On Janaury 29th, 2009,  it was widely reported that the world's glaciers retreated for the 18th straight year.  Yet there are a still folks  who deny global climate change.  Nothing irks me more than running into clueless smirking deniers.  They spread confusion and dupe otherwise intelligent, well-educated people. 

 The first step is to winning the debate is get the deniers to admit there is change.  This is easy to do just point out the the obvious -even die-hard denier, find it hard to deny that there aren't any glaciers in Glacier National Park or that Mount Kilamanjaro is no lonber snow-capped. 

Once they have admitted that glaciers have retreated, the debate boils down to whether carbon emissions from humans are causing the problem.  Here is how to win this part of the argument.  First, it may be true that  the Sun may be the ulitmate driver of whether the world is cooling or warming, don't sget idetracked on that issue.  Focus instead on the human component. 

Petroleum is a fossil fuel.  All the oil and coal we extract and burn on a daily basis hundreds of millions of  barrels and tons a day was once in the atmosphere.  That was during the Cretacious period.  Global temerpatures were higher then because of all the atmospheric carbon.  The carbon was taken from the air by plants.  Now we are burning the decayed plants in the form of oil and coal and the carbon is going back to the atmosphere.  In other words, we are recreating conditions which we know led to higher temperatures in our past.

Carbon in the atmosphere acts as a blanket.  It insulates us. It doesn't matter what the Sun does, the blanket of carbon will still effect the Earth. If we are in a solar warming trend, we are going to warm up more and stay warm longer, if we are in a cooling trend, we will cool less quickly and stay warmer than otherwise. 

Human carbon emissions have an effect just as the same emissions had an effect the first time around when they came from volcanic emissions.

I have never had anyone beat this train of thought. The funniest response is when deniers go into sulk mode. As one denier once told my brother-in-law.  I hate arguing with that guy he has too many facts. My rational people, such as my friend the theoretical physicist changed his view on the subject entirely.   And that is how we win the climate change debate: changing one mind at a time.