You didn't try hard enough. Following the post to which you linked, you responded to several informative posts with arrogant affirmations of your uninformed beliefs and personal attacks against those who are trying to inform you.
Just look at yourself:
Ummmm...We heve here effect, effect, cause. Not "causes". No feedbacks. A cause.
From someone willing to talk physics, not from a post-modern ********ter.
No. I requested that people use their real names. I don't believe that anyone really has a birth certificate in the name of "Trakar", "Capel Dodger" or "A Unique Person".
I worked with cytologists at the UH PBRC as a diver/collector of sea urchins (which make accessible objects of their study) and with marine biologists and biochemists at the UH HIMB as a diver/collector of moray eels (ciguatera toxin research). They don't talk like this:..."Strategic latency", really? Note also the passive voice and cliche. I'll accept a correction, but that sounds more like a Poli Sci, Philosophy, or Literary Theory grad seminar than the hard science people I knew.
There are apparently different conceptions of "basic". If Lubos Motl and Freeman Dyson qualify as "certified competent" in "basic physics", then either (a) that "basic physics" does not imply what AGW theorists claim, or (b) Dyson and Motl are lying.
As has been pointed out, the (a) and (b) possibilities you are willing to consider do not cover the space of possible explanations.
In particular, it has been pointed out to you on several occasions,
including the two posts immediately prior to the link you gave above, that Freeman Dyson actually does accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming. He's a contrarian optimist whose faith in technological progress leads him to conclude that we'll find some way to deal with AGW, but that's not at all the same as denying the reality or basic physics of AGW.
Lubos Motl is a string physicist turned blogger who likes to say provocative things. Although he often lampoons what he regards as poor climate science, I don't know whether he denies AGW or the physics of AGW outright. It doesn't really matter; he's no more of an authority on climate science than I am.
I'm still trying to understand how the surface temperature can depend on anything other than solar output and the radius of the Earth's orbit. Obviously it does, since there's a fairly regular 24-hour cycle in surface temperature where I live and the 8000 mile variation in the distance between me and the sun seems to small, compared to the 90 million+ mile total, to have the daily 10o F. or so effect that I observe.
During the day, the surface of the earth in your vicinity is exposed to the sun's radiation. During the night, the surface of the earth in your vicinity lies within the shadow cast by the other side of the earth.
If you put a shallow pan of water in the sunlight, it will become hotter as it (and the pan) absorbs the sun's radiation. If you then put that pan of water in the shade, it will cool off via the mechanisms known as convection and radiation.
The branch of physics known as thermodynamics includes quantitative laws that describe how fast these processes of heating and cooling will proceed. Those laws are beyond the comprehension of people who don't understand differential equations, and they aren't trivial even for people who do, but the physics is known, and is considered basic physics.
The dynamic equilibria that determine the temperature of the earth's surface have been understood in rough form for many years. The role played by carbon dioxide (among other atmospheric gases) is part of that well-established climate science. The anthropogenic
increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (from 315 ppm in 1958 to over 390 today) is indisputable. (If you don't believe me,
ask Freeman Dyson.) The basic science, which has been known for more than a century, tells us that increasing levels of carbon dioxide (while holding everything else constant) will warm the planet.
There is no genuine dispute about what I wrote in the paragraph above. When people deny those basic facts, you may assume they are uninformed, lying, or too scared to acknowledge what they know.
The hard part is calculating how fast and how much the planet will warm up. That involves taking the very general differential equations given to us by the science of thermodynamics, specializing them to the specific circumstances of our planet, and solving those equations. That process is known as modelling. Planetary climate is extremely complicated, with lots of feedback between different subsystems, so modelling is hard. Reasonable people can argue about the accuracy of our models.
We can, of course, compare the results of our modelling to the observed evolution of our planet's climate. That has been done. It looks as though our best models are pretty good. Those models are broadly consistent with the many scientific observations that have been discussed at length in this and other threads.
That is why anthropogenic warming is now accepted as probable by almost all scientists. There is still some room for doubt, and the amount of room for doubt is still under dispute, but you are unlikely to find any informed, sane, and honest people who flatly deny the likelihood of AGW.
What (if anything) should be done to slow or to stop or to reverse anthropogenic global warming is a far more contentious question that lies within the realm of policy/politics. Most of the confusion that pervades discussion of this subject has come from the promotion of political views at the expense of science.
