Oh come on - you're going to nitpick his wording? Mercury has a tenuous, light atmosphere - compared to Venus it is nothing. His point you're ignoring is that the thick atmosphere (with high levels of CO2) of Venus is the main reason it is so much hotter than Mercury, despite being farther from the Sun.

Meh, actual science generally isn't that cut and dried and is more about context.  For all intents and purposes, Mercury doesn't really have an atmosphere.  Anybody interested in what is generally called atmospheric science will usually say that Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere because what Mercury does have is so close to a vacuum.  Basically, the vast majority of science can be safely done while assuming that Mercury has no atmosphere.

Now, technically Mercury does have something very tenuous that is some kind of atmosphere.  But its more of a curiosity than anything else, so it gets ignored in most contexts. 

Yeah, this insistence that global warming must predict monotonic decreases is Arctic ice levels is pure silliness.

Nature is hugely stochastic.  There will be ups and downs in the overall trends.  Thats how the real world works, and thats why no reasonable person claims that one year "trends" mean anything one way or the other.  What matter are 15+ year trends, which are quite clear.

1)The IPCC is not scrambling to explain anything at this point. The full report will be released in due time. What everyone is buzzing about is a leaked summary (leaked by a climate change denier, by the way named Alex Rawls, who is/was part of the IPCC), not the full report. The summary of the first part of the four part report will be released on Sept 27th. The fourth and final part of the study, the Synthesis Report is due to be released in October 2014

What is being left out of this media frenzy about the IPCC eating crow is their UPWARD revision of the likelihood that humans are responsible for the overall upward increase in the Earth's temperature from "Very Likely" to "Extremely Likely".

“There is consistent evidence from observations of a net energy uptake of the earth system due to an imbalance in the energy budget. It is virtually certain that this is caused by human activities, primarily by the increase in CO2 concentrations. There is very high confidence that natural forcing contributes only a small fraction to this imbalance.”

2)The ice sheet is NOT getting larger on the whole.

As I showed in links about a few month ago (which you largely ignored because they were inconvenient to your argument), various models (from decades ago) based on our current theories of Climate Change have been successful in predicting current climate change.

As I also showed in links a while back, current models are overwhelmingly successful in predicting climate changes when given initial conditions from decades ago.

So, to put it bluntly, our best models appear to have tremendous predictive capabilities given the inherent difficulties in modeling a fundamentally stochastic process.  Sure, many of the fine details are beyond our current capabilities to predict.  There is absolutely a lot of refinement work to be done.

But anybody who doesn't acknowledge that it is overwhelmingly likely that worldwide temperatures will increase by a substantial amount over the medium term future is being willfully obstinant.  The details may need filling in, but the broad details are well understood.

Yeah, go ahead and go back to my previous posts in this thread from a while back.  You seem to have ignored them once again because they aren't convenient to your argument.  You are good at this.

I linked multiple well regarded scientific sources that indicated that there has been measurable warming over the last few decades that is in line with what was predicted by climate change models.  That is, of course, assuming that you don't cherry pick your end points.

You are welcome to deny data all you want because it doesn't fit with your arguments.  But I suggest that that is a poor basis for public or scientific policy.

They're insurance companies.  They make more money by charging more based on mythical future events.  They get corn holed by Uncle if they go bankrupt for ignoring something Uncle claims is real.  If you were a risk assessment company, you'd be taking the bullshit into account too.

Our severe weather has been nothing of the sort.  They really enjoy talking about record flooding, record hurricanes, etcetera, but they're completely normal.  There has not been a single historic weather event in the US, everything supposedly historic came with the "since ####" tagline.  Hurricane Sandy is just another footnote in history, not a historic event.  There was a bigger one in 1938, and bigger ones than that came before.  Coast altering hurricanes have been pounding the Manhattan area since before it was Manhattan.

They talk about how many hurricanes there are now compared to before, but they don't mention that they weren't tracking most of the ones that never made landfall.  2005 was the worst year ever, 28 named storms, 15 hurricanes, 7 of them major.  In 1933 it was 21, 10 and 5.  There were no weather satellites in 1933.  How many named storms would there have been if they were tracked by satellites?  1950 had 8 major hurricanes, so 2005 isn't even the top for major hurricanes without factoring in tracking shortcomings.

It's a flawed premise backed up by incomplete data, not proof of global warming, let alone the junk science that is AGW.

YOu are confusing 2 different points.

point 1: There has been warming in the past 30 years.

Point 2: The models predicted the current warming lull

Point 1 is a given.  As far as I can see, no one is arguing that point.  It has warmed (by about 1.5 degrees Celsius) in the past 30 years.  Just as it did 12 times between 1895 and 1940 (before the 'catastrophic' rise of CO2).

Point 2 is false.  No models predicted a 17 year lull (pause/hiatus/interval/vacation) of warming.

No, they're not agreeing with that.  Not at all.  And the fact that AGW true believes keep insisting that everyone really agrees with them when in fact everyone doesn't is what makes this whole thing more akin to religion than science.  

Insisting, capitalizing, jumping up and down and screaming at the top of your lungs that everyone agrees with your point of view doesn't make it so.  It just makes your arguments harder to take seriously.  Real science and real debate are not conducted this way.  

This.

I would consider using tree ring data from 8 trees in a single forest 'cherry picking'.

And, from the big IPCC report:

"Scientists are 90% sure that 1981-2010 was the warmest such span in the last eight centuries, and there's a 66% chance that it was the warmest 30-year period in the last 1,400 years.

While the last 15 years have not warmed as quickly, we've seen steady warming over most of the globe, and we haven't seen a below-average temperature month since February 1985.

Scientists are also 99% certain that we will see more hot days and nights -- and fewer chilly ones -- as the 21st century progresses.

"Each of the last three decades has been significantly warmer than all preceding decades since 1850," according to the IPCC report."