The effect of CO2 declines logarithmically. The first 20ppm CO2in the atmosphere has a greater effect
than the following 300ppm. The incremental effect of increasing CO2at the present 385ppm level is almost immeasurable. Why don't climate "science" articles acknowledge the actual physics of CO2? It's lower now than it was before there were human beings to invent acronyms like AGW.

We are nowhere near the saturation point. This idea stems from a misunderstanding that CO2 is evenly distributed vertically through that atmosphere.

The mechanism is explained well here .

Your assumption that scientists have overlooked these mechanisms are quite incorrect, and have featured in models of climate change going back to fouriers original work on the topic of the greenhouse effect in the 1800s.

So we know that the earth has warmed and cooled many times before. We really have no credible evidence regarding the actual rate of change in these prior instances

Wrong! We have icecores, geological evidence and tree ring evidence (Although since about the 60s the tree ring evidence appears to have gone off the rails, due to the changes in carbon isotopes we put into the air from nuclear testing and cheynobyl).

CO2 levels seem to have varied wildly, up to 7000 ppm, during both heating and cooling cycles. Has anybody isolated the reasons for heating in the past? Can those reasons be ruled out in this instance?

Yes, this has all been accounted for. You should not that 7000ppm is not a CO2 concentration conducive to human life at all.

If not, then AGW alarmists are in thin ice. Natural processes are almost always much more complicated than we realize

And yet you have a strong opinion on it that makes you feel you understand it better than atmospheric physicists. Why IS that?

If your theory is so wonderfully complete, why can't you create a computer model that can start with conditions twenty years ago and work out a correct description of the present?

They can and they do. Most models are tested against earlier data to see how it lines up. Current models are pretty damn accurate.

Please note, I'm not denying that it's getting warmer. I simply don't subscribe to the current hubris that makes humanity responsible for all of it.

Physics hasn't got a lot of room for opions I'm afraid, the universe is somewhat oblivious to the whims of political opinion.

As someone who has a lot of Perl on his resume, I heartily endorse companies hiring people who work with boring old technologies!

As a python coder I'm somewhat pleased that my boring old technology is currently seen as flashy new technology right now.

Grunge, is back in fashion, apparently.

Yep, I remember as a kid building a crystal radio with my dad, and he used a photo-resist etching solution to build the pcb. The end result was pretty damn pro. I still have that radio, 30 years later, and it works great.

Apt, considering this same government is pretty much implementing an NSA style metadata retention scheme as we speek. Apparently we have to trust that they won't mishandle the data and this example clearly shows they can't.

Yet you think that the law enforcement officers should be willing to risk their own lives to stop them, which unless you place a very low value on their lives, tells me that you think it is an emergency after all.

While there is of necessity some risk to their safety in the course of their job, that doesn't mean that they signed up to give up their lives needlessly just to satisfy some jackasses who don't know the difference between fantasy and reality.

This isn't Hollywood. That's a course of action that has pretty good odds of resulting in the people attempting to do the arrest injured or killed.

This isn't "any reason." This is attempting to ram the gate at a secure checkpoint, where the use of deadly force is expected.

I'm not willing to risk the lives of law enforcement or soldiers in order to try to spare people who are apparently too stupid to live.

I don't know about AC but I bought a made in the USA Moto X (1st gen) and a made in South Korea Galaxy S5, both are first world countries with non-deplorable working conditions.

Go back to high school and retake reading comprehension and basic physics please. I know that is far too rude and confrontational, but it doesn't sound like you read my post at all, which is tiresome.

I stated myself that surface temperature has been consistently rising. I and anyone trusting the meteorology community agrees that even the current 'slowdown' is as you reference, a matter of warming but at a slower rate than previously and than expected.

I don't comprehend where you ever got the notion I believed or claimed otherwise? I pointed out that the rate of net energy/radiation coming into the planet is the more important and direct measure. The basic physics of the greenhouse effect is trapping incoming radiation so that more is coming in than going out. The resulting extra energy leads to warming. What I observed and you again reference yourself in your quote of the article is that the changes to that energy imbalance at t edge of space, is dominated by volcanic activity since the 60s. With the major increases we've contributed to CO2 contributions in that same time, that gives some hope things aren't as bleak as many fear mongers wish. With no notable trend in the energy imbalance in the whole Ceres results of the last decade and a half, we certainly seem less likely to be facing catastrophic sensitivity to CO2. The increases of a decade and a half being in essence undetectable in the core measure of changes to the energy imbalance.

You can't, however, use the change as proof of AGW, because that would be circular reasoning.

No, it would be called science.

(A) We've known the mechanism since the 1800s when Fourier et al first raised warnings about CO2s spectral absorbsion lines and the implication the coal spewing industrial revolution might have on atmosphere. This is validated science and underwrites so much physics that we'd have to turn the clock back on at least a century of scientific understanding in multiple fields if it wasn't true.

(B) We have a solid graps of how much CO2 is being put into the atmosphere from both economic modelling and satelite and terrestrial telemetry.

(C) This permits us to do a back of the napkin calculation as to how much energy (thermal and kinetic) is being added to the climate system from human intervention (its a lot).

(D) This in turn gives rise to more complicated modelling that can tell us how much of that energy goes to warming, how much to increased kinetic activity (cyclones/etc), how much gets absorbed by the ocean and how much radiates back out.

(E) The end result both matches up with observation (And *n o* natural process can account for what we are seeing. Volcanic activity is incredibly insubstantial. Even krakatoa hardly put a dent in it. And solar activity is also quite minor).

Occams razor says we *must* conclude humans are causing substantial climate change, because if they are not we have to find a mechanism that (A) Prevents physics from working as it is known, and (B) Makes it look like physics is working as it is known. Should this be found, it would be Nobel prize level monumental. However, as they say, big claims require big proof, and that proof is not remotely forthcoming.

The fact that it's getting warmer isn't proof that AGW is correct

Yes, but the fact that the data matches the theory, and if it didn't we'd be rewriting nearly a century of physics indicates that suggesting something is magically making it only appear that physics is correct is some seriously magical violations of occams razor.

The basic physics of climate change is that increasing levels of gases trap more energy from the sun, increasing the amount of energy in our atmosphere and climate system. We know by and large, most of the energy is stored in the oceans as water holds energy much better than gases in the air.

With such a simple observation, I'd like to make the observation that it seems too few of the IPCC guys pushing for policy stuff are paying any attention to the energy budget. Instead, we have the only basis scientifically being that the average surface temperature is warming, and CO2 levels are rising and we are the ones pushing them up. That's all well and good, and they are important observations. About 30 years ago though we started sending up satellites to measure incoming and outgoing radiation. The ERBS and CERES programs from NASA have given us direct measurements of trends in the overall energy balance at the edge of space. The most direct measurement of global warming that we can have. The summary from each program, has let us find a decade level average energy imbalance, and we've found it is in good or at least general agreement with energy levels measured via Ocean Heat Content observations.

Here's the important bit though. As the IPCC's most recent AR has observed, the satellite measurements show that for the duration of the CERES project, there has been NO TREND in the energy imbalance. The earlier ERBS data showed the same as well. Our satellite measurements have shown significant and very steady trends in energy balance cycling monthly, but the average over the years and decades we've measured is just a steady and consistent average neither shifting noticeably up or down. Meanwhile, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over that same time have climbed like nobody's business. All our models and expectation for X degrees of warming for so much CO2 kinda hinges pretty heavy on CO2 pushing up the energy imbalance. If it's not, and observations suggest that. We may not need to be so worried as some of the panic ridden crowd wants.

Before I get citation needed shoved down my throat, here's a peer reviewed journal article published in Geophysical Research Letters. It is comparing observed atmosphere energy imbalance to the CMIP5 model runs. It finds good agreement, but also makes the very notable observation that the energy imbalance trend is dominated by volcanic activity(ie NOT the CO2 levels that are higher than they've been in millenia). Full abstract:
Observational analyses of running 5 year ocean heat content trends (Ht) and net downward top of atmosphere radiation (N) are significantly correlated (r~0.6) from 1960 to 1999, but a spike in Ht in the early 2000s is likely spurious since it is inconsistent with estimates of N from both satellite observations and climate model simulations. Variations in N between 1960 and 2000 were dominated by volcanic eruptions and are well simulated by the ensemble mean of coupled models from the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). We find an observation-based reduction in N of 0.31±0.21Wm2 between 1999 and 2005 that potentially contributed to the recent warming slowdown, but the relative roles of external forcing and internal variability remain unclear. While present-day anomalies of N in the CMIP5 ensemble mean and observations agree, this may be due to a cancelation of errors in outgoing longwave and absorbed solar radiation.

I thought we got rid of slavery a century or two ago.

By summer, they may have been able to finish assembling half a dozen of those 10,000 shelters.