Nobody doubts that there have been warm periods in the past with causes other than CO2. That doesn’t prove that CO2 isn’t causing global warming today.

Also, if you’re so concerned about the tone of debate, it might be a good idea not to start off by addressing another poster by just their last name.

How disgraceful to dismiss someone of Lindzen’s background and stature in that way. You are effectively accusing him of lying. He is not a paid stooge, he is a responsible climate scientist with impeccable scientific credentials. These ad hominem attacks show how desperate the warmers get when they cannot disprove the science facts quoted by Lindzen, Singer, Baliunas, Soon, Michaels, Ball etc etc, This is the sort of attack found on the the arrogant web site Real Climate.org. Real scientists welcome debate and don’t denigrate their peers.

The Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are a matter of record, sunspot cycles are a matter of record, they fit climate cycles far more than co2 levels do. There are comparable periods of warming in the 1700′s before co2 was deemed a problem. There are so many lies being told about global warming, from drowning polar bears, (4 after a storm), to accelerating sea level rise, (not happening), to melting ice caps, (the Arctic was warmer in the 30′s), Antarctica is getting colder except for the West Antarctic Peninsula. You don’t need to read Lindzen, there is a mass of research out there that contradicts the climate models, but of course only the favourable stories are published.

Yes I do.

The above post was just some of the stuff that makes me wonder about climate change.

The former point goes against the current scientific consensus. You’re perfectly entitled to challenge such a consensus of course, but I don’t think this is the appropriate forum, as none of us are scientists in a relevant field. If you think the scientific establishment is all mixed up on the question of anthrogenic climate change, please feel free to pursue that theme and come back to us when your first peer-reviewed paper on the topic has been published.

The latter point is of course arguable – there may indeed be nothing we can do about it. However, there may very well be something we can do about it. Until it’s proved conclusively that all is lost, I believe we owe it to ourselves to at least have a go, don’t you?

Yes but it does suggest that it is possible it has got nothing to do with us and thus we can’t do anything about it.

coincides rather inconveniently with extremely large-scale industralisation and that the changes have been far too fast and violent to have been solely natural.
It is not unnaturally rapid. Climate has changed this fast before. Then all we have left is that it is conincedence.

Yes, that’s why it’s called climate change. my point is that their is some effects that cancel out the other effects. i.e. Climate change can cause effects that increase and decrease the temperature at the same time. Thus canceling out the effects to a certain extent. Hence why it is complicated.

But there is about 40 Vineyards in the Doomsday book.

Virtually all of which were small vanity projects that didn’t work well, or were used for producing non-potable alcohol and vinegar.

But not all the effects cause warming some cause cooling.

Yes, that’s why it’s called climate change.

Trying to track all these changes to see the overall effect is complicated.

Complicated in that you need a lot of different sources to trace weather from before records were kept, but that something is complicated and difficult isn’t to say it’s impossible. After all, you could say that about most scientific endevour.

What I am wondering is not that the climate is changing but a.) Is man made and b.) If that is the case is there anything we can do about it.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of climate change that’s natural, but I think the primary reason behind strongly suspecting that we’re to blame for the recent change in weather patterns is how it coincides rather inconveniently with extremely large-scale industralisation and that the changes have been far too fast and violent to have been solely natural.

It’s common sense that we, through our actions, have some effect on our environment; we don’t live in hermetically sealed bubbles after all. The real question is how significant that effect is.

So what should we do? Aim to deal with the worst and abandon all our civilisation, ban aircraft, ban cars, ban fossil fuels, ban cows or should we do nothing and hope for the best.

No, that’s all somewhat melodramatic. The a good argument can be made for minimising our effect on the environment. After all, that’s the reason behind renewable energy: rather than mining the earth for energy, take advantage that the earth itself is a giant solar power plant and siphon off a small quantity of that energy. After all, it doesn’t make much sense to mine a resource when you don’t have to. Should we stop using fossil fuels? Yes, where there’s a viable alternative. Should we ban cows? No, but minimising the amount of methane they produce is a good idea. Ban aircraft? No, but aiming towards being carbon neutral is a good idea. Doing nothing and hoping for the best is never a viable strategy in these matters. Too many civilisations have fell precisely because they decided to do that at the expense of their environment.

What many people don’t understand about climate change is that the whole business will probably be a matter of supreme indifference for the planet itself. It’s ourselves we need to worry about. Humanity has of course survived great climactic adversity in the past, but most of its civilisations didn’t.

The point i was making about weather data is that alot of people use that. And facts like we have had loads of huricanes in the past ten years. We simply don’t have enough data on that to say whether that is unusual or something that happens every 200 years.

Actually we have a good deal more to go on than just 500 years of recorded weather data, specifically ice cores and such like which can reveal climactic changes going back many hundreds of thousands of years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core