I have to say, though: how ironic would it be if the Bush Administration, bullying its scientists, censoring reports, and generally being up to its eyeballs in special interests, turned out to be RIGHT? "The science really wasn't in!"

"global warming, fact or fiction"

... HA!

I think you are pointing to that as some sort of argument...but really it makes perfect sense. You could probably e-mail the guy for his specific arguments but considering the sheer number of environmental processes that require C02 I think its absurd not to see that its beneficial. Granted I think everyone can agree moderation (as with all things) is required, the issue is what constitutes moderation.

In any case, I don't want to assume anything so I will ask if you are planning to refute the point that current rates of change are in no way abnormal? I realize you may have problems with the rest of his argument but short of an attack on his data source which is sort of hard to do in this venue I think we can take his information at face value even if you don't accept his conclusions.

In any case I think if you approach this whole thing from the default scientific position of skepticism and apply the standard levels of scientific rigor required for theories to be considered seriously it quickly becomes clear that a number of inconsistencies that would prevent a theory in physics or chemistry from being given credence does very little to stop this theory from being given serious consideration and has now reached the level of sensationalism by the normal standards of scientific debate.

Last I checked, this was the internet. Saying that I expect to be taken seriously implies that I actually care about the opinions of people on the internet.

I don't modify my views based on people's opinions IRL, why should I do it here? 

I quoted the statement regarding CO2 because even if it is not some huge danger and directly responsible for disastrous global warming, I think that the claim that massive CO2 emissions are not only benign but BENEFICIAL was not at all substantiated unless I missed something obvious and I don't think he has anywhere near sufficient data to back up such a claim. Unless he refers to his constant harping on the danger of global cooling -- but then, he can't be, because he doesn't think it's a forcing agent of global warming.

As for the Bush Administration, perhaps I was exaggerating a bit but I remember the following news items quite clearly:

By the way, what are your thoughts on the water vapor issue as discussed above?

My point was less about Bush and more about the fact that its used as a scapegoat for everything now. Or perhaps more accurately a dumping grounds. Some people think that if you say Bush was censoring scientists that it proves global warming true. But even if we want to assume these articles are 100% factual it doesn't mean anything in the realm of science for proving the theory one way or the other. Really I don't care much about the bush-bashing, its mostly that it distracts from the issue at hand.

Aside from that, do you doubt that this happens both ways?

As for your quote about the C02 connection in the yale pdf, I think there is very good reason to call that data into question based on existing scientific work. It is well documented that the ocean absorbs C02 when its cold and releases it when it warms back up this process happens over the course of 800 years or so. When dealing with a graph whose scale is 100 million years per 'tick line' I think it is more than reasonable to expect that the increase in temperature and accompanying increase in C02 is to be indistinguishable in terms of which came before the other. To be clear I understand that the graph is showing two different models of C02 estimation, but the idea is that this information is later taken and used to graph against temperature to show a correlation.

In that situation the proper thing to do is consult the existing convention. The existing theory, which to my knowledge has been rigorously proven sound already, says that the increasing temperatures cause the increasing C02 not the other way around.

So considering that the prior work in this field was accepted without contention up to now I find it hard to understand why that it should be ignored so that this newer theory fits. If anything the new theory needs to be examined, corrected, and potentially thrown out unless it can provide a new mechanism to explain this issue or show cause to believe that the existing convention is false. That is the way these things have been handled in the past, why should this be different this time?

As for the water vapor issue, is there something specifically you wanted me to comment on (perhaps you could quote what I appear to have missed)?

Not sure what I am missing but I'm honestly not seeing what you're driving at.

In any case the point I am driving at is that the human impact is pretty negligable.

But if we remove water vapor:

And a better look at these breakdowns:

So really the only thing Humans contribute to in a meaningful way is the category of "Other" which is only 0.007% of GHGs by concentration and 1.4% by effect, and that is after you remove water vapor. You could probably make a case that we contribute meaningfully to Methane also, but still that only accounts for .471% by concentration and 7.199% by effect.

To be fair this data is probably out of date by now, but I don't have a huge list of bookmarks to work from or anything so I just did a google search for global warming and water vapor and used the first data I found that looked credible and had a good credits section.

It appears to be from 2000 which is recent enough to be at the bare minimum a good indicator of how things are, even if not 100% accurate.

Edit: A quick weighting of everything shows that not including water vapor, humans are responsible for 5.5% of warming due to greenhouse effect. Considering that even the most diehard pro-GW scientist won't say that the GHE is responsible for all climate change I think 5.5% of a smaller portion is quickly getting into the territory of negligable.

But even then I still think there is reason to doubt that the current warming is related to the GHE in any meaningful way just based on the NASA satellite data.

Absurdity at its finest: EPA seeks to classify water vapor as a pollutant.

I hope that is a joke and that I missed something =P