Don't blame me, I voted for for Kodos.

IMO, neither party cares about public opinion on net neutrality and if you want your voting day activity to matter show up and vote for none of the above by spoiling your ballet. If you can get even 20-30% of the vote to show up as spoiled ballets then politicians selfish interests require them to take notice and try harder again to care what the public thinks in order to gain those extra votes to increase their power base.

What if it's on topic? Say, I dunno, when discussing climate change and citing a celebrity that won a noble prize for their related work?

I'll whole heartedly agree if you want to lay the failing at the feet of ever giving Gore the time of day in scientific circles, let alone a Noble prize. You'll have to forgive people for continually bringing Gore's statements on the matter forward though. His videos are showing up in schools to 'teach' kids about the important scientific research on climate change. My kids came home having watched before they were in grade 5. When the indoctrination is pushed that far out, people are NOT remiss to start pushing back.

IMO it's not much different than the situation with Islamic Jihadists and moderate Muslims. The fact some might claim common cause with a larger group doesn't make it so, but some denouncement from the greater community starts to become of importance. Regrettably, there has been little to no efforts made from the scientific community to distance itself from Gore's extreme proclamations and warnings. Yes, I know scientists don't appreciate having to come out of their research labs where they are doing actual real work to do stuff like that, but it's important. It's all the more important the more impact you believe your research has to society as a whole.

So deniers like the authors and editors of peer reviewed journals like The National Academy of Sciences and Geophysical Research Letters and Nature. Nature in particular publishing an article with the 'denier' skewed title of "Strengthening of ocean heat uptake efficiency associated with the recent climate hiatus".

Nothing burns me more than somebody faking as though they are all for the scientific process and defending it's 'findings' while at the same time totally ignoring the actual science. The reality as pointed out in the 3 linked articles, and many, many, many more is that since 1998 the rate of warming has dropped off heavily enough it no longer matches most predictions or modelling very well. Something in the predictions and modelling was missed that is happening in the real world, and has caused an apparent 'hiatus' in the rate of warming that was expected. Tracking, identifying and understanding that is important science, and thankfully they haven't stopped to listen to people like you who would prefer to deny that reality.

Which is the source of a huge part of my skepticism regarding the severity of the 'problem'.

1. Our climate is warming, period. We have almost 125 years of instrumental data to prove it. The but is that, 125 years is not enough data points for phenomena that as you pointed out span centuries and even millenia.
2. CO2 is a GHG and contributes to warming, and we are dumping significant quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. What severity of impact is that causing though? We have just barely been dumping that CO2 for a century, and our best data points don't give us much reference of the 'before' trend.

What pushes me past skepticism though and into outright rejection is graphs like the IPCC published Mann et el graph showing temperature over the last 2k or more years. The work and principle of looking at older proxy records to get a longer reference of climate is vitally important, and a way to extend what we know and can use to improve prediction. The principal is good. The published articles are pure hack jobs though. Data points projected by proxy prior to 1900 are posted and attached to current instrumental records and show an alarming and sudden upward trend in temperature starting at 1900. Now, any sane, skeptical mind would point out the change in data sources as the first and most important cause. Instead, Mann et al claimed a eureka moment, as human CO2 emissions also roughly coincide with that time, so clearly human activity is the cause.

That isn't just bad science, IMO it is deliberately and intentionally bad science. The fact is further proven and demonstrated if you take Mann's oldest and original graphs and just map out what 2014 and 2020 aught to look like if his observed 'trend' is real.

I like to class myself in the rational crowd, and I think a major blind spot between sides is regarding the degree of warming. The following are further facts I think we can agree must be recognized if someone wants to be taken seriously:
1. The instrumental record over the last 125 years clearly shows things are warming.
2. CO2 in the atmosphere acts as a GHG and causes warming.
3. Human activity is dumping sizable quantities of CO2 into the environment and measurable amounts are accumulating in the atmosphere.

These are all well documented, measured and verifiable facts, not part of any honest debate.

That said, I STILL count myself a skeptic of the 'degree' or 'rate' of warming that we should be anticipating over the next decades. Having all the hottest years on record occurring in the last decade or two doesn't alarm me over much. We only have 100 some years of data, and the trend in it is a relatively linear warming from start to finish.

The point of contention is the question of whether or not we are facing 'catastrophic' change or not. Plenty of reconstructions and climate models argue for exponential warming. Such predictions go back to the very first IPCC report, which current global average temps are nearly cooler than the coolest error bars of predictions from back then. More recent estimates start the 'curve' later and later which has served to keep predictions consistent with measured reality. Despite this though, the best models all still DO recognize the absence of accelerated warming in recent years as a problem. They didn't predict it.

If anyone is still reading and thinks I'm missing important reasons to still anticipate catastrophic results, please let me know, but in all my searching of journals and actual, honest research I am just NOT finding any strong evidence or suggestion that it's time to 'panic'.

It's not 'deniers' pointing out the hiatus, but actual peer reviewed scientists. They point out that the hiatus DOES matter because it's getting close to falling outside the error bars that were meant to take into account the 'statistical noise' you want to claim as excuse for inaccuracy. Surely you realize the stupidity in claiming, essentially, conflicting data doesn't contradict method X, after all, the data the method was based on is far too noisy to expect good results. Seems like your admitting to knowing too little, which is presumably what you mean to be arguing against,

If we are just going to through out facts devoid of context, the IPCC fourth assessment pegs annual NATURAL CO2 emissions at 430 billion tonnes. Or worked backwards to 1870, about 62 trillion tonnes.

It's cute using something like Slate as a citation to demonstrate the state of scientific research. Regrettably for your argument, actual scientific journal articles like these ones in Nature, IOPScience and Science all contradict your statement. These articles all note "Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century" with multiple citations to yet other scientific journal articles that demonstrated this.

And that's assuming any negative feedback loops don't override it (look at the Iris hypothesis for an example of what could happen).

The global mean temperature trend for the last decade has fallen outside the error bars of the climate model projections gathered by the first IPCC assessment. Go ahead and deny that all you like, but the actual scientists are looking at the why and trying to sort out what they got wrong, in articles like those I've linked above.

Agreed, but how good are the climate models is a very important question. Plenty of people are pushing very, very hard for sweeping large scale economic and political level reforms based on the results of these models. Global CO2 emissions are tightly locked to economic development, particularly in developing nations like China, and significantly cutting those means significant economic fallout.

Look at the IPCC assessments and you can see what their current assessment of climate model reliability is. They rank it to be quite high. At the exact same time, they also note that climate models are NOT well agreed on what SIGN to place on the impact of cloud feedback. Apologies if it makes me sound like I'm cherry picking my data. Clouds contribute significantly more to the greenhouse effect than CO2, and models are uncertain what SIGN to place on clouds? I DO NOT believe the certainty the models can give on CO2 impact is all that powerful while there remains disagreement on the sign to attribute to clouds. Most importantly to all of us stuck on this rock, it certainly seems insufficient to advocate massive global political and economic reforms.

Well, save for the collapse of the world's ice sheets by 2100. You know, the most shocking and pinnacle of Gore's movie... But other than the parts he exaggerated, he was in keeping with the IPCC. Just like George W. Bush was a genius except for the times that he wasn't...

Policy derived from science is superior to policy derived from opposition to science.

Agreed.

You are just restating our differences. I'm trying to tell you, the policy Al Gore is pushing for is NOT derived from science, but is in fact derived in it's absence.

That's a very ugly logic there. One side isn't made white because the other is darker.

Politicizing the science is the problem, I don't care what side your on. Science aught to be about the provable, demonstrable facts and all the political wrangling left out as a separate field.

Science should inform political decisions, but it's a slippery relationship. If someone like Al Gore declares that science says you should buy his company's carbon credits or face disaster people can generally see to dismiss him as the problem, and someone misusing science for his own agenda. When he gets awarded a Nobel along side real scientists though, suddenly people start questioning where the scientists fall into the agenda too.

Again, I don't care who is misusing the science and to what end, it's wrong in every case, and it damages the public understanding of what science really is.

the political objective becomes a logical product of the climate science. you are suggesting the science is being used by leftists. what if the science just naturally and inevitably supports what leftists are saying?

But the science doesn't naturally support any of that. The agreed on science is that the world is warming, CO2 contributes to warming, and humans are producing CO2. Nowhere in that does it naturally fall out that carbon taxes are the correct scientific response. Even if the results of the warming will be catastrophic, the question that still needs answering is what solution is most cost effective? Reducing emissions, directly preparing to live with the warming, or both. Right now the political left is acting like reducing emissions is the only game in town, and the holy texts of science have their back...

It's no wonder people are recoiling at that, science is being mis-used as a political tool and guys like Al Gore who are doing it are getting Noble prizes. When the people pushing an agenda conflate their agenda with the science, and get a Nobel prize along the way, it shouldn't be surprising that people react more strongly against that science than against some report about a planet many light years away.

You declare that governments are all bad, and thus that genocide really is nothing new. As though there are no degrees of bad that a government can fall under. Gaddafi was going to commit a widespread genocide against his opposition. Your defense for not stopping it amounts to observing that America's congress doesn't care about the American people either, so they are just as bad and no sense trading one bad government for another.

You downplay genocide because you want to take pot shots at NATO and the west to point out that yes, they are bad and have done evil things too.

Put on our big boy pants and face the real world. Every nation the world over has done horrible, terrible things to masses of people. America is not special in that regard. In order to try and make live better for people, sometimes that means working against a common enemy, like the rebels are working with NATO to remove Gaddafi. Removing Gaddafi doesn't guarantee a golden age for Libyan people. It just aborts the guaranteed retaliatory genocide Gaddafi would have enacted without his defeat, and a slim hope for a better future that was impossible without Gaddafi's removal. That is a good thing, however bleak the circumstances may be.

An honest question. During Gaddafi's revolution, were all his supporters rallying in the streets demanding the basic freedom of democratic process? That would seem a very important distinction or commonality.