[Pretzel Logic]

OK. Let's turn to logic rather than emotion. What upset me is that I pointed out data several times and you never acknowledged the data. It's hard to be ignored and not get upset. I'm sorry if my "head in the sand" comment was offensive. I was just saying (poorly) that the greenhouse effect is not debatable. The magnitude of the effect is what scientists are trying to figure out. When you add insulation, things end up warmer (in a cold environment, like the earth's environment which is outer space).

I agree that the greenhouse effect itself is undebatable -- it's one of the things that makes our planet livable, and it comes from various different gasses (for example, water vapor is a major greenhouse gas). However, it may be important to note that the greenhouse effect is not something man has created, it's a natural function of our atmosphere, and it's the reason half our planet doesn't drop to -166 degrees at night. So, it's not really a bad thing of itself, per se.

To me, the relevant debate is whether man's activities are increasing the greenhouse effect -- specifically in a way that could be dangerous. In a way, I believe we're saying the exact same thing in this regard. The only meaningful difference (that I can see) is that you are operating from the assumption that there is going to be "X magnitude of increase from man," which implies a presupposition that man's activities are most definitely warming the planet to some degree or other; whereas I do not accept that presupposition -- although (and this is where things seem to have gotten confused) I do not dismiss it out of hand, either. I simply believe we do not have enough true scientific understanding, or long-term data, to even form concrete presuppositions.

Forgive me for a slight tangent, but one of the things my dad taught me when I was young was to question our presuppositions -- to question those things that we have accepted without question. Our presuppositions form the foundation of all logic that follows, so if they contain even the SLIGHTEST error, then every single thing that follows will be built on error, and that error is thus magnified a hundred times. If we start with a faulty presupposition, then we end up with a faulty conclusion. Thus, for logic to function, we have to be MOST careful at the beginning of things. That's how I'm approaching this subject, and why I'm not willing to give any logical ground away to assumptions.

I'm not doing this out of stubbornness, arrogance, or anything of the sort. I'm doing this because it's the only way I know how to confine things to the bounds of both a logical and a factual framework.

To wrap this point up: I think we can both agree that climatologists have a limited understanding of how climate works.

Where we diverge seems to be this: I maintain that we cannot even form viable presuppositions in such an environment. We can form working hypotheses (yours being: "Man is causing some degree of warming, the question is how much."), but a working hypothesis is not an established fact. Again, I'm not stating that this necessarily makes your working hypothesis wrong -- I'm just saying that we have to recognize it for what it is, or we will be unable to spot data that goes against it. For example, if we formed a working hypothesis that "all fire trucks are red," and also accepted that as our presupposition (i.e.- failed to recognize that it was just a hypothesis), then we would not even be LOOKING at blue trucks -- and we would thus never, ever spot a blue fire truck that busted our biases. Accordingly, in the end, we "prove" ourselves to be right, simply because our expectations directed all our subsequent research, and caused us to completely avoid channels that could prove us wrong ("We are NOT allocating one dime to examine blue trucks! We already know that all fire trucks are red, the only question is 'How red are they?'").

Any presupposition that isn't infallible is thus potentially very dangerous, so I try to keep extremely tight standards for what I'll accept without question.

Without a complete understanding of how climate works, I don't see how we can form any infallible presuppositions about what effect man might have -- if any -- on a system that we can't even establish a baseline for. That's why I keep an open mind. At least, until the science is ACTUALLY "settled."

I'll come back to the rest of your post later.