth trying.
I don't know about the others, but Richard Tol does not disagree with global warming being anthropogenic in nature. He has disagreed with the IPCC (correctly, I think) on the realism of its SRES emissions scenarios.
When the weather can be predicted further than a week out, I will start to lend credence to Climate models. The prediction of weather has little to do with the prediction of climate. The weather will never be predictable past about 2 weeks due to inherent limitations of chaos theory. The climate prediction horizon is much, much further out, because it is only predicting coarse-grained averages, not local weather.
The reason people get so worked up about global warming is that, at the very least, millions, if not billions of lives are threatened if even the mildest of predictions come true. At worst, we could be looking at the end of our species and most other life forms on the planet. That's ridiculous. In the mildest cases, the damages will be mostly economic, not in lives. Even the most extreme cases are highly unlikely to wipe out the human species.
You may be skeptical, but such models are validated on hindcasts of observational data. Moreoever, while the Earth's climate is complex, it is based on known physical mechanisms and the first order effects arise from simple and uncontroversial physical constraints such as energy balance and flux balance.
How does one prove humans did not cause GW? How does one prove that solar forcing, or orbital changes, or any other "natural" causes were no the source, at that a combination of them? As you say yourself below, you don't ever "prove" things in science. You merely support them with evidence. In this case, you do so the way you support a hypothesis in any other branch of science: you see whether the evidence supports the predictions of your theories. The evidence supports the hypothesis that most, but not all, of the recent global warming is anthropogenic in origin.
The model can output pretty much what you want it to. In point of fact, models do not output whatever you want them to, and climate models fail dramatically in reproducing the observed temperature changes if you leave out anthropogenic effects. They do decently up to the mid-20th century, but then the divergence becomes drastic. The conclusion: natural causes were a significant contributor to global warming until mid-century, beyond which anthropogenic effects began to dominate.
If it is anthropogenic, what would the normal climate be w/o our effects? See above. You can see some of these model results with and without anthropogenic forcings in Figure SPM-4 of the latest IPCC report.
According to the cycle-theory some AGW proponents have claimed we should be much colder than it is now, and that this is evidence of our impact. I don't know anyone who actually claims that there is a cyclical cooling trend that should have kicked in right now. There has been a slight cooling trend prior to industrial times. Models predict that the cooling since them would have been quite small.
This is one of the questions today's "climatologists" do not seem to want to research and answer. This is further nonsense. The study of glacial cycles is perhaps the most active area of paleoclimate research.
Until the hard work of verifying by experiment and not simulation is performed, it is wrong to declare GW to be caused by any particular "cause". That too is wrong. Models aren't perfect, but they tell us enough to determine that AGW is real.
Anyone telling you it has been "proven" that humans caused/are causing GW is lying. Scientific theories are never proven. This is true, but trite. The fact is, the evidence in favor of that theory is very strong.
Gravitational tides from the rest of the galaxy, other planets within the solar system, other galaxies. My high school physics is a few years behind me now but isn't gravity the one force that works at infinite distances, even if by then the energy is infinitesimal? Yes, but if you actually work out the math, you find that the tidal force (which drops as the inverse cube of distance) is utterly, utterly negligible in those cases. The only bodies which have non-negligible tidal influence upon the Earth are the Moon and the Sun.
Other planets do perturb the Earth's orbit gravitationally, though, and over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, those perturbations do result in climate changes. It's a much slower process than the global warming that is currently happening, though, and we aren't in the right phase of our orbital cycle for that to explain the global warming anyway (other than possibly kicking off the last interglacial 10,000 years ago).
Still, there's a chance that tidal forces from some body that's approached the solar system or vice versa could cause a degree or two of warming in several of the bodies in the system. No, not even remotely, sorry.
We know for a fact that increased CO2 means highly increased plant growth. Plant growth ranges from a 50% increase to a 100% increase with a 600ppm CO2 concentration on the low end - and for some like pine trees 170% or more increase in biomass at only 400ppm CO2. Plants store CO2 (as we all do). More plant life means more animal life. All of which pulls CO2 from the atmosphere. Of course, there are also feedbacks which result in more CO2 in the atmosphere, such as increased soil organic matter decay, decreased ocean heat uptake of CO2, and so on. The net effect is still of overall atmospheric CO2 increase over this century.
It may suprise you to know but the likelihood is that the Earth's atmosphere is not so fragile as to be severely impacted by a 1% change. I don't know what you mean by the "fragility" of the atmosphere. If you ramp CO2 up to 600 ppm, it's not going to "break" the atmosphere, but it will produce warming.
They also want to limit discussion of temperatures and levels of CO2 to only the last 100 years, and claim everything is based off of it. This is, of course, false.
If we take their comments about an 800 year lag (over a 5000 year warming period), and assume (they do not say otherwise last I knew and the site has DB issues atm) that this can be applied to more than one warming period, then we should be able to extrapolate backward by looking at when the warming began and when the CO2 increase began. If we go back to the start of the CO2 rise, and then backtrack 800 years what will we or do we find in the temperature record as we know it? If we do that, we find nothing like the deglaciation trends in which the 800 year lag is seen. Next question?
Over the last century it has been shown that the global average (global sea level isn't level) has been a decrease, with an annual variation of about 8 inches. No. Look in, e.g., the latest IPCC report. They find an average increase of 5 to 8 inches over the 20th century.
Furthermore, the long term average for seal level on this planet is much higher than it is now. Much higher So what? Does that somehow make it not a problem now?
You also ignore that the rate of sea level rise has increased over the 20th century, and will continue to increase.
Even if hurricanes were on the rise, deaths from hurricanes are still orders of magnitude less than they used to be. Therefore, we don't care if hurricanes increase? Your comparisons grow ever more absurd.
Going back to historical records, glaciers overall have been shrinking since the late 1700's. More than half of the "lost' glacier mass occurred prior to 1950 (ahem, Model T, anyone). Assuming your figures are correct, and I have no reason to assume that, turn it around. Nearly half the glacier loss over the last 200-250 years has taken place in the last 50 years.
You continue to ignore the importance of rates. The current climate change is unprecedented more in its rate than in its overall magnitude, which is important when change is sustained.
It seems like nobody is considering the possibility that there's some factor causing an increase of 0.2 degrees, some other factor causing an increase of 0.1 degrees, maybe some feedback caused by the combination of the two causing an additional increase of 0.1 degrees, etc. Of course they are. That statement can only be made by someone who hasn't read any of the scientific literature. Start with the latest IPCC report. It carefully breaks down the contributions of anthropogenic and natural forcings, discusses climate feedbacks, and so on.
So the fact that other planets in our solar system are experiencing changes in temperatures which a close to the changes that we are experiencing ourselves is entirely irellevant to the discussion? Yes, because the causes of the warming in those cases are due to factors which have nothing to do with the Earth's climate.
You aparently have little faith in the effects of the rest of the solar system on our planet That's right. Tell me, what effects of the rest of the solar system are there upon our planet's climate, other than solar irradiance? It's not gravity, it's not electromagnetic radiation, it's not cosmic rays. What do you think it is?
Slashdot Mirror
You're injecting the assumptions that man is the cause for global warming and that CO2 has a serious effect in trace quantities.
These are not "assumptions", they are strongly supported by a great deal of evidence.
You've only got two facts. One, CO2 level is up. Two, man is creating more CO2 than he used to.
We have many more facts than that, including measurements of the other climate forcings (solar, volcanism, etc.), measurements of many climate effects, and laws of physics which relate the two.
From this, you are assuming man is warming the planet
This is not an assumption, this is a conclusion based on evidence.
and that a warmer planet is either all bad or more bad than good.
This is also not an assumption, it is a conclusion based on climate projections and economic studies.
The rest of your 'facts' are BS.
Really? Then I am sure you will be able to easily refute them. I wonder why you didn't.
About the climate, it can only be said that the planet is currently warming, cooling or remaining the same and that it will either continue to do what it is doing or it will change directions, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly.
This is nothing more than gross ignorance.
All the evidence you have to say it is warming is actually inconclusive when it comes to predicting what is going to be happening over even the next few decades.
Of course, you will dismiss without justification an unlimited amount of evidence as "inconclusive". This is not an actual counterargument.
Suffice to say that the models have been grossly incomplete with primary causes of temperature change being ignored in the calculations as having uncertain consequences on the climate while secondary and tertiary factors have been played to the hilt.
To the contrary, many proposed causes have been investigated in detail, including the ones you propose. Anthropogenic sources are the dominant effect.
CO2 is not the primary green house gas, it's a tiny fraction of the whole. Water vapor alone makes up 96%.
You have been corrected on this silly claim before on Slashdot. I wonder why you keep repeating it.
What is relevant to global warming is the change in GHG concentration, not the absolute fraction.
Natural greenhouse gases provide the baseline greenhouse effect, and warm the planet some 50 degrees. Global warming is so far only a 1 degree change above that, and is due to a small increase in greenhouse gases. Almost all of that increase is due to anthropogenic emissions, mostly CO2. Our GHG emissions comprise a small fraction of the total greenhouse effect, but that is irrelevant: they are responsible for almost all of the change in GHG concentrations from pre-industrial times, and are correspondingly responsible for most of the change in temperature since pre-industrial times, which is what we refer to as "global warming".
Methane is 20 times more effective than CO2.
There is also much less of it. Methane is not insignificant as a GHG, but most of the change in greenhouse warming has been due to CO2. Furthermore, most of those changes are also due to human activity, from transportation, animal husbandry, land use changes, etc.
And when water vapor forms into clouds - there is a massive change in the arrival of solar energy.
Yes, this is well known. However, water vapor cannot drive a climate trend, it can only amplify or suppress an existing trend. (See here.)
The only reason that the man made global warming scare made it this far was the lack of scientific research tying the very close short term relationship of the sun's magnetic activities to that of temperature effects via cloud formation.
Since there is no scientific
CO2 is not the only forcing function. There are other greenhouse gases, there are aerosols and particulate matter, there are solar variations, and so on. CO2 is by far the largest forcing; the second and third largest are other greenhouse gases and aerosols.
1. Most of RealClimate's posts are by people other than Mann.
2. Mann's posts aren't any less correct than theirs.
3. Mann's "hockey stick" study has not been discredited. In fact, independent checks by the NRC and the NAS both found that the overall shape of the hockey stick is a correct and robust feature, although the NAS thought Mann underestimated the size of the error bars on his reconstruction. Also, many other temperature reconstructions have been performed by other groups using different methods which also reproduce the hockey stick shape.
4. ClimateAudit? "Unbiased"? Don't make me laugh. If by "unbiased" you mean "in stark disagreement with virtually everything published by anyone in the climatology community", and run by the now discredited Stephen McIntyre, sure.
The facts, however, differ. There is a direct link to man's activity, natural effects are not large enough to produce the observed changes, and the historical record indicates that we are not due for a "cycle" of warming that looks anything like what we are experiencing. Ah, great comeback. Is that as in depth as you get? I already indicated in detail why you were wrong, but you didn't read the links. Come on, I want a debate. No, you don't. Your whole post is entirely free of scientific content. Both deal with the climate, therefore, they are in the same field. This is false. They are not in the same field, they often don't even work in the same department, and most importantly, prediction of the climate is totally different from prediction of the weather for reasons I already gave, which you ignored. You and your crowd wants to upset the world economy on less than 50 years of studies. Don't tell me what me or "my crowd" thinks. And I note that you are as ignorant of the economics of climate change as you are of the science. This world is, some say, billions of years old, we study it for less than 50 years and we know what is going on??? So that's it, your big argument, the basis of debate? "I don't believe that science works, therefore it's wrong." Great. Good argument there. Then the scientist realize that if there is no problem, there is no money...hence, there will always be a problem as long as there is a grant to pay for the study of it. And your second big argument is a global conspiracy theory. No, what happens in reality is that if somebody publishes dodgy work they get torn apart by the scientific community and nobody ever cites their work again. I am not worried about the polar ice caps melting. This will pass. Sure, because it's all "natural", and not just "natural" but a "natural cycle" which will soon reverse itself, and therefore you don't have to worry about anything. Pretty convenient. If you didn't hear, February was one of the COLDEST on record...can you explain that? It doesn't contradict global warming in any way, so I'm not sure what there is to "explain".
If you want to talk about the 2007 global average temperature, that is somewhat more relevant.
It sounds like most of your criticisms are themselves outdated by 5-10 years.
What happens in the ice age cycles is thought to be more like this:
1. Variations in the Earth's orbit cause the Earth's temperature to temporarily rise.
2. This warms the oceans, causing CO2 to come out of solution and into the atmosphere after a period of about 800 years.
3. The greenhouse effect of this excess CO2 continues the orbitally-induced warming long past what the warming trend would be in the absence of the CO2.
Climate feedbacks matter.
Other than that, it is a physical fact that CO2 causes warming. What's under debate is how much other climate feedbacks alter that warming.
Try here.
Other "stakes" include the potential for: more heat waves, more flooding, monsoons, blizzards, and hurricanes, droughts, less runoff (stress on water supplies), regional climates becoming less suitable for agriculture (including reduced crop yields, altered growing cycles, reduce nutritional content), impacts on fishing, invasive species and pests, new disease vectors, species extinction and ecosystem collapse, and other effects, including secondary effects of population displacement, economic damages, and consequent implications for geopolitics.
Ew.
I don't know about the others, but Richard Tol does not disagree with global warming being anthropogenic in nature. He has disagreed with the IPCC (correctly, I think) on the realism of its SRES emissions scenarios.
You may be skeptical, but such models are validated on hindcasts of observational data. Moreoever, while the Earth's climate is complex, it is based on known physical mechanisms and the first order effects arise from simple and uncontroversial physical constraints such as energy balance and flux balance.
Other planets do perturb the Earth's orbit gravitationally, though, and over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, those perturbations do result in climate changes. It's a much slower process than the global warming that is currently happening, though, and we aren't in the right phase of our orbital cycle for that to explain the global warming anyway (other than possibly kicking off the last interglacial 10,000 years ago). Still, there's a chance that tidal forces from some body that's approached the solar system or vice versa could cause a degree or two of warming in several of the bodies in the system. No, not even remotely, sorry.
You also ignore that the rate of sea level rise has increased over the 20th century, and will continue to increase. Even if hurricanes were on the rise, deaths from hurricanes are still orders of magnitude less than they used to be. Therefore, we don't care if hurricanes increase? Your comparisons grow ever more absurd. Going back to historical records, glaciers overall have been shrinking since the late 1700's. More than half of the "lost' glacier mass occurred prior to 1950 (ahem, Model T, anyone). Assuming your figures are correct, and I have no reason to assume that, turn it around. Nearly half the glacier loss over the last 200-250 years has taken place in the last 50 years.
You continue to ignore the importance of rates. The current climate change is unprecedented more in its rate than in its overall magnitude, which is important when change is sustained.