What a condescending snob you are. Sadie the cleaning lady would have as much chance of predicting the weather as the frauds who masquerade as climate scientists.

The most dangerous people on the planet are those who think they know better than others about how those others should live.

AGW is NOT about the science; it is an ideology about nature and how much humanity should be permitted to interfere with it.

The climate scientists cannot predict with any accuracy the weather from month to month yet we, the public, are expected to take as gospel these charlatan's predictions about the climate in a 100 years time.

Weather and climate are stochastic which means there is a time-declining probability of ability to predict what is going to happen.

The climate scientists, that is the IPCC, who pretend 95% certainty as in AR5 are nothing more than witch-doctors.

The comparisons between mechanics, engineers and doctors and their expertise is grotesque. You don't go into the doctor with a complaint where the risk and prognosis are non-deterministic and defined by time so that any remedy the doctor says has a probability of success is vitiated by time.

And to think billions have been given to these people who have consistently failed to produce any evidence or make any valid predictions.

As I said, people who believe in AGW are expressing a religious belief.

GrahamY: " Spit your arguments out so the public can adjudicate, don't hide behind authority..."

I focus on the basic hypothesis that CO2 concentration underlies global warming.

The long-term coupling between CO2/CH4 levels and global average surface air temperature is incontrovertible. That there is not perfect coherence over short intervals is explained sufficiently, for me, by ocean and land involvement in carbon cycling, as well as exiting ice ages, but it does not avert us from self-correction in the maintenance of coupling.

Air temperature has wavered naturally and slowly enough between 2 degrees above and 5 degrees below today's for life to cope. The variation in CO2 concentration has never been as sharply upwards as now. Even if we have observed a current slowing in the temperature uptrend it will not decouple from the CO2/CH4 concentration for long. We can expect the correction anytime, and it may well be as sharp as the uptick in CO2 concentration has been over the last few decades.

Regarding the issue of catastrophe, if air temperature rises beyond 2 degrees to say 4 degrees (and we're headed higher without action, we will enter uncharted territory. When the temperature was 4 degrees below today's the now highly populated parts of the northern hemisphere were under massive ice. Skeptics do not acknowledge GW let alone what a 4 degree rise means.

In coming to my own decision from a skeptical position. In view of fundamental evidence, including that existing for AGW, acceptance of skeptical alternatives could only be on faith.

I do not wish to go into detailed rebuttals of the skeptical position as they are already all over the internet, such as http://www.skepticalscience.com/A-Scientific-Guide-to-the-Skeptics-Handbook.html and associated links therein.

Luciferase, your argument fails at the first hurdle. You contention that "the long-term coupling between CO2/CH4 levels and global average surface air temperature is incontrovertible," is shown to be completely wrong by the graph on this page at figure 4 http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4167.full as is your contention that we are seeing changes at the moment which are unprecedented. In fact it is still cooler than it was earlier in the Holocene, as demonstrated by the discovery of forests under glaciers that are currently retreating due to warming.

The difference between people like Carter and me, and people like you, is that we are happy to put up hard evidence instead of just airily gesturing out to the internet and saying "I do not wish to go into detailed rebuttals of the skeptical position as they are already all over the internet, such as http://www.skepticalscience.com/A-Scientific-Guide-to-the-Skeptics-Handbook.html and associated links therein."

Runner refers us to the Bible, you to skepticalscience. There is little difference.

I put more faith in what the ice cores tell us, but it only goes back 800,000 years.

Here is going back 150000 years as was the extent of coring in 2002 http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap01/icecore.html

Ice coring now goes back further:

http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/journalists/resources/science/ice_cores_and_climate_change_briefing-sep10.pdf

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm
"Ice cores reveal the Earth's natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range," explained Dr Wolff (of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS)sic)."

For a more layman's perspective:

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/index.php?id=40&tx_naksciinterview_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=643&cHash=7faa6cce3f&table=tx_naksciinterview_interviews , or, http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/10/08/3864474.htm

Going to the credibility of Eric Wolff:
http://www.esf.org/media-centre/ext-single-news/article/ten-questions-with-descartes-prize-laureate-dr-eric-wolff-british-antarctic-survey-member-of-the.html
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Eric-Wolff/148342670

From your link: "A wealth of evidence, however, suggests that pCO2 exerts at least some control [see Crowley and Berner (30) for a recent review]. Fig. 4 cannot by itself refute this assumption. Instead, it simply shows that the “null hypothesis” that pCO2 and climate are unrelated cannot be rejected on the basis of this evidence alone."

Stacking the proxy geological data, with its tepid conclusion such as this, up against ice cores is a no-contest, IMO. The BAS link states "However, they provide no direct analogue for the future because the ice core era contains no periods with concentrations of CO2 comparable to those of the next century." In other words, we're entering uncharted territory if we do nothing.

My "...airily gesturing out to the internet.." applies because all the other arguments, other than the one we're having and whether or not man is responsible for the extraordinary recent rise in CO2 concentration, are sideshows others can argue about as far as I'm concerned for now.

It comes down to data and reliability, not faith. You can attack the data or the man and his organization (Wolff, BAS) or explain why the research you cite is superior to the point it allays concern.

GY, how can we have a discussion if I try to meet your challenge in the spirit you ask then you insult my intelligence for doing so by putting me in the same category as runner!?

That's a little better Luciferase, but not much. You can't refute data over 500m years by data that doesn't even go back 1m.

What's more you neglect to mention that in the ice core data CO2 increases are a result of temperature rise, not the cause of them. CO2 increases after the temperature starts to increase, not before, and even more tellingly, it continues to increase at the same time as temperature turns down before it starts to turn down itself. The lag is somewhere around 500 years.

So what you have posted can't prove causation because in the correlation CO2 depends on temperature, not the other way around.

That the author of the article where the graph is found says it doesn't disprove the relationship is neither here nor there. His opinion doesn't change the data.

No-one is arguing CO2 has no relationship, the argument is the extent to which it is a driver or a passenger, and what other drivers exist. The graph conclusively shows that other factors are stronger. The data you refer to also shows the same thing.

Taking the word of any religious expert in the understandings of climate change is quite pointless to all and even to themselfs:)

Runner:) your a gem:)

Planet3