Folks, GW is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of atmospheric chemistry and radiative forcing. For folks like KC, the nutter posting in this thread who has been consistently repeating the bizarre claim that the Earth has been cooling for ten years, this blog’s fpr you: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/instrumental-record/

Now get this clear: RealClimate.org is written by bona fide, working professional climate scientists. I know some of them personally, and have worked closely with one of them for more than a year (a scientist who goes to Antarctica and various glaciers drilling ice cores, and who has a whole labful of analytic chemistry equipment to analyse those cores). Let me be absolutely clear: If these people are “perpetrating a hoax”, they have been diabolically clever about it. They have managed to conceal any such hoaxy intentions not only from the world, and from their scientific peers, and from their employers at several of the world’s finest universities, but from me personally. The idea that KC and nutters of his type carry around is: “RealClimate.org is written by people who do not agree with my obsessive belief that GW is a hoax; therefore it is a “biased” source that should be ignored.” KC, try to achieve a moment of clarity: You, not these world-class scientists, are the punk here. YOU are the biased source. You have a blind belief, and you keep feeding it pre-filtered crap, repeating only the pseudoscientific crap that justifies you in your obsessive belief.

As for Dick Lindzen, Roger Pielke et al.: There are very few bona fide working climate scientists who cast doubt on the impact of rising CO2 levels on global temperature projections (remember, there’s a time lag of decades before we’ll feel the full effects of increased GHGs, because of the thermial inertia of the oceans). There are, however, a few. Why? No matter what the subject, for any scientific question of complexity, you’ll find some people taking extreme positions, and contrasting this with the mainstream scientific view – or, more cannily, staking out no clear position of their own, and just casting doubt on the mainstream instead. Sometimes this is from a stubborn obsession with the idea that they know the Truth that everyone else has overlooked; sometimes it’s a love of notoriety – today, the easiest way to get undeserved celebrity as a climate scientist is to take some kind of “skeptic” position, since you’ll become an instant hero to the KCs of the world; sometimes it’s just crackpottiness, since it turns out even some folks with PhDs aren’t immune to the same kind of obsessive insistence that the world as they imagine they’d like it to be is the world that must be. What is clear is this: If you understand anything about how the enterprise of science works, how its peer review and professional status system works, you will know that the idea there’s some kind of a vast conspiracy amongst climate scientists to hide The Truth is not only laughable, it is actually impossible. Moreover, you will understand that you should be far more skeptical of what scientists on the fringe of the mainstream consensus say than of the mainstream scientists. Mainstream science is mainstream for a reason. It’s overwhelmingly more likely to be accurate, especially, as in this case, where multiple independent lines of evidence ranging from paleoclimate data to direct measurements of the transparency of various atmospheric gases to visible light and to infrared light all converge on the same conclusion: Massive climate change due to GW is in the pipeline because CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide are transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared (unlike N2 and O2, which are transparent to both).

Try to understand that atmospheric chemistry is not a matter of political opinion. Insisting it’s a hoax doesn’t make it a hoax. There is no rule other than Rush Limbaugh’s Rule of Right-wing Sheep Following Opinion Leaders Blindly that says “conservatives” should deny mainstream scientific opinions they are not qualified to judge, simply because a few right-wing opinion leaders paid off by the oil and coal industries have parrotted some talking points for their clueless listeners to obsessively repeat. If you think mainstream climate science is a hoax, you are a clueless sucker. Sorry to break the harsh news to ya. Happy new year.