Hello

Sorry for the absence. Thanks Martin and Hilary for your points. I will look at these and get back to you when I have the chance, and look with interest at the other posts too.

Charlie

"Did senior military commanders ever declare UFOs or global cooling the greatest anticipated threat to the US, as has happened with climate change?"

A view from the past:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/25/the-cia-documents-the-global-cooling-research-of-the-1970s/

http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf

Welcome back Charlie, you could try Jo Nova's sceptic handbook. The best way to approach this in my view would be to not believe a word of it and try to disprove everything in it. It is probably the work of David Evans her husband, an apostate from the faith of global warming, but it's a good introduction to what sceptics feel about the science. There are other branches of scepticism, of course. For instance some people, me amongst them, don't believe there's a snowball's chance in hell (good metaphor?) of stopping the rise of CO2 any time soon. so the billions being added to our electricity bills aren't just irksome, they're a direct attack on the way of life of the British, and other unfortunate nations. Which, if you read into the goals of environmentalism, Club of Rome, etc., is what they are. Others believe that "renewable" energy is a waste of time and won't replace fossil fuel energy any time soon, except, of course if we go nuclear, which the environmentalists oppose.

You could look in the historical records and see that the only relationship between CO2 and temperature is that CO2 rises in the atmosphere around 800 -1000 years after heating has occurred, which is a reasonably well understood phenomenon of the oceans degassing.

You could ask why the temperatures have ceased to rise while, according to the alarmist, CO2, which is the main driver of warming has risen by 8%. (The don't know, but you should ask yourself then, what makes them so certain they're right.)

You could ask yourself where the "missing" heat is, that's the heat that should have accumulated in the climate system according to the IPCC models, but hasn't. The theory is that it is hiding in the deep oceans, but the physics for achieving such a feat aren't clear.

If you want the scientific arguments, they revolve mainly about the assumed positive feedbacks, for which there is no empirical evidence. Sometimes it's referred to as "climate sensitivity".

But whatever you do, and whatever you're told, by anybody including me, start out by thinking "that's bollocks", and look it up for yourself. Roughly translated into the Latin that becomes "Nullius in Verba".

I've only scratched the surface here there's a lot more to learn, but keep in mind any scientist worth his salt doesn't want you to believe him, he wants you to try to prove him wrong, while he looks on smugly watching you fail.