4 questions for intellectuals. What is your reaction to...?

1. The big question is really what drives climate - human activity or natural cycles (i.e. sun)? Can you prove that?

2. Well isn't this just the antithesis of your first question?

3. Well fine - lets see it. I think you are woefully wrong, but hey why not?

4. I think our burning of fossil fuels does next to nothing to the climate, but hey fine - lets see your "proof".

I don't know what kind of answers you want here. You say what if you could prove - if it were proven, I would be convinced . It's not a difficult concept.

Your terminology seems confusing. First of all, theories can never be proven to be 100% real, they can only be proved false. A million apples falling from a tree doesn't prove the theory of gravity to be 100% real, but 1 apple "falling" up could prove it false. Nonetheless, I'll respond to your hypothetical questions.

Your #1 is inconceivable, because you'd require experimental earth-sized laboratories where you could control all the parameters (e.g. you'd need to be god).

#2 is possible (as all theories are tentative), but knowing what I know, extremely improbable. Your experiment, whatever it was, would have to be replicated by others and thoroughly scrutinized by other climate scientists, before I'd consider it valid (as I know I lack a sufficient knowledge-base to detect experimental flaws you may have used). If this were accomplished, I'd accept it.

#3 again the "prove" isn't appropriate, but it's certainly possible for you to provide sufficient evidence to convince me (assuming I couldn't find other evidence from credible sources invalidating your evidence). If this happened, then I'd oppose nuclear energy.

#4 again with the "prove", but any evidence you could provide to support this hypothesis would be considered by me.

The bottom line is this: If anyone can present new evidence that holds up to the scrutiny of other scientists in the field (this eliminates the amateurish work done by some of the blogger doubters around), I would accept it. I have no personal benefit from AGW being true and I"d much rather it were false (I have enough things to worry about as it is). However, if AGW is true (as I'm pretty certain), then there are some negative aspects it would bring into my life if nothing were done.

1) If you look into the science of this it is not that difficult, for instance it is possible by finding what isotope is attached to the Co2 sample to know if its origin is recent (burning) or ancient (fossil fuel) the later is predominant in the recent ice core record, even large parts of the denier have given up claiming warming isn't happening and are just running with the 'its not humans' line.

2) The denier movement have been throwing out theories by the handful from Pluto to U.N. world domination to the power bill of Al's house as proof GW isn't happening, no science at all.

3) Nuclear fuel in far more finite than even fossil fuels if the world went nuclear in a big way we would run out of Uranium in ~30 years

4) The heat absorption characteristics of Co2 are proven scientific fact, dating back a century there is no question Co2 is a green house gas.

1. Doesn't really matter to me. Global warming is already proven, as much as anything in science actually is.

2. Your laboratory would have to accurately model 20 miles of an atmosphere surrounding a planet 8000 miles in diameter. With gravity, land and ocean, etc. Intellectually, it would be difficult to do that convincingly. If you could I'd listen, but "well, this is just like that" handwaving is not going to cut it.

3. I'd say we probably need to engineer the process better. I assume you're talking about the environmental impacts of constructing the plants and the uranium mines, I think those can be done in an acceptable and net positive way. Transporting the fuel and waste products is surely negligable.

4. Farfetched is putting it mildly. As with #2, your "proof" would have to be more convincing than this:

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm

Which is quite a task. But, hey, go for it. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for you if you can.

EDIT - In accepting the reality of (mostly man made) global warming, I'm in good company.

The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Association, etc.

But it's not that. The data speaks even louder. I'm with the Admiral:

"I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.”

Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.)

Former NASA Administrator, Shuttle Astronaut

1. Not possible, need planetary scale atmosphere and ocean to do this.

2. See 1.

3. If you can't prove 1. or 2., how are you going to demonstrate 3.?

4. See 3. (This is aside from the fact that most climate physicists discount the idea that Earth is sensitive to runaway greenhouse effects.)

Hypothetical indeed. Science isn't about absolutely proving things. Results in science are always open to revision if and when new evidence comes to light. To "prove" something in a scientific context means to convince someone that it is logical and consistent with the facts. "Proof," meaning to show that something is necessarily true, is a concept is exclusive to mathematics.

Anyway, to answer your questions. By definition, proving something in a scientific context requires convincing someone that you're right. So if you proved any of your hypothetical propositions, I would necessarily be compelled to accept your conclusions.

First you have to define global warming before you could prove it. By global warming, are we to assume that we are talking about human caused warming?

i have a feeling that two of those results would be outliers in the range of data and would be discounted in a meta-analysis. one experiment doesnt make a 'proof'.

And this question is supposed to smoke them out? How does that work?