"The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about. "  Dr. Wayne Dyer

OS member Snoreville Stuffingstocker's latest post asserts that the current concern over human-caused global warming is just a media driven panic because the media promulgated a similar panic over global cooling during the 1970s. He asserts that scientists today who believe that the combustion byproducts of industrial activity are causing global warming are not to be trusted because they once believed that an ice age was imminent.

Only they didn't. This is just another lazy, easily disproven anti-global warming disinformation ploy.

 "The notion that the 1970s scientific consensus was for impending global cooling is incorrect. In actuality, there were significantly more papers in the 1970s predicting warming than cooling."

"Most predictions of an impending ice age came from the popular press (eg - Newsweek, NY Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine). As far as peer reviewed scientific papers in the 1970s, very few papers (7 in total) predicted global cooling. Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming due to CO2. More on 1970s science..."

I used to listen to Lowell Ponte (referenced in Stuffingstocker's post as the author of a book predicting a coming ice age) on left wing KPFK radio in the '70s. Ponte isn't a scientist. While an educated layman can understand this subject, his book is hardly authoritative or reliable. W.M. Connelly, in his analysis of Ponte's book, writes, "Evidence for Ponte's inability to tell sense from nonsense (or at least to check speculative results) is his assertion (p70) that gravity is weakening in the universe, and that this is proved by the moon moving away from the earth at 4 cm/year." Ponte is a libertarian champion of laissez faire capitalism who now, not surprisingly, denies global warming. He's also a Newsmax.com pundit, which speaks volumes, none of them good.

Stuffingstocker also writes, "Since C02 is only half a percent of atmospheric gasses and only 5% of that is man made, there is nothing we could do to alter the atmosphere short of a nuclear war."

Wrong. "The overall rise is from just below 280 ppm (the “pre-industrial” value) to the present values above 360 ppm, an increase of a factor of 1.3. The logarithm of 1.3 is 0.11, that of 2 is 0.30." Or roughly a 30% increase. Unlike other atmospheric gases, CO2 traps heat. Without the CO2 in the atmosphere, the Earth would not retain much of the infrared radiation from the Sun that warms the Earth's surface. CO2 is hardly negligble, whatever its percentage of the total composition of the atmosphere.

This is simple science. C02 traps heat - We're generating rising levels of atmospheric CO2 - the Earth's temperature is rising.

There's another reason not to increase atmospheric CO2. The ocean acts as a carbon sink. The increase in atmospheric CO2 is acidifying the oceans. Fragile green plankton near the ocean's surface generate most of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Those plankton, as well as all life forms, exist in a narrow range of environmental conditions. We are altering those conditions at our peril.

We are gambling with our future and the continued existence of an ecosphere needed to keep the Earth habitable for humans.

And before anyone brigns up "Climategate," I refer you here and here. 

I'm done arguing about this. I will not waste any more time fencing with people whose only research consists in quote farming and recycling debunked arguments against global warming when even a cursory study of basic science and the available data lead inevitably to the conclusion that human activity is causing global warming. Science is about finding the best expanation that fits the facts about a given phenomenon. Those who continue to deny global warming who demonstrate no grasp of basic science and do nothing to educate themselves are beyond convincing. They will forever remain obstinately, willfully ignorant.