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Originally Posted by captainslug
While CO2 levels have increased between 1960 and 2005, we can't say with any certainty that we're the cause, because forests have also been increasing in size in the past 150 years.
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Where the heck do you get this BS? There are many threads of evidence that prove beyond any shadow of doubt that the excess CO2 comes from fossil fuels. Some of them, such as isotope ratios, take a little science to understand, but the simplest one just takes basic math and a little web searching. You can quite easily find figures for the amount of coal & oil extracted over the last century, Figure out how much CO2 burning them creates, and how much that would increase atmospheric CO2 concentration. Then compare your number to the actual measured increase.
As for that baloney about forests increasing, I think that- if you're being honest - you're confusing a small, localized increase in the northeastern US (due to changing population patterns as people moved west) with the entire world, which as a whole is undergoing severe, ongoing deforestation.
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Ocean temperatures disagree with atmospheric temperature records. But at the same time the acidity levels of the oceans has been increasing. And magnetic pole is shifting. And sun spot and solar wind activity have been increasing.
And cloud coverage percentages have a much more direct impact on global surface temperatures than greenhouse effects.
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Most of those either have no effect, or one too small to measure, but in any case they're irrelevant: their effects will only add or subtract a tiny bit from the effect of CO2. It's rather like asking whether the geese that brought down that airliner had fleas or not, and then claiming that the fleas were really responsible.
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Global Warming is an oversimplification of what is a much more fascinatingly complicated system. While the greenhouse effect is real, there's presently no real certainty as to how directly anthropogenic CO2 production affects climate change over time.
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Depends on what you mean by certainty. Send a boulder bouncing down the side of a mountain: it's not certain where it's going to land, whether it'll set off a landslide, or how big the slide might be, but it's damned sure not going to roll uphill. All the anti-AGW arguments amount to various ways of claiming that the boulder's not going to roll, or if it does, it's going to roll uphill.