I'm skeptical that it was any warmer during the medieval or roman warm periods than it is now. I haven't seen any good evidence for that. Even if it were as the warming continues that won't be true for much longer.

Our civilization is built around the climate as it has existed for the past 8,000 years or so. Climate change will have an effect on that. I'm particularly worried about our agricultural systems that are feeding 7+ billion people. Any major disruption of those will have profound effects.

As far as sea level I think we already have at least 20 feet of rise built in. There is a lot of lag in the response of the great ice sheets to warming but respond they will and there isn't anything we can do about it. The last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea levels were 70-80 feet higher than they are now. Maybe it's just a matter of how many centuries it takes to get there.

In measuring those imbalances they're measuring the filtering that greenhouse gases do to the infrared spectrum. The fact that some of the absorption spectrums overlap means there is some uncertainty in what gas causes what effect but those uncertainties are quantifiable. Cloud cover and ice albedo are also subject of research and they haven't found evidence for them being major factors.

To me it just looks like you're desperately searching for anything but CO2.

Here Richard Alley explains that carbon dioxide is the biggest control knob for Earth's climate going back as far as we can tell.

Also I cited measurements of the Earth's energy imbalance by observing the difference between surface and TOA infrared radiation. That's from the last 20 or 30 years.

I think even 4 degrees C of global temperature rise will be disastrous. That's not runaway warming. It's not so much the warming but the rate it's happening. If the warming that has happened and will happen over the next 100 years were spread out over 2 or 3,000 years it wouldn't be that much of a problem. Everything would have time to adjust.

Anthropogenic CO2 will not cause runaway global warming. The Earth isn't going to turn into Venus, at least not on any time scale that matters to us.

As far as research done during the period of CO2 increase, basically all of the research has been done during that period. CO2 started increasing in the early 1800's (maybe even the late 1700's) but it didn't really start to become significant until the 1900's.

Another level of the greenhouse gas story is you can measure the spectrum of infrared radiation at the surface and compare it to the spectrum at the top of the atmosphere. You can observe how it changes over time. From this you can determine the energy balance between surface emissions and TOA. If there is an imbalance temperatures on Earth will change until a new balance is achieved. Observations in the satellite era have found an imbalance.

I laughed at what you though my opinion was.

Models are not science. At the climate model level they are tools that science uses to understand the interactions of a complex system. You think that if you can prove models are useless then you can show global warming is a sham. You need to go at it at a much lower level.

Of course it's a truism that everything in science is a model at one level or another. The first order modeling for the effect of CO2 is to do what John Tyndall did in the 1850's. Shine various frequencies of light through it at varying concentrations and measure the effect. From that you can derive a formula for the effect of CO2 on the range of infrared light.

Models are not the primary evidence for global warming. My statement from the previous comment is:

That's the primary evidence. Models are merely tools to explore the interrelation/interaction between the various factors in climate.

Well, you're the one who brought politics into the discussion back in this comment. I was merely responding.

As I mentioned a few posts ago the Earth is warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and changing the concentration of them will change the temperature. That's about as simply as it can be stated. Anything beyond that is details.

I don't give a flying fuck for the goddamn politics. It's the science I care about and politics have little to do with that. In the end all the politics in the world can't change the objective reality that science helps us understand. If you think scientists are subverting their work for the sake of politics you must think they don't give a damn for their science and their reputations. As I said time will tell as the future unfolds and any scientists misrepresenting the science will be discovered. They're mostly too smart to think they can get away with the kind of deception you think they are practicing.

Yes, politicians who don't like the implications of global warming and what we need to do to address it. For some it conflicts with their world view and for others it has the potential to cost some of their supporters a lot of money.

I don't give a flying fuck for the goddamn politics. It's the science I care about and politics have little to do with that. In the end all the politics in the world can't change the objective reality that science helps us understand. If you think scientists are subverting their work for the sake of politics you must think they don't give a damn for their science and their reputations. As I said time will tell as the future unfolds and any scientists misrepresenting the science will be discovered. They're mostly too smart to think they can get away with the kind of deception you think they are practicing.

The science of global warming became controversial because some people didn't like the implications of it and what we need to do to address the problem. We could argue all night but time will tell which of us is more correct. I like my chances.

Oh, I read all of what you wrote. Your notion that science is a religion is absurd. Science is empirically tested against objective reality. In the long run it can't be perverted because sooner or later that objective reality will overtake any errors or purposeful misrepresentation. Any Us and Them involves those who accept objective reality as it comes and those who aren't willing to for one reason or another. I'm firmly on the side of accepting reality.

Ok, do you also understand that the Earth is considerably warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Without those greenhouse gases the average temperature on the surface of the Earth would be ~0 degrees F instead of the ~58 degrees F it currently is. Wouldn't you think a change in the concentration of those greenhouse gases cause a change in temperature?

So why don't you just tell me his name instead of making me guess? As far as the "modern obsession" goes I might start with Gilbert Plass who published a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change" in 1958. Did you know that President Lyndon Johnson got a report on the warming potential of the increase in carbon dioxide? The Charney Report was published in 1979. Through the 1980's James Hansen was publishing on the subject. His testimony before Congress in 1988 was pretty alarming.

Models are tested all the time against the real world both in the projections they make and in hindcasting. Did you read the links I cited? To quote from the first one:

I trust that the scientists know how to test their models and that their judgement about how well they're doing is sound. I suspect that your judgement of how they should be tested is wrong.

None of the WG1 report can be traced to the WWF. It's all peer reviewed scientific papers. Worrying about the Himalaya's error in the WG2 report is getting silly. It's one small error in a 3,000 page report, the error has been admitted by the IPCC and steps have been taken to prevent it from happening again.

I guess because Al Gore is a "left wing" politician anything he says is automatically political. And all along I just thought he was reporting what the science said. I could care less about Al Gore, I pay attention to actual scientists.

I read the article on the JSER report. Without spending more time than I'm willing to all I can say is that since the report was published in 2008 the Earth continues to warm.

I've run out of steam to respond to the rest. Time will tell whether the climate scientists case is a goner but so far nothing is happening that causes me any serious qualms about it.

When you start throwing words like "dogma" around it's obvious where you stand. It's perfectly valid to question the science of climate change but it has to be done in a scientific manner. When people start throwing around arguments about who's making the claims (Al Gore anyone?) how much it's going to cost or how people are trying to control us it's not longer a scientific argument that has anything to do with the science. When people bring up old arguments that have long since been debunked it's just wasting scientist's time. There has been the occasional argument from the anti side that caused scientists to reexamine their science (Anthony Watts Surfacestations.org being a notable example) but what mostly happens is it strengthens the science making it even more solid.

So while you might think it sounds like dogma it's mostly scientists and others getting tired of having to repeat themselves over and over and over again to people who won't listen to them.

If you're letting your dislike of people like Al Gore color your attitude toward the science then you're not being properly scientifically skeptical. On top of that if you don't seek out what Gore actually said instead of just believing what others say he said you're just letting yourself be duped. I don't pay much attention to Gore but when I've looking into the claims about what he said from the denier side they're most often taken out of context ignoring the qualifying statements he's made.