Anyway, some useful stuff here but no knowledge of the second law of thermodynamics … so I must move on.

Now I know who that modeler is.

Happy Landscheidt Minimum.

‘Global warming’ means a general average increase in temperatures over the whole world, which has clearly been occurring for a century or more and accelerating in the last few decades. It’s due largely to growing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, which provides a greenhouse effect, keeping more sunlight in and warming the earth.

‘Climate change’ is a result of global warming: as average temps increase, weather patterns get messed up and funny things happen, like massive heat waves, droughts, rains, floods, hurricanes, and yes – even record cold spells and blizzards.

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

Can you read the link below, and explain why we should disregard his conclusions?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/

it was really like living in a fan-forced oven; worst run of hot days on record, three days in a row above 44°C (which is about 111-112°F) with extremely low humidity around 10% or less

Melbourne’s water supply has been cycling down lower and lower each summer for the past 10 years

southern Australia is turning into a semi-arid zone as the climate belts shift southward, and the formerly reliable, rain-bearing weather that southern Australia used to receive in autumn, winter and spring, has shifted south of the continent altogether (ominously, completely as predicted by global warming climate models). So, what was once a reasonable place to live, with dry summers but reliably moist for the rest of the year, is developing an increasingly uncertain future.

My sense of how this alienation arises… goes something like this. The climate issue is already highly politicized, so people start out with partisan inclinations. Then, the more highly educated conservatives—people like Deroy Murdock—proceed in a typically “intellectual” fashion to find information about the climate issue that confirms what they already think. For this they go to partisan and like-minded sources, such as Fox News or any number of rightwing anti-science websites.

Exactly. And frequently someone originally cooked up the spin for those sources as well. It all needs generous amounts of sunlight, preferably in real time. (For example, something like what this post does with the “CRA-caused-the-mortgage-meltdown” meme.)