The earth's cleaning cycles for gases and fumes does not encompass the release brought forth by humans and our industry. The stored layers of fumes and gases will increase since you'll have a small surpluss at all times, all adding up as time passes by (for instance, since the industrial revolution). This does not mean, however, that human emissions are enormous compared to nature, they're still small but they have a larger impact since the planet has no foreseeable way of ridding itself of the surpluss emissions.

I'm not siding with either side here, I realize that our emissions have an effect, I'm simply arguing that our emissions aren't very big compared to those of nature itself (which they're not) since many seem to believe that we output vast amounts of gases and fumes compared to natural processes.

I'll repeat one more time in case this still isn't clear to someone; our emissions are not big but might end up having a big impact over time.

Showing a 15 year trend with temperatures stabilizing for now doesn't prove much. It mostly proves the climate is a lot harder to predict. Temperatures have been going up, are still up, glaciers are still receeding, ice coverage on ocean water is still receeding. And although trends show that global surface temperature of oceans is down and sea level rise is down, it is still higher then expected with melting ice alone. That could suggest lower parts of the ocean are warming up. There has been a lot of flooding as well, dumping a lot of water on land.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Extreme-Flooding-In-2010-2011-Lowers-Global-Sea-Level.html

There are many other factors that can cause variations, eg solar output is at a minimum atm.


Global dimming can play a role, ironically pollution can make temperatures drop as well by preventing sunlight from reaching the ground.
Cloud coverage can play a role, more moisture in the air will reflect heat back into space as well.

Anyway the climate is changing. We are changing the land space and composition of the atmosphere. Both have effect on the climate. We can wait another 15 years to see where the current trends are going, or wait for quantum computers to be able to build more accurate climate models, but can we afford to sit and wait?

I do agree though that there is little point in dismantling our industry, instead we should start converting it to become sustainable in the long run, rather sooner then later. At least that way we'll have the energy in the future to cope with climate change.

Here is a list of recent graphs
http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/global-warming-mapsgraphs-2/

And the latest analisys by NOAA, plenty of change
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/

What people doesn't seem to consider is negative feedback. Higher sea temperatures increase the evaporation in the tropical areas, increasing the number of clouds and reducing the sun rays that reach the ground, cooling it. Higher levels of CO2 make forests and crop fields have higher yield, and this way the CO2 level reduces it's growth. We've had geologic eras with tens of times more CO2 in the atmosphere, with rain forests in the Sahara, with a much more green earth:

Is there a direct correlation of CO2 level and temperature? There doesn't seem to have a lineal correlation, at all. I think people are barking at the wrong tree, and lots of people believe we're much more important than we really are.

At OP-

Well it depends on who you believe and are convinced by.

The vast majority of climatologists (you know, the guys who actually do the research and come up with the data) are almost certain Global Warming is due to human activity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

Then you have some who think it's all blown out of proportions or is a liberal/green/commie hoax but those who are advocating that position don't tend to be climatologists but rather right wing politicians or conspiracy theorists.

People like:-

Republican Congressman John Shimkus (God told Noah there won't be anymore floods)
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44958.html

Or conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones or David Icke (It's a NWO scheme to kill off the planets population so as to make it a playground for the rich and powerful)

I agree that the west is on the right path, the air and rivers certainly are a lot cleaner then 20 years ago. However this is a global problem. China and India have taken up the role we once had and unfortunately there are quite a few more people in those countries. For example China is completing 1 or 2 new coal plants per week.

Luckily China is working hard on green energy and preventing pollution from coal power plants.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/green-china-rising/73263/
The project installed brand new equipment on a large coal-fired power plant to capture 120,000 tons of CO2 each year.
Huaneng will install 10,000 MW of wind in the next few years (which almost equals U.S. total wind power) and an equal amount of solar (more than the U.S. total).
Clean-tech is the main event, at over $40 billion per year in government investment.
Imagine if we would spend that kind of money on clean energy research.

We seem the be stagnating in the west. At least in Canada Budget 2012 pretty much put green energy development on hold.
http://www.pembina.org/blog/616

Sure we'll plant some trees, how much that benefits exactly is still under debate.
http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/carbon_offsetting_tree_planting.htm
In order to deal with currently generated carbon dioxide ... approximately equivalent to the entire land area of Spain, twice as big as the United Kingdom and bigger than any US state other than Texas (696,621 sq km.) or Alaska (1,717,854 sq. km.) To be forested anew each year and held as such forever.

And currently we have this little misstep called oil sands development.
http://oilsandstruth.org/
The tar sands mining procedure releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production and is slated to become the single largest industrial contributor in North America to Climate Change.
The tar sands are already slated to be the cause of up to the second fastest rate of deforestation on the planet behind the Amazon Rainforest Basin.

We won't destroy the climate. We'll reduce the biodiversity a bit, slightly shift temperate zones around, create some more desserts. A few more hurricanes and floods. Nothing big on earth's geological scale. Certainly nothing compared to what wiped out the dinausours. Life will go on, our luxury lifestyles probably won't though.

The end of the age of oil will have a much bigger impact. The world will slowly start to change when oil becomes really expensive. Suddenly shipping goods back and forth all over the world gets a real price tag. Maybe ships can go back to burning coal, or go nuclear... How far do trucks get on batteries or planes?

You just contradicted yourself there, since, as you said, Thorium breeder reactors would take more research, whereas photovoltaic is reaching grid parity within a matter of years for many major cities, not decades.

The map that I showed you is the surface area of photovoltaics needed that would produce the same amount of energy that humans consume through other means, if photovoltaics have an 8% efficiency. In the lab, photovoltaics are in the 40% efficiency range.

It's not "decades or centuries away from being cost effective", it's reaching that point quicker than you can tell.

Clearly five hundred million years ago the system was very different - there was more methane in the atmosphere, there was less in the way of carbon dioxide absorbing life, the sun was at a very different point in its life cycle etc. Carbon dioxide would still have had an important part in the climate but the level cannot be directly compared to current conditions. If you want a real comparison look at more recent data such as that from the Holocene period.

Photovoltaics won't reach grid parity for a while, unless you look at countries with high electricity costs like Germany. Also, photovoltaics have 40% in practice too but they're expensive. It's a prive vs. efficiency. Anything higher then 8% costs too much to manufacteur or uses rare elements. 

Wind is already below grid partiy, the problem is that it only provide inttermittent power, or no efficient way of storing that energy.

Don't forget hydro power guys! Here in NZ the majority of our power comes from hydro. We only get about a third from non-renewable (mostly nat gas).

Why we don't have this correlation today? In that graph we see differences of 20C related to differences of 100 ppm of CO2. If this were the truth, nowadays the Antarctica would be at -40C, as we have now ~400 ppm, and that's not what we see. May it be that the CO2 proportion in the atmosphere was related to the temperature, and not the temperature related to the CO2 proportion? There is a theory that implies that the oceans capture more or less CO2 in relation to the temperature, and it has approximately one thousand years of lag. If you take a look at the graph, it seems that the blue line follows the red line, and not the inverse.