The work you're talking about was called 100 Authors Against Einstein - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Authors_Against_Einstein#Hundred_authors_against_Einstein

Let's go for the long hanging fruit first. How about we stop pumping/mining carbon based energy sources from the ground and burning them into the atmosphere. I bet that would drastically reduce the among of greenhouse gases released. (And would have the nice side effect of being sustainable and cheaper in the long run)

"it only takes one person with a cogent argument to disprove something." -- Wrong. It takes empirical evidence, not a cogent argument. The consensus view that the earth is getting warmer is backed by literally hundreds of published papers each of which cite physical evidence, measurement, models, etc. If there was a case to be made that the consensus view is wrong, there would have to be *some* evidence out there somewhere that contradicts the consensus view. There is not, and that' is why there are no papers describing it.

"There are way worse greenhouse gasses that don't even get filtered most of the time. Cause actually carbon dioxide isn't all that strong of a greenhouse gas."

This is an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. What you said it true, but basically irrelevant. Carbon dioxide might not be the worst greenhouse gas, but (A) we release orders of magnitude more of it than any other green house gas. You could eliminate every methane emitter on earth and not make a dent in global warming because well over 90% of it comes from the CO2 we release. (B) Carbon dioxide-caused warming lasts far longer than any other green house gas. If we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, the warming we have caused will not dissipate for nearly a millenia.

"Funny how the chicken little's so easily dismiss all the climate scientists that disagree with the claim that the sky is falling and demonize anyone who attempts to point them out."

What's funny how all those alleged "climate scientists" cited in this letter have yet to publish a single paper that contradicts the consensus view that global warming is real and man-made: "That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change... Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position." -- http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full

Won't work. Once they've caused a disaster, they can simply declare bankruptcy. They would either have to put up the money into an escrow account in advance, or purchase insurance against such a possibility. (And greedy bastards that they are, the insurance companies can provide a very useful oversight role in such a role)

On the other hand, it strikes me as a fundamentally radical policy that we are willing to accept the possibility of long-term, effectively unfixable contamination of our underground water sources in exchange for a temporary fix to our energy needs.

"Police investigation closed with no support for there having been a hack." - Nice try. Here's a detail of the (competent, non-police) investigation into the hack: http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-hack-used-open-proxies.html

"None of those eight committees investigated the actual allegations of misconduct found in the mails beyond "did you?". - do you have a citation to prove that? I didn't think so.

I've read the alleged smoking gun email - the one referring to "Mike's Nature trick." It was from the context of the conversation that the "trick" they were talking about was to make two divergent data sets (measured versus tree ring historic) match up. It only looks bad if taken out of context by someone who doesn't know what he is talking about. It was about as pathetic a smoking gun as you can get.

"I don't recall reading about any mass withdrawals in 2008." - There weren't any bank runs in 2008, but there have been before that (Thus proving that one company can, in fact, tank the economy) 2008, like 1929 and unlike 1837/1893/1907, was a market crash, not a banking crash.

"Notice how the recoveries from the panics of 1837, 1893, 1907 you mentioned were all much quicker than both the great depression and the current recession, when Keynsians made the policy." - I'm sorry, but you really couldn't be more wrong on the history here. The whole reason the Great Depression was so bad is because after the market crashed, the Fed raised interest rates and tightened the money supply, so that by 1933 the amount of money in circulation had dropped by 35%. This is the exact *opposite* of a Keynesian approach. (Even Milton Friendman - about as far from a Kenysian as you can get - pinned the blame on the Fed's contractionary policy in his A Monetary History of the United States. Ben Bernake, whose entire academic career centered on studying the causes of the Great Depression, famously apologized to Milton Friedman in 2002 on behalf of his predecessors, admitting that they made the depression much worse by using a contractionary approach) Futhermore, in 1936, as the Great Depression was starting to turn around, Congress began cutting back on New Deal spending, and the economy went into a double-dip.

"I think if you let them go through bankruptcy, sell off the good parts of the businesses, and discredit/fire the bad actors, within a year you'd have recovery. " -- That's a bit like saying that if the car that hit us had been going 30 mph faster, we'd have had a faster recovery. You think bad companies should have been left to fail, so you're rationalizing that letting them fail would have made the economy bounce back faster. It's wishful thinking. The truth is in 2008, when the CDO market froze (thus, under the mark-to-market accounting rules, rendering all CDOs worthless), if the government hadn't stepped in and started buying them, a huge chunk of wall street would have gone bankrupt. In turn, all of their subsidiaries would have shut down. People would have gotten laid off, and in turn would stop spending. Aggregate demand would have plummeted. More businesses would have gone under. It's much more likely we'd be facing 25% unemployment (instead of 11%) and a 10+ year to recovery (We're only in the fourth year of the current recession but it's starting to look better) It's already happened once (the great depression) and you haven't made any case for why it would be any better this time around. (In fact, since the economy is much more integrated and interconnected, it would almost certainly be far worse today than the Great Depression)

"I don't think the Fed should have been created, and I think we should still be on the gold standard" - yea, that's the problem there. Monetary policy might not be perfect, but the idea of abandoning it and going back to the gold standard is like saying that drills hurt, so we should abandon modern dentistry. Frankly, it's silly.

"Yet there are emails on public record and confirmed as being authentic from members of the climate science community to each other that show they are engaging in exactly the kind of behaviour you attribute (with no evidence) to other scientists." - if you're referring to the emails hacked from East Anglia University (the so-called "Climategate" emails) then you have been misinformed as to the contents of those emails: "Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Inquiries_and_reports

"Republicans are not distrustful of Science, they are distrustful of politicized scientists and various hangers on." - This is flatly untrue. Republicans deny or abuse science when science interferes with their pro-business agenda (the tobacco-cause-cancer and CO2-causes-global warming denial being a great examples thereof), or when they want it to say things it doesn't (like about fetal pain in early stages of pregnancy). Go read this book.

Except the world trade center, post-collision, was not an oven. It was an open smoldering hole in the side of a building, with minimal insulation. That's why the smoke was pouring out instead of being retained inside the building.

Not in the least, since I'm not out to prove the philosophical truth or not of their proposition. What I'm suggesting is more like a rule of thumb.

Jet engine temperature is not the same thing as open air burning temperature. Looking at the specs page, I think I might have gotten my Celsius and Fahrenheit confused. (I was writing the above paragraph from memory) According to the specs, the open air burning temperature of JET A-1 jet fuel is 260-315C (500-599F)

"I assume businesses act in their self interest, and if they don't they should get bankruptcy (not in their interest). I have no problem with stupid people/businesses doing stupid things as long as I'm not paying for it." - It's easy to say that business that don't act rationally should go bankrupt. But what do you do when you have ordinary people - people without a complex understanding of the mortgage market - who were pressured into purchasing dangerous financial instruments (adjustable rate mortgages) when fixed rate mortgages would have been much better (and not knowledgeable enough to know better)? Or to lenders that were outright defrauded by mortgage brokers who lied to them about the counterparty's ability to pay it back? The government absolutely has a responsibility to prevent these kinds of abuses.

"No one company's bankruptcy would cause the entire economy to crater." - That is provably false. One insolvent bank can trigger a run on all banks, even solvent ones. That's what caused the panic of 1837, the panic of 1893, and especially the panic of 1907. The situation today, when financial institutions touch basically every other sector of the economy, is even more prone to collapse. You said "Lehman went through it" as if that somehow makes it OK. You forgot what came next. After Lehman Bros. imploded, it caused Bear Sterns to implode, and would have caused Bank of America and AIG to go down next had the government not stepped in. (And Lehman, the biggest bankruptcy in history, was dwarfed by both, by the way. Lehman's market cap was $50 billion market versus $69 [2012] for AIG and $102 [2012] for BoA)

"Other businesses buy up the pieces and life goes on." - We've seen what happens when you let everything implode and trust the market sort it out. It was called the Great Depression. Yup, I couldn't imagine why anyone would object to letting that happen again.

"I would never ascribe to the government the role of "ultimate arbiter of systemic risk". They can arbitrate contract disputes and punish fraudulent activity but they are not the overlords of the whole market." - What planet are you from? The US Government has been doing just that since - at the very least - the creation of the Fed in 1913, and arguably since the creation of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. If you took a poll of 100 ordinary people on the street "Should the government intervene in the market to prevent depressions from happening?" you'd probably get nearly 100% of people agreeing to the idea, because it's common sense.

""too big to fail" was a lie told to congressmen (and their constituents) to give taxpayer money to companies in trouble as opposed to them taking responsibility for bad decisions." - maybe that congressman realized that, as politically unpalatable as bailing out the bad actors was, letting another great depression happen was even less politically palatable.

"What gives you confidence in that assertion? Whether or not the lender brokered the mortgage itself, they would not own a mortgage with excessive risk if they didn't think the government was their backstop. (unless they were irrational and/or made bad decisions, in which case, let them go bankrupt!)" -- If the people brokering the mortgages had to own them and eat any losses caused by them, they would never have made those bad loans in the first place.