True, I was meaning more that it can be demonstrated very easily in that sort of setting with a light bulb or flame, vessel full of CO2 and infrared glasses or sensor.

Once again I am saddened by The depths to which the Slashdot community has fallen. This used to be a technology site. Technology that could not happen without extremely advanced science. And yet here you are, questioning global warming and the effect of human induced rises in CO2 levels. This stuff has been studied for going on 125 years. There is no doubt what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It's Grade School physics for goodness sakes. We should be the ones leading the charge to shift away from Fossil Fuels before great harm to our civilization becomes inevitable. But here we are, mired in the same ridiculously simplistic arguments about stuff that has been proven or disproven by science over and over. This isn't a matter of science being wrong, it is a matter of society not being allowed to trust a very small subset of scientists because they threaten a very profitable economic paradigm. Eventually, that will turn, I hope not before it is too late to avoid catastrophe.

That's not true at all. The extra heat can be very likely be transferred to the oceans. Something never possible in the Arctic Ocean before. Also to a lesser extent any permafrost that has now thawed (many studies have shown the permafrost line shrinking northward) would also represent energy lost to the earth. We are witnessing a massive change in the Earths heat budget, and it will hit the weather patterns of the Northern Hemisphere particularly hard.

This is just the latest in a series of published work finding that weakening ocean and land temperature contrasts between high and mid northern latitudes is having a profound effect on the Jet Stream. Search for jet stream and arctic on Google Scholar and they'll pop up. They all show that the poles live and die by the circumpolar winds that 'lock' the cold air in those high latitudes (Antarctica included by the way!). If those circumpolar winds diminish, then the cold can effectively 'escape'. In the Northern Hemisphere, it results in the jet stream becoming extremely contorted, sets up 'blocking' and we get these long periods of abnormal weather (extra cold in late winter/early spring, extra heat in late summer/early fall?) The weather channel has a great rundown of the jet stream *today*. Illustrates it perfectly. http://www.weather.com/video/forecast-for-your-spring-35814 Lets just thank our lucky stars that Antarctica is a continent surrounded by ocean, and not an ocean surrounded by continents, like the Arctic. This fundamental difference means the southern circumpolar winds have a huge contrast to work from with the gigantic ice fields of the continent versus the far away lands of Southern America, Oceania, and Africa. Ironically, the ozone hole actually makes the Antarctic colder and the circumpolar winds stronger... so as it fixes itself as human CFC emissions dimish, those winds will start to weaken and warming will be able to creep in there as well. But at least that buys us time. Were the Arctic and Antarctic equal, global warming would have likely been much more immediate. Though who knows, maybe that would have spurred us to action before today (which is still never?) The world and science that attempts to explain it is wonderful and terrifying all at the same time. Lets hope we can get our acts together and change our course before we cause so much change to our atmosphere and oceans that we are unable to avoid the clear and present dangers now on tap.