Flynt is sharper than any copper knife.
Obsidian is sharper than any copper knife.
Tribal people shave with flint to this day.
There is archaeological evidence of shaving going back 20,000 years.

Increasing relative to what? During the last interglacial all the ice on the planet except for Greenland and Antarctica melted completely.

All this assumes that humans with hundreds of millions of years worth of technological development will not be able to figure out a way to reflect away excess sunlight.

Newton's model made excellent and reliable predictions.

I never put forth the idea that CO2 drives the climate. I'm not referring to only one climate change event. I'm talking about these papers. They do not appear to me to be consistent with the doctrine that CO2 drives the climate.

Petit et all 1999 -- analysed 420,000 years of Vostok, and found that as the world cools into an ice age, the delay before carbon falls is several thousand years.
Fischer et al 1999 -- described a lag of 600 plus or minus 400 years as the world warms up from an ice age.
Monnin et al 2001 -- looked at Dome Concordia (also in Antarctica) – and found a delay on the recent rise out of the last major ice age to be 800 ± 600
Mudelsee (2001) -- Over the full 420,000 year Vostok history Co2 variations lag temperature by 1,300 years ± 1000.
Caillon et al 2003 -- analysed the Vostok data and found a lag (where CO2 rises after temperature) of 800 ± 200 years.

I don't see how that graph is an example. It shows a warming trend that starts around 1620 and a CO2 increase trend that starts around 1840. Moreover, this time period is useless for analyzing the natural interaction between temperature and CO2, since it is well known that most the CO2 increases since 1840 are because of the increased burning of fossil fuels and not primarily as a result of rising temperatures as has been the case over the long term as indicated by the ice cores.

If only they did. But they don't. Even if they're in principle modelling physics, they end up tweaking all the parameters to turn it into essentially a curve-fitting exercise. That's why after the sudden ice arctic drop in 2008, there was suddenly a "scientific" model that predicted the arctic would be ice free by 2014, which then Al Gore got to tout enthusiastically as if it were science.

If the best models are worthless and have not made any good predictions, should we really "go with them" just because they are the best?

You're not going to understand anything if you use that movie for a source. What the movie doesn't tell you that the changes in CO2 follow the changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, indicating that the causal relationship has flowed (during the 800,000 years of data from those ice cores) mostly (if not entirely) from temperature to CO2. You can read dozens of papers studying this lag in the peer reviewed climate journals. There are theories that there is still causal relationships the other way in how the climate has evolved over that time, but they are much more tenuous than suggested by Al Gore's naive observation that, hey, the lines go up and down together.

And the ice cores are not the source of the temperature data presented on the 1000-2000 year range. Most ice core analysis doesn't have the resolution for that. For that they use tree ring data, which is a lot more questionable than ice core data, as it has to make a lot of assumptions about the things other than temperature that influence tree growth rates.

It's not that simple at all. Given the current composition of the atmosphere, for instance, to the best of our observations, more CO2 in the troposphere traps more heat in the troposphere, raising its temperature, BUT more CO2 in the stratosphere radiates more heat out of the stratosphere, lowering the temperature of the stratosphere. There may be a point in the system, after which the absorption bands in the troposphere are saturated enough that the cooling effect on the stratosphere of additional CO2 is greater than the warming effect on the troposphere.

Or it could be that global warming will lead to fewer hurricanes and less drought. The idea that we can use a computer model to predict the behavior of this system outside the region that we have data for is naive.

And it could also be that we can ONLY support 11 billion people with global warming, as the one thing that global warming certainly leads to is higher evaporation rates, which means more fresh water produced by nature. And fresh water supply is the biggest limiter to human population.

This. Or just slowly crank up the morphine until he stops breathing. I don't understand why this is a problem.

Well you see, it's no longer "global warming". It's "climate change". And "climate change," of course, means more extreme weather events, which are caused by manmade pollution. And therefore every extreme weather event is compelling evidence that Al Gore was right all along.

This is the same photographic technique used to create the stargate special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but putting the camera on a trolley and zooming it in. Here's a really good video on the evolution of the technology. http://youtu.be/KhRo2WbWnKU

For artistic slit scan photography, check out Jay Mark Johnson's work. It's much more interesting than this stuff, imo.

I'm saying if the plane of the orbit is perpendicular to the plane of the ring. Of course it doesn't have to be fully perpendicular -- as long as the two planes aren't identical, any satellite orbit will move back and forth across the plane of the ring. The magnitude of the effect would depend on how perpendicular the plane of the orbit is to the plane of the ring, and therefore how far away it moves from the plane of the ring at the extremities of its orbit.

If the ring was perpendicular to the orbit of the satellite, it would have an additive effect to the earth's gravity in proportion to how far out of the plane of the ring the satellite is. If the satellite is in the plane of the ring, it would have no effect, as it would pull equally in all directions.