Why natural cycles only play small role in rate of global warming

1. What do you make of the many reputable, accomplished scientists, physicists, etc. who do not believe that it is soundly supported by basic science?

2. What do you make of the former IPCC scientists who have whistleblown on the IPCC scientists' political bias and resigned in protest?

3. What do you make of Cook, et al's fraudulent "97% consensus" paper?

You then replied with 1,100 words that do not answer any of the three questions I asked. Instead you offered generic, verbose opinion about science and scientists and politics.

I don't know who you are trying to convince, but if it's me, you didn't, because you did not answer my serious, specific questions.

Science is advanced by specific answers to specific questions. If you are as serious about this issue as you ostensibly are, you ought to have specific answers for these specific questions.

If you don't have them, and if you won't get them, then do us both a favor and just admit that you don't know the answers and aren't willing to find them. It is rude to offer verbose bullshit to someone attempting to engage you in serious discussion.

Help me understand, please: what about that comment makes it a flamewar comment? I was attempting to engage him in serious discussion, and he offered voluminous nonsense in return. Is it verboten to point that out? Where did I cross your line?

By the way, I recently exchanged a few comments with you about HN's political bias, and you asked for examples. This submission's comments, and the flagging of my comment, is a good example of what I was talking about. There is a clear bias in that comments espousing a certain view are downvoted and flagged, even without violating the guidelines.

It seems clear that you quickly respond to comments which are flagged, even those flagged by the person being responded to. If I may ask, since I haven't seen this question asked or answered before: do you also police downvotes and flags? i.e. when people downvote, kill, and flag comments that do not deserve to be, do you correct it?

It doesn't appear so to me, and that creates an additional avenue for bias to be expressed: since only users with certain karma scores can vouch for wrongly flagged comments, it's easy for users with high scores to wrongly flag comments from users whose scores do not allow them to protest.

Yes, AGW has become a political football. The fact that Al Gore is a democrat and popularized the issue has probably hurt the issue more than anything. But politics is beside the point. What does the science say? The peer-reviewed stuff where they publish there data and methodology?

You say you don't deny that climate change is happening, yet everything you point to are talking points of deniers. Climate gate was a non-scandal. Yes, data collection is a messy and expensive business, and a lot of reconciling of various data sets has to be done. Yes, one of the people doing that work found a "trick" to figure out how the unannotated data set could be interpreted to explain why the paper which was associated with that data set arrived at the conclusion it did. That doesn't mean they were tricking the public.

Then you go off on a tangent about scientists and gender issues, which makes me think that you are really trying to address some wider point than that of climate change denial.

You conclude with the same FUD that the smoking lobby used -- sure there are lots of studies that seem to indicate that smoking causes cancer, but you know there are some studies (paid for by the tobacco industry) that show it isn't a problem, so geez, it seems like we don't know enough yet to do anything about it.

I thoroughly reject that stance. Businesses of all kinds have to make decisions based on incomplete and even contradictory data every day; we put people in jail for life or even kill them based on evidence which is not 100.00000% proven. Why, when it comes to climate change, are some people holding out for a mathematical proof or something? Why shouldn't we proceed based on the best available information? Why should the claims of climatologists, with thousands of man-years of research and published data be insufficient, yet a nay-sayer can say without any proof that addressing climate change would be disastrous to the economy?