You're young, aren't you?

Talk.origins has been around since ... the 1980s maybe? At least the 1990s. It was the place for creationism-evolution debates, back when Usenet was the place for Internet discussion.

That's hilarious. Newsflash: the term "denier" is ancient history in Internet debates.

The point is that it's stupid to disbelieve a scientific theory on the basis of what terminology people who debate it use.

You're conflating one person with an entire field and condemning researchers as a whole on that basis. I thought we we supposed to be arguing about scientific facts here? There's more to climate science than Mike Mann, or the late-Holocene paleotemperature reconstruction community.

Oh, an armchair philosopher of science. That's even funnier than an armchair scientist making grand declarations about what science is.

Fine, we both agree on that. Nobody's claiming that it is, although that seems to be your straw man representation of "global warmers".

In the history of science, there are far more examples of a scientific consensus established over decades being right, than being "dead wrong". (Insofar as theories can be said to be "right", i.e. good approximations.) You just don't read about the boring cases in philosophy or pop-sci books. There aren't any daring scientific rebels who overturned the WKB approximation but driven out of academia for their heresy.

Sure. There are all kinds of people who think there is still huge controversy in the scientific community.

Hell, there are still people who dispute the existence of AGW, independent of any "catastrophic" outcomes.

You don't specify what "catastrophe" is supposed to mean. But the scientific literature, as well as the evidence, quite consistently supports the existence of substantial positive feedbacks, in agreement with the IPCC range of 2-4.5 K per CO2 doubling.

Oh come on. Just Google "evolution denier", or search the talk.origins archives.

That's nice, but irrelevant to my point.

If you think the people who debate global warming are more akin to creationists than scientists, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of science (as well as the people who debate global warming).

That too, is a strawman. Scientific fact isn't established by vote. It is, however, entirely legitimate to bring up the relative balance of scientific opinion on the matter when discussing it with someone who isn't going to sit down and teach themselves climate science.

I'm a professional physicist. There are all kinds of cranks who claim to have disproven quantum mechanics, relativity, etc. It's can be fun to pick apart their arguments, but at some point, when they say "Deepak Chopra has an argument and you have an argument, and I can't evaluate who's right", it's perfectly reasonable to say "Look, quantum mechanics has been working on and tested for a century, and there's a reason why the scientific community as a whole has come to different conclusions than Deepak Chopra".

Come on. Look at fission, a much simpler technology than fusion. That took 30-40 years to deploy after they had working reactors. We're decades away from having a fusion reactor that creates a nontrivial amount of net energy. Hell, look at how long it took to remake the world's economy around even simpler technologies like coal or oil. A good portion of a century.

Existing technologies do address the problem. They are displacing some fossil fuel use and will displace more in the future. They just won't displace all of it on the climate timescales, but that's the best we can hope for.

rather than developing new technologies that actually will address the problem.

Developing radically new technologies will not address the problem on relevant timescales, because they're even further behind the R&D curve than existing technologies. At best, we could hope for incremental improvements on technology (like more efficient solar cells, or nuclear reactors, etc.) exploiting existing economies of scale, experience with engineering, deployment, and maintenance, etc.

For the purposes of my argument, it is irrelevant whether existing technologies will address the problem. My point is merely that non-existing technologies are even less likely to address the problem than any existing technology.

No point in researching fusion, then.

No, I'm making a more general point, mostly in response to his claims elsewhere about emissions policy being "changing people's lifestyles".

To sum up: It is even less feasible to meet this century's non-fossil energy requirements with currently nonexisting technologies than with currently existing technologies. It amazes me that you believe otherwise. No matter how much you research some tech that doesn't exist, it's going to take most of this century to deploy it even to the extent that existing "inadequate" technologies are already deployed. It's a matter of infrastructure and business economics, not technology.

Look, this is stupid. I didn't say anything about "meeting the need" (presumably replacing fossil fuels altogether). We are going to have SOME non-fossil energy technologies, and ALL of them can be scaled up TO SOME EXTENT. The magnitude of that extent is irrelevant to my argument, which is that fusion power will play essentially no role in whatever energy technologies we end up deploying this century. Increasing solar power by x% (even if x=1% or something trivial) is still vastly more feasible - in costs and timescales - than increasing fusion power by the equivalent amount of energy.

You're missing my point. My point is, no matter what your target is for non-fossil energy sources, that target will be more quickly and cheaply met by anything but fusion.

Existing technology will ramp up to widespread deployment faster than technology that doesn't exist yet, I can tell you that.

That's hilarious.

If you really cared about nuclear power, you'd advocate a carbon pricing scheme just like James Hansen does. That would make nuclear power more competitive with fossil fuels, because they're being effectively subsidized by the market distortion which ignores their negative economic impacts on the environment.

For that matter, if you really cared about freedom and not forcing decisions on people, you'd advocate pricing carbon so the market would be aware of its real costs, and could therefore adjust the energy sector accordingly. This could be by ramping up nuclear power, or solar, or decreasing fossil energy consumption, or increasing efficiency, or whatever makes the most economic sense.

Advocating a particular technology is "picking winners", an anti-market approach. Why do you hate capitalism?