If you want to draw a Global Warming disciple up short ask him (or more likely, her) what observations could refute Global Warming theory. Nine times out of ten they will not have any idea of how to begin to address the question.
Global Warming Theory is not unlike most pseudoscience in that it so thoroughly fuzzy and amorphous. It's maddeningly difficult to argue with psuedoscientists because they do not accept the framework of evidence and verification.
Adherents of Global Warming Theory just know that it's true, they don't need to debate the issue. They argue ex cathedra though few of them have entered on the scientific equivalent of Holy Orders. Al Gore comes to mind as the perfect example. He has never even passed freshman physics at the local community college, probably can't even enumerate Newton's Laws, hasn't even the most elementary grasp of probability theory, statistics or analysis. None of this stops him from speaking with complete and utter confidence about things which people with 1600 SAT scores, who have studied the feild all their lives cannot be sure about.
Al Gore comes to mind as the perfect example. He has never even passed freshman physics at the local community college, probably can't even enumerate Newton's Laws, hasn't even the most elementary grasp of probability theory, statistics or analysis.
More fundamentally, no understanding of the scientific method and the critical role of skeptical test of hypothesis by multiple independent reserearchers experimenters and properly performed observations/experiments.
Consensus and group think is the antithesis of the scientific method.
From Wikipedia: Gore attended the elite St. Albans School where he ranked 25th (of 51) in his senior class. In preparation for his college applications, Gore scored a 1355 on his SAT (625 in verbal and 730 in math). Al Gore's IQ scores, from tests administered at St. Albans in 1961 and 1964 (his freshman and senior years) respectively, have been recorded as 133 and 134.[9]
In 1965, Gore enrolled at Harvard College, the only university to which he applied. His roommate (in Dunster House) was actor Tommy Lee Jones. He scored in the lower fifth of the class for two years in a row [9] and, after finding himself bored with his classes in his declared English major, Gore switched majors and worked hard in his government courses and graduated from Harvard in June 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government. [9] After returning from the military he took religious studies courses at Vanderbilt University and then entered its Law School. He left Vanderbilt without a degree to run for Congress in 1976.
From Book Reviews: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: The Environmental Ethic versus the Big Business Ethic
"Gore’s interest in global warming derives from a chance encounter he had with pre-eminent oceanographer, Roger Revelle, in an undergraduate class at Harvard in the 1960s. After directing the Scripps Oceanographic Institution in La Jolla, California from 1950 to 1964, Revelle went to Harvard University where he served as Professor of Population Policy and Director of the Center for Population Studies. It was from Revelle, one of the great American scientists of the 20th century, that Gore learned about the study of CO2 concentrations measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The graph on this page shows measurements from Mauna Loa which document the increase of atmospheric CO2 in a continuous pattern since 1957. Revelle had showed Gore this trend after only eight years of measurements. Gore uses this graph in his documentary as primary evidence of the increased “greenhouse” effect caused by increase in CO2.
I doubt that a class Roger Revelle was involved with was Elementary Basketweaving -- especially at Harvard.