[Bruinator]

Agreed, not all are but some of the people that have engaged me and what I have read and seen in other places forms my opinion.

So, in your scenario on testing, does this scenario play out with the global warming crowd. Seems to me, it would have been refuted long ago.

[doc30]

The green house effect is very real and can be measured in the laboratory experiments and the results do agree with the physics. It's a misnomer that the green house effect is caused by man. THe green house effect has been operating since the planet formed. The absorption of infrared light of the blackbody radiation from the Earth (around 500 cm-1) is real and is responsible for the atmospheric temperatuer of the Earth. It's related to absorption along the high energy tail of the quantum rotational levels of CO2. CO2 essentially absorbs infrared completely aaround it's fundamental modes, but these higher energy level tails are very weakly absorbing so they only absorb a tiny amount of the IR passing through the atmosphere. If you double the CO2 content, you double the energy absorbed.

That being said, the role of CO2 in the heat budget of the Earth is just one very, very small part. It's a very dynamic system with all kinds of positive and negative feedback mechanisms. We are getting close to doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere, but how significant that is to the overall heat budget is not certain.

My personal take on it is that humans are highly adaptable and that if there is climate change, there really isn't much that can be done to change it one way or the other. Plus, from a technical point of view, I don't think we should be deliberately trying to manipulate the climate because of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Best to ride it out and exploit climate change, a true capitalist, conservative approach, than to impose draconian socialist measures to deal with it and cause more harm, both environmentally and economically, than any harm coming form global warming.