AGW IS a religion, not science. Any movement in which the standard response to dissent is to attack the dissenter by any means possible is far from science, no matter how hard it uses charts and graphs to masquerade as one. I’ve even had to deal with such idiotic comments as claims that a weatherman is unqualified to discuss climate science, and that a economist is unqualified to state that data points had been left out of a statistical analysis. Now you just gave me fuel to combat his claims that we are “Poisoning the oceans with CO2″.

And all I have done is point out that the science needs to be reanalyzed under proper scrutiny to determine what inclusion of all data will reveal, as opposed to what it shows with hand picked and “adjusted” data. My favorite has been how he tried to “prove” the MWP didn’t exist by showing a chart that I had just finished pointing out was suspect for having included only 25% of the available data.

*sigh* I know this will take years to sort out, but the sooner this religion is picked apart by the FACTS the happier I will be.

[A linear fit wouldn't tell you anything about acceleration. I'm not trying to argue here that there aren't effects to our technological impact on the environment -- there clearly are. I'm trying to argue that the effects are the effects that we see, and that there's not some underlying dynamic that means we're stumbling towards a cliff in the dark. If I'd used a linear fit, I would have been sneaking that conclusion in as an assumption in the method: look, a straight line, no acceleration! That's a common enough dodge in this kind of argument but not one I will personally indulge in. -jsh]

You may also add these facts to your repertoire concerning ocean acidification http://www.livescience.com/animals/091202-sea-creature-shells.html

It’s is hard to imagine how such small amounts of carbonic (or any) acid could have any catastrophic effects on a system as massively buffered as the ocean is. In low buffered freshwater ecosystems, acidification can have some relatively minor destabilizing effects. But even there universal buffering effects mitigate the process progression.

I am afraid that Mike Treder’s understanding of earth’s ecosyetems could use some tutorial. Only a minority of ecosystems are stable in the medium to long term. One of the more interesting facts is how well life adapts to such “regular” catastrophic events such as floods, fires, glaciation, and massive environmental variability such as temperature fluctuations, drought, etc.