...human-caused climate change is junk science, but it is also part of the new-age religion.
Religion or religious fervor? Yes. New? Ha! Hardly. Rather, it is only the newest home of the zealots*. Even in my lifetime, a scant 40 years, I recall the previous building which housed them: Nuclear Fear.
Like much real estate, a building's value is often "location, location, location" and once it became apparent that Nuclear Fear was in an ineffective neighborhood, they began a lengthy move to a new address: Anthropogenic Global Warming. Whether the new neighborhood is really better than the old has yet to be seen, but Nuclear Fear is now a bombed-out (pun!) shell of itself. What is not widely remembered is that it was not the original location. No, it was merely one in a lengthy succession of addresses in a variety of neighborhoods. There may come a day, and that day may be sooner than thought, when yet another address is required. Exactly where is not yet known, but a search through the history books shows it will likely be a new building at a previously-used location.
Edit: I forgot to say that the Nuclear Fear building was recently renovated. They sold the naming rights to a new multinational conglomerate: Climate Change.
First, I am a no-kidding, graduate degree atmospheric physicist...
I am a no-kidding, bachelor degree mechanical engineer... No, wait. I do actually have the degree, but I chose to do something else professionally that pays more. Regardless, one of the things thermodynamics drills into a fellow is how to set a system boundary. If you can account for what crosses the system boundary, you can compute some pretty important stuff. Here we are several pages into a discussion about global warming and the word "sun" has seldom been uttered. Perhaps
longhair is more correct than he realizes; perhaps its omission is a form of regurgitation. Talking about energy retention in a system with a sole energy source, while omitting (wittingly or otherwise) that sole source, strikes me as *very* poor science. That energy source has its own cycles and an accounting is required.
So now I will show my cards. I can accept we are in a warm period, but I am unconvinced as to its cause, and until somebody can accurately account for the large ball of fusing hydrogen 93 million miles away, I will remain unconvinced.
* I don't intend to give zealots a bad name by assocation with the AGW crowd. I have a religion, one that requires me to accept absolute truth to the exclusion of all others. In that vein, I am as much a "zealot" as anybody else, but unlike the AGW zealots, I wouldn't deign to tell you how you must believe or act based on beliefs I have chosen. I'm comfortable at my OWN address, and I don't need to transform the neighborhood through force so that everybody believes as I do.
Would it have helped if I had said that he was a skeptical professional instead? If so, mea culpa. 
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