The Global Warming Swindle, which you can see on Google Video in a mere 75 minutes, is a pretty comprehensive list of counter arguments to global warming (hereafter GW) alarmists. It's not surprising that a rebuttal is out, and because I'm not a climatologist, I figure the anti-GW guys overstated their case, and these rebuttal guys were going to put them in their place. But what was presented has pushed me not towards GW, but full blown true believer status, that is, I truly believe GW is a replacement for failed utopias of the past, so that if you don't believe in God or communism, you can now believe in GW and be part of a higher order of people with purpose, justice, and posterity on their side. Like Y2K, a little logic, and a lot of fear, go a long way. The counterargument was incredibly weak. So here's the big counterargument:

First, Chris Merchant (advocate in this rebuttal for the anti-anti-GW side) notes we should have a healthy skepticism of documentaries. Uh...Isn't the Inconvenient Truth a documentary that is the main argument made in favor of GW?

Now, the factual rebuttal Mechant presents:

Global Warming Swindle Claim: Temperature increased most prior to 1940 when human-based CO2 emissions were relatively small. Then they rebounded in 1975. So CO2 and temperature don’t go together.

Rebuttal by GW advocates: The world is a complicated place. Several things affect the climate—solar variations, aerosols, volcanoes. Aerosols were decreased in 70’s. It takes decades to affect temperatures through CO2 emissions.

Me: So the 'world is complicated' makes that whole 1940-1975 temperature decline, which had people talking about global cooling, a mere blip? How can that be so clear the variation from 1940-75, which is at least half the variation of the entire sample from 1850-2005, is considered noise, yet the total variation, has a clear cause and effect. Do you have a standard error here that you wish to apply consistently?

Later in this area Merchant states it is “too simplistic to expect the temperature record to reflect a single variable [ie, CO2]”. Yeah. So your side will stop doing that too?

Global Warming Swindle Claim: Humans produce 2% of CO2 that is produced annually (and total CO2 accounts for only 15% of greenhouse gas effects).

Rebuttal by GW advocates: ‘technically true’. It’s half true because…our production is unnatural, and so strictly additive, as opposed to what is natural and has 'sinks'.

me: I'm sympathetic to the idea that a natural equilibrium with millions of years would not have natural 'sinks' for smart apes who started cooking everything in a few hundred years ago. But I roll my eyes when they say the fact that humans produce 2% of CO2 is 'technically true'. As opposed to--nontechnically true, true on referee's decision? Further, why not state: here's our best guess as to the natural variability of the 99% of greenhouse gases humans cannot possibly control. I have the feeling that facts such as these, unrepresented, are not supportive of their position.

Global Warming Swindle Claim: CO2 increases are led by temperature, not vice versa, historically

Rebuttal by GW advocates: Driver of ice age is the Milankovitch cycle, which affect CO2 before temperature. Also...Perhaps ice caps shrink in these cycles, causing there to be less sun reflection, so temps increase, which increases CO2 because at higher temps CO2 is less soluble in water, which increases temperature, and thus CO2. So of course temperatures lead CO2...that doesn't mean that the great CO2/temperature correlation in The Inconvenient Truth is wrong or misleading...

Me: Milkankovitch cycles are treated by Wikipedia as improbably related to ice ages. As per these if-this-then-that stories...such stories have a lot of degrees of freedom that could be used to assert anything. But fundamentally, the rebuttal agrees that historically, temperature has caused CO2 to rise historically, so that graph showing CO2 and temperature that seems to suggest CO2 causing temperature, is a bit misleading, no?

Global Warming Swindle Claim: You can model anything.

Rebuttal by GW advocates: modelers have limits on what parameters are valid. Constrained by physics, chemistry, observations of the real system (eg. Stable climate in general, 20th century data match, etc.)

Me: You haven't done time series, have you? Matching a model to data is easy if you give me the data first. First, parameters are only part of a model: you have to include how they are used, which are used. For example, say you have two parameters, A and B. You can have models (A+B)*x or x^(A+B) or (A+B)*ln(x)....same parameters, very different results. And generally you are excluding parameters C, D, E that you considered and could have used, but it didn't fit the data as well. The key is that models have many more degrees of freedom than mere parameters, and something like the historical climate is never 'out of sample' because everyone in this game knows the data. Further, much of the Global Warming Swindle rebuttal is about how easy it is to explain the data by playing games with data and models.

Global Warming Swindle Claim: Solar Activity predicts temperature rises

Rebuttal by GW advocates: Changing moving averages, and lags, allows one to fit this data, or any data, pretty well.

Me: I agree that degrees of freedom make this unconvincing, but the same argument could be made of CO2 and global temperature models. I'm not an expert on solar activity, but it seems an extant solution, especially since Mars is warming too. See www.oism.org which implies the lag in data is merely because the temperature is the forward 11 year temp.

Global Warming Swindle Claim: Money corrupting GW advocates

Rebuttal by GW advocates: ad hominem

Me: pathetic all around, but clearly that which pays the most, has the most bias against. Their is much more funding for GW ($2 Billion a year in the US), not against, so if you believe money underlies everything, you should be more skeptical of GW, not their opponents.

As Laurie David says: "That was my first lesson - never let knowing next to nothing stop you!"