BASIC has had it all along!

1. Given that the warming from AGW can been occurring since about 1970, I would imagine that most of what is melting now was frozen before 1970.

2. The "unprecedented melt" referred to is a one-day melt, not a decades-long process like that we are experiencing under global warming and mentioned in this article.

3. That article is from 2009. In 2012 the Arctic sea ice was far below any extent recorded since 1979.

4. Antarctic sea ice is increasing because it's sliding off the continent of Antarctica due to the increased melting.

5. The graph you link to is scaled out so far that the warming of the past several decades would look like a vertical line -- if you could even see it on that scale. You're just zooming out on the time scale until you can't even see what you don't want to.

6) Man's contribution to carbon is 3% of what? One-third of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere came from fossil fuel emissions.

Of course, you can come up with thousands of excuses to not believe AGW. I have yet to see one of them that holds water.

Controlling and sustaining a fusion reaction isn't the hardest part. The hardest part is getting out significantly more energy than you put in. Fusing just small numbers of nuclei is fairly easy. According to Wikipedia, "all it takes is a vacuum tube, a pair of electrodes, and a high-voltage transformer; fusion can be observed with as little as 10 kV between electrodes."

I never said anything like the LHC is a waste of time. I was simply pointing out that the statement "The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang" is incorrect.

Fusion requires energies of around only about 1 MeV. The LHC operates in the TeV range, which is a million times more energy than required for fusion.

That's not true. There are collisions occurring in Earth's atmosphere that dwarf the energies explored by any colliders humans have built. The LHC has been designed for a maximum of 14 TeV. Cosmic rays can have over one million times more energy. That's one reason we're not concerned about the LHC creating a black hole that will swallow the Earth, because it would have happened naturally by now if that had a significant possibility of happening.

An unemployment rate of 10% is a far cry from the ghost cities the grandparent was describing.

I see that emissions per capita have gone down, but I have also noticed that the population of the U.S. is growing. We need to decrease total carbon dioxide emissions, not emissions per capita. Additionally, North America has by far the largest per capita carbon dioxide emissions among continents (excepting Antarctica), so I wouldn't necessarily go tooting your horn about how great America is about emissions.

I agree that taxing items according to the carbon emissions can easily solve the problem of countries not wanting to cooperate with decreasing emissions. But we need to decrease our total emissions, too.

What are these "draconian means" I keep seeing people refer to? Increasing energy efficiency seems quite sensible to me, especially given the current cost of energy. And we will have to switch to alternative energy sources some day because fossil fuels will run out. The means seem perfectly reasonable and sensible to me, not "draconian". Of course, the longer we delay, the more draconian the means will need to become, so we better get started right away to reduce the draconianness as much as possible.

The effects of global warming are going be more severe than the slight discomfort of feeling warm. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced. Droughts will be more common. GDP will drop. It's economically favorable to us in the long run to work on reducing carbon dioxide emissions now. In any case, fossil fuels will nor last forever, so we will need to develop alternative energy sources at some point. I would rather develop them earlier so their cost will come down, which will help keep energy prices lower as fossil fuels run out.

Your post smacks of "Let them eat cake!"

It is called a prediction. It has been relevant for decades. Why do you think it somehow wasn't relevant yesterday? We certainly have suspected that temperatures would rise by several degrees Celsius for quite a while, as my last post pointed out.

It's called cognitive dissonance, and it's the same idea expressed in my signature. People will alter their belief systems to reduce their feelings of uneasiness.

Maybe you can point us to where "it got several degrees hotter than we thought it was while we weren't looking". It sounds like you're making it up just to be argumentative. The average global temperature has risen about one degree Celsius over the past several decades, and I don't think that has surprised many climatologists because it's in line with the predictions we've seen since the nineteenth century.

That statement sounds alarmist to me. Given the number of times I've heard California's economy is in bad shape in the past, and how business seems to be thriving there, I think there isn't much to worry about.

By growing certain plants in areas that currently have little vegetation, then burying the plants so the carbon they extracted from the atmosphere remains sequestered, we can remove significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's not nearly enough to continue burning fossil fuels at the rate at which we currently do. There has been some work with "artificial trees" that can remove more carbon dioxide. You can read more about carbon sequestration.

To me, it seems easier to just increase energy efficiency and find alternative sources of energy. I don't understand why so many people are against those ideas. I remember some vague talk about it "destroying the economy" if we do so, but that sounds like alarmism.