Arrhenius stated only that CO2 acted to absorb heat (long-wave infra-red radiation for the nitpickers). He posited that if you added CO2 to the atmosphere the heat would increase. What Arrhenius didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, is that at 280ppm, the atmospheric CO2 already absorbs 97% of all incoming long-wave infra-red radiation. Doubling the CO2 to 560ppm, would not make it absorb 194% of the radiation, it would make it absorb about 99% of the incoming radiation. Since CO2 accounts for approximately 4-7 degrees C of the Earth's warming (there's arguments on the exact figure) that would be an increase of about 0.08 to 0.14 degrees C. Now, there are some factors that add to that (re-radiation, tropospheric concentration and re-reflection of albedo infra-red, etc) that could make that as much as 1 degree C of surface warming. But that's it.

Adding twice the CO2 doesn't mean twice the temperature. And the feedback mechanisms are neutral to negative. They must be, or the 7000ppm CO2 of the carboniferous period would have resulted in Earth looking like a ball of molten rock.

Now, let's get back to the real point.

Climate scientists continue to make statements like, "We can expect more Katrina's every year!" Yet the U.S. is now in its longest cycle without a major hurricane landing since records began being kept in the 1930's. "We can expect more tornados to ravage cities across the U.S.!", yet tornadic activity across the U.S. is at a 50 year low. Total thunderstorms are average at best, and while there is some evidence of slightly stronger convection cells, there's a certain bias in the fact that we never before had satellites capable of sampling and quantifying such activity in seconds rather than days.

In short, the evidence all points the other way.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for gas or oil or coal. I'd rather see all of it go away. Give me clean, safe, cheap, plentiful nuclear power every day of the week over all of that. Preferably LFTR designs spread out like candy all over the country. I'd love fusion too, but like my Grandfather who was promised to see it "within his lifetime" and died in 1988, I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Solar power is a joke, with its rare earths and sulfur-hexafluoride washes doing a dozen times more damage to the environment then they'll ever recover in a lifetime. We've already tapped 95% or more of the hydropower on Earth, and I doubt the birds will live through putting up enough windmills to power a typical city, much less the planet. Not to mention, that has it's own problems. Wind Power Potential Overestimated

Your point, "We've seen warming" ignores the one great thing about climate change -- the climate is a complex system -- it is always changing. It is a vast, living, breathing system taking in all life on earth, all changes in the sun, all chemistry in the oceans, every wave, every sunbeam, every butterfly flapping its wings. It must be constantly changing. We are looking at a tiny sliver of it and saying, "Oh no, we're all doomed!" We act as if we want the climate never to change, not one iota, not one jot.

The climate never changes on Venus, on Mercury, on Mars... They all have one thing in common. They're dead worlds.

Give me a changing climate any day over that.

You think I'm joking - there has been a baffling increase in the amount of "Russia had it better" posts around here lately.

I bet you could link to some of those posts to add impact to your statement, if you wanted to.

So, the fact that both Tornadic activity in the United States and Cyclonic Activity globally are at 50 year lows all point to this "increased activity". Somewhere you have failed to notice that your claims must be backed up with data. Also, you have failed to explain why the actual global temperatures over the last 30 years have come in below the lowest predicted warming of all the models used by the IPCC, yet they continue to increase the predicted response. The last IPCC report posited a 3.0 degreeC/century rise in temperature, while actual data points at 1.2 degrees C/century or lower.

I work in computer science, and there's a name for a model which cannot predict, it's called "broken" or "incomplete". The fact that you now wish to make multi-trillion dollar, economy-wrecking, and real-life endangering decisions based on computer models that still can't agree with each other, much less the facts, is frightening beyond belief.

The amazing thing to me is that the same crowd that doesn't trust a banana with an extra gene inserted through a science evolved through 60 years of study, or grown with a fertilizer used for 80 years without a downside, are completely willing to take steps that will result in starvation, civil wars, and economic catastrophe over an increase of 0.012% of a particularly harmless gas in the atmosphere, which is required for life on Earth. A gas which, during the most life-bearing phase of the earth's history, was almost 20 times as abundant. All of which is based on computer programs developed by non-computer programmer programmers, over the course of a few months, which are less than accurate in the short term, and whose predictions are wildly inaccurate over the long term.

Not to mention, if tree-rings are such great thermometers, why has the dendrochronological record not been updated since the 1980's? Surely in the billions being funneled to climate research, someone can pay some grad students $10 an hour to go get some tree cores with a hand-drill every weekend?

Most of these climate scientists wouldn't know the climate it if rained on them.

You want an analysis of the article itself? I could do that, but someone already has: Cook's Survey not only Meaningless, but Misleading

The survey is full of self-confirming bias, and selection bias. And the 97% number ignores the 65% of the papers that said *NOTHING* either way about AGW. In fact, if you take only those papers that explicitly endorse AGW, versus those that deny it, the ratio is actually flipped, with the "deniers" winning out.

In fact, by percentages of publications, the number that support AGW have been steadily declining year after year since 1995 according to the very numbers in this paper. Make of that what you will.

That was a brief synopsis for those of you too lazy to RTFA.

Would you like me to work the Navier-Stokes equations for you to show convective heat transfer in a fluid body? I'm quite aware of what heating does, and I'm also quite aware that you have no concept of the numbers being talked about here. You talk about adding thousands of watts per square meter to a liquid forcing a transition to a gaseous (and often turbulent) state. The difference the math talked about here is 1.3 watts per square meter, out fo 1365 watts per square meter. And spread that over a 30 kilometer high column of gas. The overall increase is down in the third to fourth decimal place. Climate scientists know that, and they posit that there are dozens of "positive feedback" methods that will drive temperatures higher and higher. They believe the climate is in a unstable dynamic equilibrium, rather than a stable dynamic equilibrium -- think the difference between being on a roller-coaster poised at the top of the hill, or one at the bottom of a valley.

We have heard words like "tipping point" or "past the point of no return" which are all associated with an unstable equilibrium. Yet the climate of the Earth is no such thing. Yes, we may be able to push the roller coaster a little way up the hill, but when we release it, it will roll back down to the bottom again. The climate is the same way. It must be, or over the 4.6 billion year long life of this planet, some event (the Siberian Traps for instance -- look it up) would have long since sent the planet spiraling into catastrophe.

Anything -- ANYTHING -- we humans can do is temporary. To believe otherwise is the most blatant of arrogance on our part. The fact is, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be having some effect on temperatures. But so what? We live in every biosphere. No one is going to die from it. It could be good. Things will change. So what -- they've changed before. We'll adapt. Some things won't. They'll die. There's this thing out there called evolution. It's been doing that for nearly 4 billion years.

So, your boiling pot of water, while a wonderful visual, is totally wrong. To get a more accurate model, turn your burner up to full, and when you've got a nice rolling boil, light a match and add it. See if you can spot the difference. That's the real model.

Which is why I'll never do a kickstarter- I'm not going to pay extra for early access to a product that I can't test and may never be made. I'd be willing to invest for a share of the profits, but not pay extra for a presale.

What a lot of idiots like Animats just don't get about Arduino is that Arduino managed to get a fun package out on the market anyone can get started with and can get started with without having to rely on the type of people who snort derisively at anyone who cannot tell resistors apart by smell.

Just buy a kit and you can experiment for fun in a way that is fun and does not involve the need to first lean how to measure voltages until you want to.

Yes there are countless other systems out there, both more powerful and invariable connected to communities that are exclusive rather then inclusive. Ask on an Arduino forum for stuff anyone knows about as beginner and you get an answer. It is the same reason Linux beat BSD and PHP beats say Java or Ruby. Not because they are necessarly better products but because more people can get started with them.

Plenty of people who mess with these kit robots just want to mess about, use them as toys, have a bit of fun. They don't need massive parallel processing or sensors with miles of range, they do not dream of making a spy bot. They want to have a toy that follows their hand or make their own beer cannon or just see some leds light up. I know to anyone who has a full soldering stations it might sound incredible but for the majority, first having to spend a weekend soldering a kit together is NOT what they want if they buy a diy robot kit. They want to spend maybe an hour at most and then have something that moves. From there they may or may not advance. 2D SLAM? Jezus Christ Animats, just how sad are you as a human being?

Most people don't want to instantly have to develop the next generation mars rover. They want to have some fun! PLAY. If you like remote control aircraft, you start with a simpel plastic model and have fun and MAYBE someday you will go further OR NOT! Maybe start with a click and play model train set like Kato and MAYBE one day move on to making your own tracks from scratch. MAYBE. But from beginner to expert there is a lot of room for simply having fun, for enjoying toys at the level you are comfortable at and are willing to spend the time learning. And Arduino sits there are the beginner entry, middle level, open and welcoming and not demanding people first follow a 4yr electronics course to get anything done and because of that it is a massive hit. And it is getting people involved in messing with electronics who never would have before and it is GREAT!

And in the background are the forever alone losers trying to point out there more powerful toys with impossible to read manuals and secret society forums where you can only post if you first lurked for two years as an apprentice.

It is kinda sad in a way because it is just basic business sense. You want to sell something, you got to make it accesible. Arduino is the next step up from Lego Mindstorm. They got what made Mindstorm such a gigantic hit, an open accessible friendly platform where you can either remain as a fun loving beginner or use as a stepping stone.

And forever aloners like Animats will be crying "but we got more cpu power" as the rest of the planet has fun.

There are already dumbots in that range. Any new robot should come with at least an Allwinner ARM CPU ($7) and a camera as standard. That's enough for some vision processing and at least 2D SLAM. The hardware to put some real smarts in a little bot is now cheap and there's enough open source software available to get started on making it smart.

Given that(among the ants that don't have even cooler mechanisms, like specialized suicide soldiers who blow themselves up to shower the enemy with toxins) "swarm the enemy and keep biting and stinging without regards for casualties until nothing that isn't us is still moving" is considered a valid strategy, the chemical signalling actually makes sense: If an ant from another colony, or a predatory insect/arachnid, attacks a single ant, the ant's body automatically releases the alarm pheremone and the attacker gets zerg rushed.

It's just that, against implacable electronics that are totally indifferent to anything except being insulated by the uncounted bodies of the slain, this tactic doesn't work very well(see also: mammals that 'freeze' to avoid predators; but discover that cars aren't visual hunters; but they do kill anything that gets in their way)...

I suspect that it depends on whether sensitivity to electrical fields is useful in other contexts, or(if not directly useful) at least tightly-coupled to some other sensory mechanism that is survival-critical and will take quite some time to iterate toward an electrically insensitive replacement.

Mass death upon the power lines is obvious folly; but electrification is, what, a century old(in any ecologically-relevant amount, I know about various independent developers of primitive chemical batteries going back a great deal further; but that sort of scale barely matters), the blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

If this electrical sense isn't all that useful elsewhere, or is just some accident that didn't previously cause trouble, it could actually be culled from much of the population fairly quickly. If it has some other use, or is connected to genes that code for multiple things, some of them extremely useful, they might take ages, if ever, to stop doing this.

Waaallllllet

By mass, beasts have always reigned over the earth... A mixture of applied landscaping, chemical warfare, and rifles have allowed humans to carve out an enclave free of large mammals we don't approve of, and some of the nastier bugs and microbes(wealthy areas of the Northern Hemisphere, at least. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where restricted by law or subverted by rapid evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes. Terms and conditions may apply); but we've never been close to having the upper hand against things too small to shoot and too resilient to just habitat-destroy into submission.

Ah yes, isn't it repulsive how those 'liberals' just can't stay consistent on their support for indentured servants when their own economic interests are on the line? Truly a refutation of their ideology or something...

I have to wonder why they talked to the VCs at all... I can imagine taking the risk if you've just started somebullshitwithnorevenuemodel.com and crazy guys in suits are offering you a giant stack of pretend internet money for it; but why would a company with an actual shipping product, and sales, and such, risk going up against the elite equity-diluting and value extraction skills of a hardened VC?

What kind of survival mechanism is that? "Oh! There's danger over there. Let's all go check it out..."

Yeah, they are the Red Shirt ants.