We can start with an attempt at understanding the sheer difference between the CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) emitted by 17th and 18th century populations (and only in large-ish quantities by the small percentage of industrialised peoples) as compared to over 6 billion people living on the planet right now - with a very large percentage of them industrialised and demanding more and more power etc.
You should not just compare rates. You should integrate over the time the rates were working to produce a cumulative effect. 6 billion is an extremely recent development. Europe, North Africa, and the Near and Middle East has been deforested since ancient times. Integrate that effect over three millenia, then compare it to the effect of 6 billion, the crushing majority of which live essentially as they did 1-2 thousand years ago. The cumulative effect should be quite significant already by the 18th c., yet 19th c. experienced a mini-ice-age. Please explain that since your side professes a superior understanding of the underlying science.
Secondly - weather is not climate. Predicting overall climate is a very different procedure to predicting the weather. Crudely if I predict that the economy will grow 50% in the next fifty years, but someone in a different profession predicts the crash of a bank next month and gets it wrong - am I automatically wrong?
The underlying physical phenomena are the same. Richyoung made a good comparison with shooting groups, but the reality is even harsher, because group spread is essentially linear, whereas differential calculus is generally not. This means that small initial deflections in the model produce DISPROPORTIONATELY large errors in the final result. Anyone who has ever done numerical simulations on differential models knows that only too well.
On the other hand, if you will not use weather formation to predict climate (
), then you are stuck with horribly incomplete "historical data" that correlates parameters that we don't even know if they correspond to what we think they do. The amount of guesswork done to fill the gaps borders on the ludicrous. It is like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle when you are missing 70-95% of the pieces, and yet have the temerity to insist whose picture it is we are looking at. The reality is that we know very little about ancient climate.
And why bother with the 'global socialism' paranoid conspiracy theory meme.
Please. With Robespierre, it was the aristocrats and traitors. With Napoleon, it was the interventionists. With Lenin, it was the counterrevolutionaries. With Stalin, it was the spies and wreckers. With Hitler, it was the jews and the Dictat of Versailles. Every dictatorship identifies (or fabricates) an external or internal enemy or problem, to rile up support for itself and keep people scared and in line. Often the same people who say WOT is an excuse for PA refuse to see that GW is an excuse for GS.
Let's be completely cynical and ask ourselves who gives a crap about Kyoto. If the West is further burdened with regulations and "carbon-neutral", while China blatantly disregards that rubbish and gains a larger market share, will the environment benefit? The West leadership cannot (or refuses to) make China respect something as basic and undeniable as patent law. How can we possibly hope that China will respect a Kyoto-like agreement? Sheer fantasy.
Let me tell you what is really going on here. Socialists want to cripple the West and build up the Turd World to bridge the gap in living standards and build their global cumbaya bullshit. Ideologues at high places have been ranting about this forever, in different forms. It is all part of a big movement of globalization. GW is just the ticket that can help them saddle the West with even more ridiculous "added expense", and not just the heavy industry (which has already mostly left) but light industry, and the consumer himself. That would be the single biggest indirect tax increase in history.
The situation is essentially analogous to my colleague's thinking. I told him that if polution is the problem with Hummers, then he should propose to punish/tax all those guys with old guzzlers that do 15 mi/gal or all those guys with junk trucks that stink something awful. He then said we cannot because those guys cannot afford it, while the Hummers can. So, it is not really about who polutes the most or what is good for the environment, after all.
Here is another one for you. If humanity is the cause of climate change, and modernization increases carbon emissions, then why modernize the Turd World at all? Improvements in efficiency will be a droplet in the ocean when several billion people are "promoted" to our living standard and resource consumption. If GW is correct, that will kill the planet much faster. If anything, econuts should spend their efforts at keeping the Turd World where it is and giving away contraceptives.