A human analog is irrelevant. Humans are not analogous to cockroaches in this way. Humans feel pain through nociceptors. Cockroaches don't have these.
Besides that Humans can feel horror and misery that a brain as simple as a cockroaches almost certainly cannot. They do not have higher emotions and higher functions. They don't even have memory. Whatever it is like to be a cockroach, it is almost certainly nothing like what it is like to be a human.
Your line is arbitrary and not well thought out. It is incorrect to assume that because both humans and cockroaches have brains and humans can suffer pain that cockroaches therefore can suffer pain in any comparable way. The difference between a human brain and a cockroach brain is clearly much more immense than you seem to notice.
Brains vary considerably in complexity between the most simple clumps of neurons to the most complicated mess of emotions and cognition in humans. To assert that all of these are equally able to experience pain and suffering would obviously be ludicrous.
If you stuck a venus fly trap for the same purpose, or you stabbed a maple tree for the purpose of making it bleed, is that also cruel? Practically everyone can see that it is cruel to do this to a human, while practically everyone can see it is not cruel to do this to do it to a plant. Somewhere between these, we went from cruel to not cruel. Is there a line, on one side of which is cruel, and on the other is not cruel, or is there a spectrum of cruelty here? And what property of these "creatures" makes it crueler to do so to some, than to others?
We now know how not to find aliens. Sounds like a joke, but in all seriousness, we didn't know that before we tried and it's a very useful thing to know. This doesn't answer the question of whether aliens exist (a question that can never be definitively answered "no"), but it does answer the question of whether they're so ubiquitous that you can't help but detect them by trying.
Google didn't copy it. Both Google's version and Sun's version were written by the same guy while employed at Google. He wrote it as part of timsort in java which he gave to sun, then reused it in Android.
Exactly. I'd like to know what the alternate theory was. Did we think it might have changed on purpose? Science has only just now discovered that we are not the result of an intelligent designer? WTF?
Here on earth, the air is in constant circulation moving from cold areas to warm areas to cold areas and so on, and from ocean surface to desert surface to rain forest and so on. The temperature also swings from hot to cold daily as the earth rotates. The earth is not a test tube.
The very fact that the global relative humidity is not 100% right now (despite the fact that all the oceans in a constant state of evaporation) is proof of my point. The amount of vapor in the air, globally, is a function of global temperature, but because of the way the system works, that equilibrium can't possibly be 100%, and it isn't. In fact, it's way lower, but it's still at equilibrium.
To draw the picture for you, notice that an air mass that is at 30% relative humidity in one location has enough vapor to be 200% in another, colder location. If the air mass travels over this location it will drop half its vapor pretty quickly. When it moves back to a warmer area, the vapor level may remain constant but relative humidity drops to, say, 15%. Now if that area it is in is a dry area, then the vapor is not replaced. It's not replaced until it hits an area that is both warm enough and has enough water to evaporate. This means that at any given time, different parts of the globe are at different levels of relative humidity, but the global average is relatively constant because of the equilibrium, and it will always be well under 100% on average. If you add more vapor manually, it just rains more somewhere else and does so in a time span which on climate terms is the blink of an eye.
I have no problem with dissent, but you give dissenters a bad name by continuously trotting out these long-debunked canards. In fact the water vapor argument is an armchair argument, which never been argued by anyone who has spent any time at all actually studying climate, because they'd know how stupid it is, and yet because dissenters continuously revive the topic, it never dies, thus aiding climatologists in their blanket dismissal of dissenters as mostly quacks. If you are not qualified to dissent, you owe it to the other dissenters to first look up your argument and see if there's a rebuttal already before assuming that your high school physics was something the climatologists forgot to consider.
No, you just still do not understand. I'm not just trying to argue with you, I'm trying to explain what you are missing. You said you are more scientific than most so I'm hoping you can understand this then pass the knowledge along.
Your statement assumes that an airborne molecule can absorb only a single photon. This is false. The number of photons a molecule can absorb is directly related to the time it stays airborne. For CO2 this is measured in centuries. For H2O it is measured in hours. This makes CO2 millions of times more effective as a forcing on climate.
Both CO2 and H2O are forcings and feedbacks in the model, but H2O's forcing factor is so insignificant that it is ignored in favor of CO2 to avoid stepping over hundred dollar bills to pick up pennies.
Human emission of H2O does not contribute in any significant way to the greenhouse effect because a day after we emit the vapor the atmosphere condenses an equal amount back out. This means any water emitted more than 24 hours ago is already gone now. The maximum change in global water vapor that can be contributed by humans is only the amount humans can emit in a single day. This is minuscule. The amount of CO2 on the other hand is the amount of CO2 we can emit in centuries.
This is why the data show that CO2 concentration has skyrocketed in the past 100 years while water vapor has remained a constant function of temperature. This fact of the data is not even disputed by any scientists as far as I know.
(By the way, this isn't relevant, but your understanding of clouds is also incorrect. Clouds are suspended liquid water droplets, not vapor. Water vapor is invisible, gaseous-phase water).
No I did not. Go back and read it again. I'm well aware of positive feedback loops. The GP on the other hand tried to claim that humans cause more GW by putting emitting water vapor than we do by putting CO2 in the air. That's false because water vapor falls out of the air before contributing to warming. That is why water vapor is not considered in the models as a forcer.
In fact one of the reasons why I am a dissenter is because water vapor is so much more absorbing of the infre red spectrum than CO2. Yet we don't call on our industry to condense steam back into water rather than directly vent it to the atmosphere
If you increase H2O in the air artificially, it rains out immediately (in terms of climate response times). The amount of H2O in the air is at equilibrium and is a function of temperature and not vice versa. Climate scientists are, of course, aware of this.
(Similarly, if you were to remove all the H2O from the air, it would quickly be replaced as the oceans evaporated back to fill the gap left in that equilibrium.)
I would say I am "more educated and scientific than most"
Theologian != Religious. Most religious don't know anywhere near what the theologians know. If they did, they would not believe. Theologians are rare precisely because they're the exception to the rule in the article.
I appreciate what you are trying to do here. "Hacking" does not always mean "cracking", yes thank you, but "hacking into", by definition, is a subset of "cracking".
If he said, "engineer your way past security" would you have had to correct him and say, "that's cracking"?
You expect something different from an "estimate"? What could you possibly be expecting?
This is a MODEL, on which we can agree or not. The thing is, OBSERVATION doesn't show the same thing. It does work on paper
The model is an equation based on the observations. What the hell do you think a model is?
That's precisely the issue! Climatologists, without a global warming issues and fundings around it, wouldn't get funds.
Conveniently, by this same deduction, it would be impossible for any scientific discipline in any category to ever issue any warning based on their findings without the same conclusion.
I didn't write that there is no quantification
You wrote that there was "no consensus on the quantification". When I show you consensus, you admit that there is consensus but that it is only among climatologists who are all accomplices in a global conspiracy to suppress dissent by not funding it. This strains credulity. Besides having the all-too-convenient effect of explaining why you can't backup your assertions; for it to be true would require that would-be climatologists somehow pre-declare their conclusions (in secret?) to the would-be funders so they know whom to fund. So obviously all climatologists are in on the conspiracy. In addition to this, either there are no dissenters with funds to fund "real" research or they choose not to do so for some unspecified reason (otherwise there would be dissenting climatologists funded by said dissenters with funds).
Likely dissenters would be those for whom carbon taxing or cap-and-trade would harm the most - such as oil companies or industrialized nations, like the U.S.. Supposedly they either lack the resources to fund "honest" climatology or they don't really mind putting up with the expense of cap-and-trade etc.
but of course, the simple fact that there are 2 sides means there's no consensus
Your problem, here, is that this and the paragraph preceding it, can also be be said about creationism vs evolution. Substitute "educational establishment" for "IPCC" and "Richard Dawkins" for "Jouzel" (etc) and you've practically got a Ben Stein classic.
I thought I was quite clear that the consensus I was talking about was among climatologists, whose specialty it is to study these things. If there are 2 sides to this among actual climatologists (and I mean in appreciable numbers - not the kind of numbers that creationists also muster) then you have a point here. I'll wait for you to show this is the case. In the meantime, here is data (pdf) that suggests otherwise.
For safety, I'll reiterate that climatologists could all, certainly, be wrong. It's just that your burden of proof is quite high if you claim this is the case. It is often imagined that conjecturing a conspiracy to suppress dissent gets one off the burden-of-proof hook, but it doesn't.
Is there a link to the debate you mention, or is this something you experienced in person?
There's no clear consensus about the quantification
Please explain this (scroll down to "Climate Sensitivity" to see equations).
I lifted the above answer from the Skeptical Science website which gives a very detailed answer. You say that no quantification exists, but yet this is obviously quantification of the relationship between CO2 and temperature based on evidence. If you were aware of this, then you are obliged to explain why it doesn't count. If you are unaware of it, then I was right in assuming ignorance.
You get mad at me if I accuse you of either ignorance or deception. Please offer me another explanation for the pattern. I say "pattern" because from that same website there are thorougly researched answers to all the arguments you've raised including: it's the sun, there is no consensus, CO2 lags temp, hockey stick is broken, climate sensitivity is low, CO2 effect is weak, water vapor is more powerful, CO2 limits will harm the economy, no correlation between CO2 and temp, scientists can't even predict weather, and possibly some others I've missed. You raise each of these canards without the slightest indication of what was wrong with the scientific response to them. Either you were ignorant of the scientific responses, or you pretended they didn't exist. Hanlon's Razor compels me to assume the former.
A quick note about "tone". If you back up to the top of this thread, you'll see that this whole back-and-forth started because you replied to my correction to someone else's misunderstanding. You irritatingly paraphrased my reply to say something I didn't say which you proceeded to ridicule. I corrected your error and then you repeated step 1. (This is my adult way of saying, "you started it".)
I certainly don't lightly accept AGW as fact. In fact, not too long ago, I tended to think that the loudness of the warning was due to a bias the public and media naturally have for sensationalism (i.e. "impending global doom" always gets more airtime than, for example, "migratory patterns of birds"). What changed my mind is looking at the actual studies and the thoroughness by which they were thought through. I also looked at objections and answers to those objections. After this, the overwhelming consensus among climatologists made a lot of sense and was not surprising.
I'm quite aware that truth is not subject to democracy, but dismissing scientific consensuses unless you are an expert in the field yourself, is historically foolish. Scientists were absolutely right to reject plate tectonic theory when it was first suggested because 1. in it's earliest form it was wrong (it was proposed that the land floated on water) and 2. there was insufficient data to corroborate it. When these two things changed, it became undeniable and was easily accepted. Scientists specializing in geology were the first to reach consensus, as would be expected. (Note there's still "controversy" among "geologists" who argue for a 6k year old earth - but only the kind of "controversy" that accompanies scare quotes)
30 years ago, no one paid much attention to the idea that CO2 emitted by man had an appreciable impact, but climatologists, today, have reached such a consensus. I am not disputing the ever-present possibility that they are wrong, but these are the specialists. Back-of-the-envelope calculations by scientists in unrelated fields don't really constitute "controversy". Even a few who are in the field don't a controversy make. (There are creationists with PhDs, for Christ's sake - pun intended. That doesn't mean there's a real controversy over whether the earth is 6k years old.) I dispute your claim that there is any significant controversy over AGW in the circles in which there should be if it were warranted.
I'll reiterate one more time that the model does quantify the effect of human carbon emissions have on temperature. It is just not as simple as X carbon means Y degrees, but it's definitely quantifiable within a margin of error, and that margin of error is small enough to see that a failure to reduce our increases in carbon output is highly likely to result in catastrophe (which isn't so hard - the global economy is already teetering).
What I don't understand is why you think we need to know exactly how much to reduce carbon before we can begin making any kind of policy toward reduction. We really only need a ballpark figure if the numbers suggest that we are way-off-the-charts in terms of climate impact - and this is exactly what climatologists are warning. And this is exactly what people are trying to organize (whether by effective means or not - I'm not claiming cap-and-trade will work).
I'm neither pro- nor anti- cap-and-trade. That is, I don't know if it's the best solution or even if it will work, but waiting for a zero-margin-of-error model before doing anything seems to be an obviously bad idea. If you want to argue against cap-and-trade, then by all means do so, but claiming that we don't know the effects of human carbon emissions precisely enough is wrong -- I suspect that this isn't the real reason anyway. Hypothetically if a model as simple as "X carbon = Y degrees" were possible and we knew it precisely, would you then be in favor of cap-and-trade, carbon tax, or carbon markets in general? Or would you have other objections?
I'm not simply accusing you of an "ism" because you disagree. It's because after each reply where I explain the "model" concept, your response seems to indicates that you haven't even bothered to understand it.
For example, I try to explain that CO2's relationship to temperature is complicated and is neither direct nor immediate and your reply indicates that you think this means there's no discernible relationship so "how can we think about doing any kind of policy". But this isn't at all what I said.
(CO2 doesn't directly raise the temperature - it isn't hot - it acts as insulation so that the earth doesn't radiate away as much of its internally generated heat. So it isn't direct. It isn't immediate either. A one-time increase in CO2 results in a warming which takes place over time as the internal heat builds up. This means it is neither direct nor immediate, but in neither case does it mean we lack there's not enough info to make policies).
In contrast, each new argument you've introduced hasn't been new to me. Your last reply is no exception. Climatologists are, of course, aware of past data. It's what they use. It is well known that CO2 concentration increase trails temperature and it is well known that temperature rise does cause CO2 concentration increase. You seem to suggest that this means that the reverse can't be true, but that's false. Even if CO2 rises more in response to temperature than vice versa (which could be true), it would not at all mean that temperature doesn't also respond to CO2 rising. I've, in fact, already mentioned this. Both are true. It's called a positive feed back loop. You've probably heard climatologists warn of "runaway" global warming. This is exactly what they're referring to. They aren't only aware of this feature of the data you're presenting, it is precisely what they're warning about.
You don't come out and say explicitly that CO2 does not create a "greenhouse" effect - you do seem to imply it can't but I can't tell if you're actually asserting it. Are you? Do you deny the physics of how the greenhouse effect works?
I'm also quite aware of the hockey stick graph as it gets paraded out at every discussion of AGW as proof that all the evidence for AGW is bunk. This is really a straw man, though, because the hockey stick graph was not what convinced the climatologists. The widespread scientific consensus was reached because of the success of the models. The hockey stick graph was published to help visualize the problem to non-scientists. It was criticized by scientists precisely because it was oversimplified. It is not the evidence. The models (insofar as they explain the data) are the evidence.
If you are not explaining why the models are wrong, you aren't even in the game.
Slashdot Mirror
A human analog is irrelevant. Humans are not analogous to cockroaches in this way. Humans feel pain through nociceptors. Cockroaches don't have these.
Besides that Humans can feel horror and misery that a brain as simple as a cockroaches almost certainly cannot. They do not have higher emotions and higher functions. They don't even have memory. Whatever it is like to be a cockroach, it is almost certainly nothing like what it is like to be a human.
Your line is arbitrary and not well thought out. It is incorrect to assume that because both humans and cockroaches have brains and humans can suffer pain that cockroaches therefore can suffer pain in any comparable way. The difference between a human brain and a cockroach brain is clearly much more immense than you seem to notice.
Brains vary considerably in complexity between the most simple clumps of neurons to the most complicated mess of emotions and cognition in humans. To assert that all of these are equally able to experience pain and suffering would obviously be ludicrous.
If you stuck a venus fly trap for the same purpose, or you stabbed a maple tree for the purpose of making it bleed, is that also cruel? Practically everyone can see that it is cruel to do this to a human, while practically everyone can see it is not cruel to do this to do it to a plant. Somewhere between these, we went from cruel to not cruel. Is there a line, on one side of which is cruel, and on the other is not cruel, or is there a spectrum of cruelty here? And what property of these "creatures" makes it crueler to do so to some, than to others?
We now know how not to find aliens. Sounds like a joke, but in all seriousness, we didn't know that before we tried and it's a very useful thing to know. This doesn't answer the question of whether aliens exist (a question that can never be definitively answered "no"), but it does answer the question of whether they're so ubiquitous that you can't help but detect them by trying.
This is a good point. If you can't ask one of these machines a question, then these should be compared to textbooks, not teachers.
Google didn't copy it. Both Google's version and Sun's version were written by the same guy while employed at Google. He wrote it as part of timsort in java which he gave to sun, then reused it in Android.
How wise is it to prevent those who owe you money from getting jobs to payback said money?
Exactly. I'd like to know what the alternate theory was. Did we think it might have changed on purpose? Science has only just now discovered that we are not the result of an intelligent designer? WTF?
I'd like to know what part of the human species they imagine did NOT result from genome copying errors?
Here on earth, the air is in constant circulation moving from cold areas to warm areas to cold areas and so on, and from ocean surface to desert surface to rain forest and so on. The temperature also swings from hot to cold daily as the earth rotates. The earth is not a test tube.
The very fact that the global relative humidity is not 100% right now (despite the fact that all the oceans in a constant state of evaporation) is proof of my point. The amount of vapor in the air, globally, is a function of global temperature, but because of the way the system works, that equilibrium can't possibly be 100%, and it isn't. In fact, it's way lower, but it's still at equilibrium.
To draw the picture for you, notice that an air mass that is at 30% relative humidity in one location has enough vapor to be 200% in another, colder location. If the air mass travels over this location it will drop half its vapor pretty quickly. When it moves back to a warmer area, the vapor level may remain constant but relative humidity drops to, say, 15%. Now if that area it is in is a dry area, then the vapor is not replaced. It's not replaced until it hits an area that is both warm enough and has enough water to evaporate. This means that at any given time, different parts of the globe are at different levels of relative humidity, but the global average is relatively constant because of the equilibrium, and it will always be well under 100% on average. If you add more vapor manually, it just rains more somewhere else and does so in a time span which on climate terms is the blink of an eye.
I have no problem with dissent, but you give dissenters a bad name by continuously trotting out these long-debunked canards. In fact the water vapor argument is an armchair argument, which never been argued by anyone who has spent any time at all actually studying climate, because they'd know how stupid it is, and yet because dissenters continuously revive the topic, it never dies, thus aiding climatologists in their blanket dismissal of dissenters as mostly quacks. If you are not qualified to dissent, you owe it to the other dissenters to first look up your argument and see if there's a rebuttal already before assuming that your high school physics was something the climatologists forgot to consider.
No, you just still do not understand. I'm not just trying to argue with you, I'm trying to explain what you are missing. You said you are more scientific than most so I'm hoping you can understand this then pass the knowledge along.
Your statement assumes that an airborne molecule can absorb only a single photon. This is false. The number of photons a molecule can absorb is directly related to the time it stays airborne. For CO2 this is measured in centuries. For H2O it is measured in hours. This makes CO2 millions of times more effective as a forcing on climate.
Both CO2 and H2O are forcings and feedbacks in the model, but H2O's forcing factor is so insignificant that it is ignored in favor of CO2 to avoid stepping over hundred dollar bills to pick up pennies.
Human emission of H2O does not contribute in any significant way to the greenhouse effect because a day after we emit the vapor the atmosphere condenses an equal amount back out. This means any water emitted more than 24 hours ago is already gone now. The maximum change in global water vapor that can be contributed by humans is only the amount humans can emit in a single day. This is minuscule. The amount of CO2 on the other hand is the amount of CO2 we can emit in centuries.
This is why the data show that CO2 concentration has skyrocketed in the past 100 years while water vapor has remained a constant function of temperature. This fact of the data is not even disputed by any scientists as far as I know.
(By the way, this isn't relevant, but your understanding of clouds is also incorrect. Clouds are suspended liquid water droplets, not vapor. Water vapor is invisible, gaseous-phase water).
No I did not. Go back and read it again. I'm well aware of positive feedback loops. The GP on the other hand tried to claim that humans cause more GW by putting emitting water vapor than we do by putting CO2 in the air. That's false because water vapor falls out of the air before contributing to warming. That is why water vapor is not considered in the models as a forcer.
http://grist.org/climate-energy/climate-scientists-dodge-the-subject-of-water-vapor/
If you increase H2O in the air artificially, it rains out immediately (in terms of climate response times). The amount of H2O in the air is at equilibrium and is a function of temperature and not vice versa. Climate scientists are, of course, aware of this.
(Similarly, if you were to remove all the H2O from the air, it would quickly be replaced as the oceans evaporated back to fill the gap left in that equilibrium.)
That's easy to say.
Theologian != Religious. Most religious don't know anywhere near what the theologians know. If they did, they would not believe. Theologians are rare precisely because they're the exception to the rule in the article.
I've already seen how this how this ends.
It's also "hacking into".
I appreciate what you are trying to do here. "Hacking" does not always mean "cracking", yes thank you, but "hacking into", by definition, is a subset of "cracking".
If he said, "engineer your way past security" would you have had to correct him and say, "that's cracking"?
Anyone who thinks that no suffering is worth dying to avoid has simply experienced a failure of imagination.
Reality is depressing and delusions makes people happy. Did I misunderstand?
Since you've experienced the oppression of Iran, please enlighten us.
Or too late
Oh. So that's why they thought he was crazy.
You expect something different from an "estimate"? What could you possibly be expecting?
This is a MODEL, on which we can agree or not. The thing is, OBSERVATION doesn't show the same thing. It does work on paper
The model is an equation based on the observations. What the hell do you think a model is?
That's precisely the issue! Climatologists, without a global warming issues and fundings around it, wouldn't get funds.
Conveniently, by this same deduction, it would be impossible for any scientific discipline in any category to ever issue any warning based on their findings without the same conclusion.
I didn't write that there is no quantification
You wrote that there was "no consensus on the quantification". When I show you consensus, you admit that there is consensus but that it is only among climatologists who are all accomplices in a global conspiracy to suppress dissent by not funding it. This strains credulity. Besides having the all-too-convenient effect of explaining why you can't backup your assertions; for it to be true would require that would-be climatologists somehow pre-declare their conclusions (in secret?) to the would-be funders so they know whom to fund. So obviously all climatologists are in on the conspiracy. In addition to this, either there are no dissenters with funds to fund "real" research or they choose not to do so for some unspecified reason (otherwise there would be dissenting climatologists funded by said dissenters with funds).
Likely dissenters would be those for whom carbon taxing or cap-and-trade would harm the most - such as oil companies or industrialized nations, like the U.S.. Supposedly they either lack the resources to fund "honest" climatology or they don't really mind putting up with the expense of cap-and-trade etc.
but of course, the simple fact that there are 2 sides means there's no consensus
Your problem, here, is that this and the paragraph preceding it, can also be be said about creationism vs evolution. Substitute "educational establishment" for "IPCC" and "Richard Dawkins" for "Jouzel" (etc) and you've practically got a Ben Stein classic.
I thought I was quite clear that the consensus I was talking about was among climatologists, whose specialty it is to study these things. If there are 2 sides to this among actual climatologists (and I mean in appreciable numbers - not the kind of numbers that creationists also muster) then you have a point here. I'll wait for you to show this is the case. In the meantime, here is data (pdf) that suggests otherwise.
For safety, I'll reiterate that climatologists could all, certainly, be wrong. It's just that your burden of proof is quite high if you claim this is the case. It is often imagined that conjecturing a conspiracy to suppress dissent gets one off the burden-of-proof hook, but it doesn't.
Is there a link to the debate you mention, or is this something you experienced in person?
There's no clear consensus about the quantification
Please explain this (scroll down to "Climate Sensitivity" to see equations).
I lifted the above answer from the Skeptical Science website which gives a very detailed answer. You say that no quantification exists, but yet this is obviously quantification of the relationship between CO2 and temperature based on evidence. If you were aware of this, then you are obliged to explain why it doesn't count. If you are unaware of it, then I was right in assuming ignorance.
You get mad at me if I accuse you of either ignorance or deception. Please offer me another explanation for the pattern. I say "pattern" because from that same website there are thorougly researched answers to all the arguments you've raised including: it's the sun, there is no consensus, CO2 lags temp, hockey stick is broken, climate sensitivity is low, CO2 effect is weak, water vapor is more powerful, CO2 limits will harm the economy, no correlation between CO2 and temp, scientists can't even predict weather, and possibly some others I've missed. You raise each of these canards without the slightest indication of what was wrong with the scientific response to them. Either you were ignorant of the scientific responses, or you pretended they didn't exist. Hanlon's Razor compels me to assume the former.
A quick note about "tone". If you back up to the top of this thread, you'll see that this whole back-and-forth started because you replied to my correction to someone else's misunderstanding. You irritatingly paraphrased my reply to say something I didn't say which you proceeded to ridicule. I corrected your error and then you repeated step 1. (This is my adult way of saying, "you started it".)
I certainly don't lightly accept AGW as fact. In fact, not too long ago, I tended to think that the loudness of the warning was due to a bias the public and media naturally have for sensationalism (i.e. "impending global doom" always gets more airtime than, for example, "migratory patterns of birds"). What changed my mind is looking at the actual studies and the thoroughness by which they were thought through. I also looked at objections and answers to those objections. After this, the overwhelming consensus among climatologists made a lot of sense and was not surprising.
I'm quite aware that truth is not subject to democracy, but dismissing scientific consensuses unless you are an expert in the field yourself, is historically foolish. Scientists were absolutely right to reject plate tectonic theory when it was first suggested because 1. in it's earliest form it was wrong (it was proposed that the land floated on water) and 2. there was insufficient data to corroborate it. When these two things changed, it became undeniable and was easily accepted. Scientists specializing in geology were the first to reach consensus, as would be expected. (Note there's still "controversy" among "geologists" who argue for a 6k year old earth - but only the kind of "controversy" that accompanies scare quotes)
30 years ago, no one paid much attention to the idea that CO2 emitted by man had an appreciable impact, but climatologists, today, have reached such a consensus. I am not disputing the ever-present possibility that they are wrong, but these are the specialists. Back-of-the-envelope calculations by scientists in unrelated fields don't really constitute "controversy". Even a few who are in the field don't a controversy make. (There are creationists with PhDs, for Christ's sake - pun intended. That doesn't mean there's a real controversy over whether the earth is 6k years old.) I dispute your claim that there is any significant controversy over AGW in the circles in which there should be if it were warranted.
I'll reiterate one more time that the model does quantify the effect of human carbon emissions have on temperature. It is just not as simple as X carbon means Y degrees, but it's definitely quantifiable within a margin of error, and that margin of error is small enough to see that a failure to reduce our increases in carbon output is highly likely to result in catastrophe (which isn't so hard - the global economy is already teetering).
What I don't understand is why you think we need to know exactly how much to reduce carbon before we can begin making any kind of policy toward reduction. We really only need a ballpark figure if the numbers suggest that we are way-off-the-charts in terms of climate impact - and this is exactly what climatologists are warning. And this is exactly what people are trying to organize (whether by effective means or not - I'm not claiming cap-and-trade will work).
I'm neither pro- nor anti- cap-and-trade. That is, I don't know if it's the best solution or even if it will work, but waiting for a zero-margin-of-error model before doing anything seems to be an obviously bad idea. If you want to argue against cap-and-trade, then by all means do so, but claiming that we don't know the effects of human carbon emissions precisely enough is wrong -- I suspect that this isn't the real reason anyway. Hypothetically if a model as simple as "X carbon = Y degrees" were possible and we knew it precisely, would you then be in favor of cap-and-trade, carbon tax, or carbon markets in general? Or would you have other objections?
I'm not simply accusing you of an "ism" because you disagree. It's because after each reply where I explain the "model" concept, your response seems to indicates that you haven't even bothered to understand it.
For example, I try to explain that CO2's relationship to temperature is complicated and is neither direct nor immediate and your reply indicates that you think this means there's no discernible relationship so "how can we think about doing any kind of policy". But this isn't at all what I said.
(CO2 doesn't directly raise the temperature - it isn't hot - it acts as insulation so that the earth doesn't radiate away as much of its internally generated heat. So it isn't direct. It isn't immediate either. A one-time increase in CO2 results in a warming which takes place over time as the internal heat builds up. This means it is neither direct nor immediate, but in neither case does it mean we lack there's not enough info to make policies).
In contrast, each new argument you've introduced hasn't been new to me. Your last reply is no exception. Climatologists are, of course, aware of past data. It's what they use. It is well known that CO2 concentration increase trails temperature and it is well known that temperature rise does cause CO2 concentration increase. You seem to suggest that this means that the reverse can't be true, but that's false. Even if CO2 rises more in response to temperature than vice versa (which could be true), it would not at all mean that temperature doesn't also respond to CO2 rising. I've, in fact, already mentioned this. Both are true. It's called a positive feed back loop. You've probably heard climatologists warn of "runaway" global warming. This is exactly what they're referring to. They aren't only aware of this feature of the data you're presenting, it is precisely what they're warning about.
You don't come out and say explicitly that CO2 does not create a "greenhouse" effect - you do seem to imply it can't but I can't tell if you're actually asserting it. Are you? Do you deny the physics of how the greenhouse effect works?
I'm also quite aware of the hockey stick graph as it gets paraded out at every discussion of AGW as proof that all the evidence for AGW is bunk. This is really a straw man, though, because the hockey stick graph was not what convinced the climatologists. The widespread scientific consensus was reached because of the success of the models. The hockey stick graph was published to help visualize the problem to non-scientists. It was criticized by scientists precisely because it was oversimplified. It is not the evidence. The models (insofar as they explain the data) are the evidence.
If you are not explaining why the models are wrong, you aren't even in the game.