The kind of group think you are talking about can best be found on Fox News, where unlike the for the science community, evidence for any assertions are either not required or purely optional. However, hey, you convinced yourself your rhetoric sounds great, even if it is irrelevant.

" So called "green" electricity tends to be simply expensive. "

Perhaps true, but in relative terms once one factors in the costs of not doing it, it is actually very cheap and one reason that alternative energy companies are continuing to thrive even as oil prices plummet. Solar and wind energy are getting cheaper and this recent change in oil prices will only cause more intense economic selection to make them cheaper still.

"I think change is inevitable. Who are we to fight it?"

Sounds like the approach Neville Chamberlain was making right after he returned from Munich. Sadly, the consequences of such think often prove catastrophic.

Arizona may have beaches, but sadly it will also have soil temperatures that will make it extremely difficult to grow crops, unless you raise cactus for tequila.

Simply more evidence that Americans don't take Canadians seriously.

Your attempt to address the "cost of addressing global warming" is bogus without also calculating the cost of not addressing global warming. Clearly, there is very little evidence that there are more costs to not burning fossil fuels than there is to burning it. We can ramp up solar and wind energy and in some cases nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels. What will be lost? Jobs in the fossil fuels industry, perhaps a million. Jobs in the oil service industries, add a few more million. These could easily be offset by increased retraining and increased jobs in the alternative energy industries and to boost there is a very positive trade off of not having billion dollar oils spills to clean up, billion dollars of contaminants to remove from our air, water and food, billions of dollars of health care costs by removing highly carcinogenic substances from our food and immediate environment, far more fish, far less acid rain, and billions less in litigation costs.

Admittedly, there would be big monetary losses for those so entrenched in fossil fuels that they fail to give them up. However, one must ask why should others be forced to pay for this burden by shoving these costs onto the taxpayer? Yes, I agree that dealing with climate change will be an economic disaster to those who refuse to wean themselves from fossil fuel based economics. However, markets are already beginning to speak and future investors are taking note. Fortunes in the future will not be based on oil because its just not a good deal for most people on the planet.

Great sophism and rhetoric, but where is the evidence of this vast conspiracy of scientists to always add 1.2 C ever time they read a thermometer?

I always like to ask the skeptics and deniers a question they can never answer and invariably refuse to try.

If its not getting hotter, why are virtually all the world's glacier and ice sheets melting?

Go ahead, use those "senior" statistical skills you allude to. I dare you.

and I call bullshit on remarks that provide no evidence to the contrary. If you want to play scientist, then you need to have some evidence to make your case. As is typical of the skeptic and denier community, there is much rhetoric and sophism, some rather silly, but none able to withstand the scrutiny of close examination.

Congratulations on having more than 4 brain cells. It would behoove you to use them.

Scientists use proxy measures all the time. Tree rings and the rings in mollusk tests are very good examples. Likewise so are growth trajectories of various plankton. There is no reason to assume that simply because humans weren't around to read a thermometer, that the world at a particular moment and place in time was not within some degree of tolerance close to a particular temperature. Sure at any point in a scientific argument one could add "and here a miracle occurs". However, science is about dismissing such speculation in the absence of evidence.

By the way, the "wide error bars" on any one particular point in time might cast doubt as to the accuracy of a particular measured time period, but that wouldn't affect the least squares estimate of the trend, except to increase the variance and increase the confidence interval of the regression. If they were all very large and not different on average from each other, you would have a point, but that is clearly not the case for the data set under discussion here (historical temperature records).

Quite true, but the probability that your remarks are at all relevant is becoming increasingly small as more and more temperature measurements are taken.

At some point, skeptics are going to have to actually produce some evidence that would suggest than humanity needs to any longer take them seriously, when the odds that they are right and its either "not getting warmer" or "its getting colder" are smaller all the time.

Sure they can. Just because they are reconstructions one can not conclude that these proxies aren't roughly accurate, unless one has specific evidence that the system is behaving differently in the past than it is now. Chemical and physical processes that occurred in the past should not be assumed to behave differently than they do now unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.

If this milestone in the measuring of planetary temperatures tells us anything, it is that it is long past time for those who want to be skeptical to offer some actual evidence that their skepticism is at all relevant. Shutting one's eyes to inconvenient truths, doesn't make them go away. However, it does make us all far more vulnerable while they are closed.

Yes, I couldn't agree more and some in the fisheries community are now suggesting that overfishing could well cause many, if not nearly all, current fisheries to become "functionally extinct" within as little as 25 years if present fishing pressures continue.

However, this is an issue quite separate from those associated with ocean acidification, which adds a very heavy energy cost to organisms that must produce a calcium carbonate skeleton. The issue is made more severe because in most cases it is the larvae that are at greatest risk because they only have a very narrow time window to either accomplish this to settle if they are like many invertebrates going to advance to the next life stage, or like vertebrates who must generate the vertebral structure in order to become motile and move to preferred habitats critical for growth. When organisms don't meet the required threshold they die. It doesn't matter if some other organism might under some circumstances would have been able to do it, it just means the population and potentially nearly all populations won't be around in the next season to reproduce.

The USGS has estimated total world carbon dioxide production by volcanoes and undersea vents. Its estimated to be about 250,000,000 metric tons per year. This pales in comparison with the 33,000,000,000 metric tons generated by the burning of fossil fuels, which by the way explain why the isotopic signature of the carbon in the atmosphere is not that of contemporary plants but of fossilized plant material. Your comments about vents only indicate that we may be at even greater risk than we had previously imagined.

It doesn't matter if the oceans become only slightly alkiline. What matters for humans is whether or not species like pteropods can produce there shells and go about serving a food for the rest of the food chain. What recent evidence suggests, at least in the Pacific NW is that pteropod tests are showing increasing signs that they are unable to form undisturbed tests. The danger here isn't that the ocean itself can't undergo even more extreme chemical changes, it is that we are clearly reaching the physiological tolerances of a very critical element of the marine food web. Once they are gone, no technical fix is going to bring them back.

You might just want to talk to oyster farmers in the Pacific Northwest.

For changes to be useful, they must be averaged so that the signal is not masked by large seasonal and daily fluctuations. The critical item is the relative consequence of the change in global averages, not the absolute values of the changes themselves since biodiversity is not uniformly distributed nor does it respond uniformly to each absolute degree of temperature difference. Likewise, the specific temperature in any particular year is not particularly relevant since there is wide variability between years as well as seasons. However, we do know one thing:

If one does compare the average rate of change during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum with the AVERAGE rate that can be computed OVER THE PAST 150 years, we observe that the current rate is about 36 times faster. This implies that we shouldn't expect faunal changes in more recent future times to be less than what has historically occurred in the past, since there is no evidence whatsoever that somehow magically evolution that altered the mammal fauna then is acting differently now than it did 55 million years ago. Indeed, we might instead expect that extinction rates will likely be higher, particularly since there are many human induced land use changes that affect species diversity IN ADDITION TO those induced (explained by) solely climate change. Likewise, observations concerning the rate at which tropical species are now invading temperate environments are likewise consistent with those predicted based on the relative difference in average rate of warming, as well as those observed by looking at faunal changes in the past. The consequences are significant because of the disruption of ecosystems associated with such invasions, particularly when such invasions involve disease. For example, ten years ago cases of West Nile Virus in the US, were extremely rare, now they are becoming increasingly common.

If we look at previous geological periods that have exhibited temperature changes of similar magnitude associated with very rapid warming, ALL show tremendous extinction rates. Consequently, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the current rate of warming will induce similar rates of extinction.

Instead of terrestrial biodiversity, one could look at sea level rise and glacial and ice shield melting as another area of active interest since the consequences are particularly important. In both cases the averages of temperature change now being experienced unequivocally demonstrate that as the glaciers retreat, and they are retreating at record rates, and as ice sheets melt (both Greenland and the Antarctic are loosing ice volume), sea levels will rise faster than at any time in recent geological history. Although the averages are based on only about 150 years of accumulated data for temperature records using thermometers of various kinds, there is simply no reason to believe that sea levels won't rise rapidly or that the consequence of this rise will be anything less than extraordinarily expensive to humans. Within 200 years, it is likely that every port in the world will have to be rebuilt and unless checked, humanity had better get used to the idea of rebuilding all its ports every couple of hundred years. If one, computes this cost alone, it becomes clear that getting off fossil fuels will be incredibly more economical than continuing to burn them.

You ask about the temperatures since 1975 and those before 1945. One can presently only say that whatever has been occurring in the last 20 years or so is significantly different from what has gone on before because it is virtually certain that the last 20 years has been significantly hotter than the previous several hundred thousand. However, it also should be emphasized that this observation is completely consistent with an exponential nature of the curve and probably the next 20 years will likely better define what we can expect in subsequent decades. If you want to argue that things will be different than what the long term averages suggest, however shake they might be, then you will need to have actual evidence that such notions are any longer relevant. Simple, "naked" skepticism with out evidence might give the appearance of critical thinking, but that is all it does since it provides no substantive evidence that any critical thinking has actually occurred.