As I have said yes the heat is created by the sun but the makeup of our atmosphere is what dictates how much of that heat hits the earth and then how much of that heat is held in. If you don't understand that you do not have any grasp of the science at all. Yes co2 is naturally occurring and yes it is necessary for life and it is absorbed by plants. But that does not mean that in high levels it cant cause problems. Most major climate change events have coincided with a dramatic change in co2 levels this is confirmed by ice and soil samples. So yes you are right these swings can be totally natural but now we are releasing large quantities of co2 into the air and at the same time reducing the quantity of co2 absorbing plants on earth to filter that out.
Solar radiation - not our atmosphere - has the most influence on temperatures. To boot, temperatures are not increasing despite what we hear over and over. It has been much warmer before and it has been much cooler before. Higher levels of atmospheric CO2 actually has many benefits to life on Earth, that does not mean I am advocating "polluting to cause it", but it is worth pointing out. Crops and vegetation do better with more CO2.
The idea that we are reducing the amount of CO2 absorbing plants on Earth is not true, but it is irrelevant compared to the carbon cycles of the oceans. CO2 is released and absorbed by the oceans at a rate that dwarfs the activities of man. In fact, difficult to tell if correct or not correct, it is generally accepted that the oceans absorb half of atmospheric CO2 per NOAA. They conveniently omit that the oceans also release far more CO2 than man. This is the real feedback loop I talked about earlier - the oceans regulate the levels of CO2, not man. You have to go to exponential numbers to realize how large the amount of CO2 in the oceans is compared to what we produce.
We release less CO2 now than we used to before the EPA and other nations EPA's cracked down on industrial emissions as well as vehicle emissions in the West. We are cleaner today and air quality (at least in the West) is far better than it was only 20 years ago.
To be clear - I am not against the EPA. They have done many good things. However, they have been hijacked by folks who are after something else. Can we do better? Certainly. But that was not my main point if you read what I wrote. We are spending larger sums of money on much smaller gains in the West when the real place to combat pollution and global warming (if you believe what they tell you over and over) is in the third world. I am using their own arguments!
They want to cut CO2 emissions so they mandate that "your local utiility" raise rates and spend tens of millions to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 tons....... when they could cut CO2 emissions at the coal plant in Laos by 2000 or more tons at half the expense installing the same equipment we mandated 30 years ago! It is basic logic. If their arguments are correct we should spend the money in the 3rd world because their air impacts us. Their CO2 "warms us" according to the basic premise.
The same crowd wanted us to use Ethanol for gasoline when it actually takes more energy to produce than it yields. It subsequently creates more CO2 (farming corn - rotting or burning stalks) and other pollutants (fertilizers in watershed is going to be the next big pollution problem in my opinion) than the hydrocarbons it replaces. On top of that, it is food and that creates stress in the developing world.
In reality, we spend more taxpayer money "studying the problem" in our Universities and even governmental agencies, than we do fighting it. Think about that..... If the "science is settled" as they repeatedly tell us then why do we spend more tax dollars studying it than fixing it? I have friends from school who work on the grants.
I understand science just fine and I will not insult you or pull out an internet ruler to see who has the longer sheepskins from overpriced institutions, but you are not seeing the engineering problem they have created for themselves If CO2 is only .05% (generally accepted to be .04% but I will round up) of the atmosphere how does it become more important than the sun? In fact, if you have bought the argument that the window (atmosphere) is more important than the energy source (sun) you would then have to admit that water vapor is a far, far, far, far more powerful "greenhouse gas" than CO2. That is another fact, but it is really hard to "tax" and control water vapor.
Either logic fails or there is something else going on....... I believe it is the latter. If it were not something else - why are we not spending our anti-pollution money where it would do the most good?