yah, who care’s. But if you debate these issues, the definition you use matters.

My quick answer to the ‘does greenhouse gases matter so much’ question is that if we didn’t have the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we would be 59 F degrees cooler on the earth than we are now. If we’re adding from the start of the industrial revolution to now 280 PPM of CO2 and were now up to 380 and then make a quick mention of the positive feedbacks, increased water vapor and frozen areas of the earth about to warm and release methane.

That’s to make it all plausible. I try to mention that these aren’t the stupid people who come up with this, but the smartest eggheads in everybodies science classes who came up with this.

The internet and popular culture are flooded with global warming news bites, but they offer nothing convincing to somebody with an atheist’s threshold for required proof before belief.

Doubtful. I read an awful lot of atheist blogs (and I am atheist), and it seems to me most atheists – with a few exceptions – think AGW is the best explanation for the evidence.

The alternative explanations – ‘the data is faked’, ‘the data is bad’, ‘it’s cosmic rays, not CO2′, ‘it’s the sun, not CO2′, ‘it’s geothermal, not CO2′, and on and on are much more difficult to believe. Much more complicated as well, most of them.

The problem is not the required threshold for belief. The problem is AGW tells us we’ve been very, very bad.

http://www.realclimate.org/ index.php/ archives/ 2008/ 09/ simple-question-simple-answer-no/

and i’ll second the recommendation on:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html

and if you truly want a better connection to the science you’re going to have to tackle something like this:

http://geosci.uchicago.edu/ ~rtp1/ ClimateBook/ ClimateBook.html

1 – The warming is greater in winter than in summer, exactly what you expect if the warming is due to GHGs and exactly the opposite from what you expect if it is due to the Sun (deniers’ favorite claim).

2 – The warming shows up first in the Arctic, again what you expect if GHG-caused, not if solar.

3 – While the troposphere has warmed, the stratosphere has cooled, what is predicted if the warming is caused by GHGs; if caused by the Sun, both stratosphere and troposphere would warm…neither would cool.

4 – The models do a good job of describing the observed warming if rising GHGs are included, but are unable to reproduce the warming without the GHG increase. Just as important, no one – including the deniers – has proposed a model that will reproduce the warming without the effect of increasing GHGs. These models take everything into account that science allows, including the Sun. To disregard the models you have to assume that there is some dominant factor that is canceling out the effect of GHGs and which no one – including highly motivated deniers – has been able to come up with. Quite a stretch.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html

Review of above:

http://query.nytimes.com/ gst/ fullpage.html?res=9F04E7DF153DF936A35753C1A9659C8B63

If you really want to convince people of something put out more science showing a connection between global warming and human activity. Models, chemistry, statistics, stuff like that can be used by people to show others that global warming is caused by humans. I am no wizard with science, but from what I have seen so far, you have to explain that there is enough CO2 in the atmosphere to cause global warming. It seems to me that if you could prove that in a paper that stood up to scrutiny then people would take global warming more seriously. Honestly, I cant find anything that does this so far.

To me there should be a paper somewhere that looks like a chemistry, physics or math paper that shows CO2 in our atmosphere causing global warming,

But it is quit4e, quite dull: little change except for the Antarctic Pennsiula, with rapid warming.