I can see the politically correct future already...

Wife: Did you sleep with him?
Husband: No of course I didn't! Not that there's anything wrong with homosexuality or infidelity...

now for the mods to decide if it's flamebait, funny or maybe even insightful.

We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream

I pointed out that this wasn't unique to America, but it was the nature of the world/humanity. You seemed to disagree, and we went back and forth to the point of using ancient Egypt as an example. To which you respond:
You brought up the example of the slaves and the pyramid. I pointed out that that was a bad example, as the pyramids were built by volunteers.

Egyptian slavery(or volunteer labor if you prefer) demonstrates might makes right as a mentality, and I do insist it demonstrates it more strongly than American society does today. Comparing favorably do a slave state isn't high praise. I merely wished to point out that your criticism of the 'American Dream' extended much, much further into human nature in general. Do you deny that?

Your misinformation about the pyramids does not speak well about your understanding of the rest of history. The Pharaoh was a living God. Would a living God have to force slaves to build his tomb? No. Every Egyptian wanted to work on the pyramids, to take part in that immense religious ritual, and they were well paid and well taken care of. Archeologists know a lot about the conditions of pyramid workers, because many were buried nearby. Bones show signs of being professionally set. The workers were well fed and lived in better housing than most.

Working on your God's tomb was an honer, a privilege bestowed on the best and the brightest, not a labor of slaves.

I could stomach that theory if I hadn't originally been replying to your saying this:
That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.

Waxing nostalgic for the good old days of Egyptian slaves worshiping their Man-God, while decrying the ways of the evil American empire.

Are you really sure that's where you want to go with this?

You should read a bit more about modern sociological, games theory, psychological, and economic experiments, which show that your worldview is incorrect. People are generally nice, because cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous.

I refer you, again, to history. Cooperation is advantageous. That is NOT the same as being nice to your fellow man. The pyramids are a lasting testament to what human cooperation can accomplish. Maintaining control over more than a million slaves requires a lot of cooperation, that doesn't make it nice.

History is war, conquest and the use of force against fellow man. Over and over and over again. Usually all that war and subjugation requires a great deal of cooperation, and yes, humans have proven good at it. I distinguish between that, and being nice.

Modern democracy's approach to balancing competing groups of co-operating humans with a mechanism other than brute force seems the best way to dodge the not nice aspect of cooperative competition. After all, the majority would likely win the violent contest anyways, so letting them 'win' can be expedient.

People are generally nice, unless they live in a society where there are two sets of rules. When being nice gets you taken advantage of, people become dicks out of self defense. That doesn't mean they want to be dicks, it means they have to, because they have no real access to justice.

I think that's backwards. People are only generally nice, when they have a society that encourages that as being in their self interest.

Modern economic experiments show that people would rather be fair and practice reciprocity than act in their own self interest.

History shows that in practice people act in their own self interest. It just sometimes takes the form of collective self interest. Selflessly risking your life in a war of aggression for betterment of your group at the expense of another is a recurring theme.

In any case, even if that IS the way things are, and people are just not generally very nice, it does not mean that is the way they should be.

I agree whole heartedly. Unfortunately I see the balance of the world, both now and historically, to be dominated by warlords oppressing those under them. Anytime a warlord is overthrown, more often than not the victor simply takes their place in power. There are exceptions of course, but I'd dare say stable democracies like America are the ones that stand out.

Which goes back to the prior post, I would say America on the whole is an example of one of the rare places where might makes right is more discouraged than re-enforced. With the caveat that this is a ridiculously low bar.

We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.

I think your missing the forest for the tree. It's not just American society that double standard applies to. It applies sweepingly to the whole of human history, including every single historical and modern society.

People are just generally not very nice. As a result, odds are pretty good that if your reading this you are a bad person, shame on you!

the real point is that water vapor and clouds, which again are two distinct things, are only feedbacks because their levels in the atmosphere are dependent on atmospheric conditions.

That's what a feedback is, your just saying they are only feedbacks because they fit the definition of a feedback.

CO2 levels on the other hand are independent of atmospheric conditions.

Nope, CO2 is both a feedback and a forcing. CO2 absorption and release from things like plants and oceans is dependent on temperature, making CO2 levels a feedback. Human CO2 emissions add an external forcing source for CO2 as well. It's both a feedback and a forcing.

CO2 is the main driver.

Except that we've been coming in and out of ice ages for millenia without the benefit of human CO2 forcing.

Let me repeat my question. Water vapor and the related cloud formations account for far more of the greenhouse effect than CO2. We do not understand the effect of cloud formation well enough to even attribute it as a positive or negative feedback. With our understanding of that being so poor, how can we have such a greater confidence in our understanding of the net impact of human CO2 emissions? Remember, CO2 has a much smaller impact, and human emissions are much smaller than natural CO2 emissions to boot.

You are confusing water vapor with clouds which while they are related are two different things. Water vapor is always a positive forcing. Clouds can be either positive or negative depending on a number of factors.

My apologies, I should have said feedback not forcing. What is not well understood or agreed upon is what roll water vapor and the directly resulting cloud cover play as global temperature increases and decreases. Whether they are a positive or negative feedback pretty much dwarfs any other consideration regarding future projections. I still would love an explanation of how a much less significant feedback, CO2, can be so well known when the sign for H2O is unknown.

Also CO2 alone accounts for around 20% of GHG forcing

Which depends on how you measure it. The high end 20-25% numbers are all based on ignoring any overlapping absorption by other gases in the same spectra. No respectable scientist ever attributes that level of absorption to CO2 alone, it's dishonest. I can't be bothered to go back and dig up the journal entries, but even being generous and giving CO2 15% overall absorption, it is still crushed by the more than 60% from H2O(if we measure H2O as you did it is up around 75%) that is so poorly understood we don't even know the sign to attribute it as a feedback.

It's not alarmist, it's a logical progression. We can't keep pumping shit into the atmosphere and water supplies thinking it won't have some major cumulative effect down the road.

Which has exactly NOTHING to do with global warming. For all that you've said, we might as well be terrified of the terrible global cooling effect that we are facing from human smoke and smog emissions.

Your argument is pure fear mongering and has absolutely nothing to do with the actual science of what is happening around us.

It may be possible that rising levels of CO2 may have a negligible impact on temperature due to the negative feedback of cloud formation. Current evidence suggests otherwise, specifically that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the average temperature by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.

I'd like to see a citation for the 'evidence' of those effects for doubling CO2. All the journal articles I've found base their doubling numbers on climate models, not measured 'evidence'. More over, those climate models aren't always even in agreement over the sign to attribute to water vapor. When CO2 makes up about 5% of the greenhouse effect and H2O contributes more than 60%, I'm baffled that anyone can claim that the understanding of CO2's overall contribution is better understood than that of H2O.

Let me repeat that, because I think it is a sorely overlooked point. Climate models aren't well agreed on what sign to attribute to water vapor forcing. Water vapor forcing is known to account for more than 60% of GHG forcing. Meanwhile, CO2 is known to account for a mere 5% of GHG forcing. Can anyone explain to me how a climate model can have high confidence of the effects from CO2's 5%, when the sign for more than 60% of GHG's is uncertain?

Do plants create landfills?
How do landfills contribute to global warming exactly?

Do they bury radioactive material?
How does buried radioactive material contribute to global warming exactly?

Do they crash tankers or blow up oil rigs, causing millions of gallons of oil to flow into the oceans over a very short period of time?
How do oil spills contribute to global warming exactly?

All the theories around AGW are based around human CO2 emissions. An extraordinarily harmless gas that plants require to survive, and naturally convert into oxygen. The potential harm from our CO2 emissions is it's contribution to the greenhouse effect. All your raving about toxic waste and oil spills just proves your more interested in declaring the sky is falling than you are in the actual science.

I'll pick the broken tray. First, I'll block your thrown stars (assuming you can even get a good windup given the claustrophobic environment inside a plane) and, now that you're disarmed, beat you over the head with said tray.

Sounds like you don't even need the tray. You might as well declare that guns are harmless as well. Potential victims can simply dodge the bullets and then finish the fight with a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick.

For those of us with less Ninja skills than yourself, better weapons offer an advantage in a fight.

How different is this from someone taking a tie and strangling the person in front of them? Or breaking off the tray table? Or using any one of a hundred other improvised weapons?

Seriously? Failure to understand the difference between a throwing star, a necktie and a dinner tray is +5?

I'll help you out captain obvious. We'll put throwing stars, neckties and dinner trays on a table. Then we can each pick our weapons and have a little 'demonstration'. If you suddenly figure out the difference before picking your weapon, the demonstration won't be necessary.