The meta problem here is that you are not even aware that we are already at the phase where even psychologists and other experts are classifying who are the deniers, lukewarmers and skeptics. And how and when to deal, or not deal with them (this last one of not dealing with them goes for scientists and academics, that have to trouble dealing with the issue because almost all the points you bring were already discussed and not important now, or I should say, not show stoppers as you would think.)
Simply out of curiosity, what fields do you study?
Not just wrong, but wrong on several different levels at the same time.
First of all, the denial doesn’t even make sense: a lot of things are incontrovertibly caused by global warming, such as… warming! Of air, land, and water! 
And thus melting polar ice, sea level rise, increase of observed average long-term temperatures, and changes in ecosystems linked to temperature.
The problem of course is that the core issue was misstated. The core issue is linkage of anthropogenic GHGs to warming and the attribution of significant climate consequences. Some of the impacts are on continuous variables like changes in ocean chemistry due to increased CO2 uptake, sea level rise, decadal-scale loss of Arctic ice mass, etc. and have a straightforward attribution. Others shift the probability distribution of discrete events like weather extremes, and these can get trickier to attribute. But here’s the point. The attribution is hypothesized based on physics and supported (or not) by empirical observation – and since we are dealing with complicated chaotic systems, the latter is statistical, and the attributions have various degrees of uncertainty. IOW, it’s exactly like the first sentence “We know from physics and biology that crude oil, mercury or radioactivity from a meltdown all cause illness and loss.” These things don’t always cause illness to every individual – it depends on amount of exposure, on duration of exposure, and on the random variables of individual response. But we know enough about the underlying mechanisms and can establish statistical correlations with observed effects so that we know the attribution exists on a statistically significant basis. It’s exactly the same principle. It’s called science, and evidence.
Not in any of the physical sciences, obviously!
That’s great, but your personal virtues are not the topic of discussion here. The current dialog with you is about your unjustified attacks on the soundness and legitimacy of climate research. Like the link above about water vapor, or saying “at present there is no ‘proof’ that mankind has altered the climate of the world in any way”, or trying to discredit the IPCC, or claiming that solar variations are a major and/or hugely unknown factor in post-industrial climate change, or any of your other dozen or more harangues against climate science I’ve mentioned before, none of which have merit, and all of which are routinely used by denialists as the central argument against emissions regulation and an excuse to continue to burn fossil fuels with reckless abandon.
Again, you respond in a way that does not allow any understanding of what you are actually objecting to.
Much less any way to respond. What is your point?
You completely miss the analogy. It’s impossible to prove that an action, like burning coal, or allowing a reactor core to melt and leak, or an oil rig to explode and pollute the Gulf Of Mexico, led directly to any single other event later, or far away, or distant in time.
If you could, lawsuits would flower like a desert after rainfall.
It’s the same with CO2. We know from physics it should warm the upper atmosphere and surface as it increases. But you can’t prove that any warming is directly tied to any CO2 put out by anyone. There is no scientific basis to show this. You can’t point at a storm or a heat wave or a blizzard and claim it was because of coal burnt by China, or the exhaust gas from 300 million American vehicles. It’s not possible.
We may believe it is absolutely true, but it can not be proven. That isn’t even the issue.
Geology & geochemistry then (more than 10 years ago, last I worked as a geologist), environmental & geographical science (that’s one subject) and archaeology, now.
Wow … geology is A LOT harder than it looks … except here … everything is 10,000 years old except the stuff that’s 5,000 years old.
Perhaps you could answer a question I have about the age of these fossil fuel deposits. These coal seams in the Appiliations seem very very old, like way over 30 million years. How about natural gas deposits and crude oil?
“allowing a reactor core to melt and leak”
http://rt.com/news/japan-fukushima-nuclear-lawsuit-416/
“or an oil rig to explode and pollute the Gulf Of Mexico”
BTW, I didn’t “miss” any “analogy”. I said that your statement “proving any one thing is caused by global warming … is almost impossible” was wrong. I named four things that certainly can be so proven.
Huh?? “Put out by anyone”? Climate change is a policy issue that has nothing to do with fingering individuals but with setting policy based on understanding what we are collectively doing to the climate. What you can show is that the aggregate accumulation of CO2 contributes to warming. You can also show (by its isotopic signature) the ratio that originated from fossil fuels.
No one here has suggested that you can.
Which natural gas deposits and crude oil? And you’re out by a factor of 10 on the Appalachians.
So the coal seams are 300 million years old? Are they generally all the same age there, or is there a big range of ages? Are the Wyoming deposits younger? Aren’t all crude oil deposits from the same time, like dead dinosaurs? Now, I’m not asking for you to spend a mess of time researching all this, but I am asking where I should start looking if I should want to do this research.
There’s a range in order of tens of millions of years. I’d say that’s big, but not too big as geological time goes…
If you mean the Powder Basin deposits, then yes, they are - most of those are Tertiary (60 Ma and younger)
No, and definitely not. Petroleum deposits cover a range of periods same as coal (but different deposition environments - coal is from swamps, oil & gas from marine basins), and they are mostly derived from dead plankton-type material, not dinosaurs.
And you do realise dinosaurs aren’t all from the same time, right? In fact, we are closer to Tyrannosaurus rex (66 Ma BP) than T. rex was to Stegosaurus (150 Ma BP)!
That’s all off the top of my head from what little i know of US geology. Wikipedia would actually be your friend here, I suspect, and usually the geology department of whatever University is situated in the area you’re interested in, will have a regional website.
ETA: When I say there’s a range of tens of millions of years, I’m specifically talking about Appalachian coal there.
Thanx for the info … The wikiarticles just confuse me and everything around here is about volcanoes.
The biggest problem with public acceptance or lack thereof is that those who accept it do so out of faith, and those who do not accept are similarly motivated.
Most people who accept it think that scientists must *always *know what they are talking about and are infallible, when we all know that is completely false. It is precisely the nebulousness of the science that is at fault here. It is on very, very, very shaky ground.
Nah, the biggest problem is that when pseudoscience followers do resort to accusations that the ones following science are doing it by faith or religion they are actually admitting that they are out of good arguments; in reality going for this argument, that acceptance is based on faith, is a very old maneuver done by the ones that want to refuse science when it is going against their interests.
Not so, when the National Academy of Science is telling you that this is science.
And then you have to know that even educational academic defense groups that started first defending educators against creationists have realized that virtually the same groups or tactics are being used against educators that teach climate science, so they have added the climate change deniers into the same column as the creationists.
nm