5. The Antarctica argument is primarily use to debunk the scare-mongering of Al Gore that sea levels are going to rise by 20 feet. If land ice melts, sea-levels will rise, If sea ice melts, nothing changes.

4. Climategate definitely wasn’t a good thing. The models were shown to be modified to fit the desired result and many confessions of doctoring the data came out. If this sounds like solid science to you, so be it, but if these types of allegations were levied against an oil or cigarette company, you would all be screaming your heads off.

3. There are indeed a lot of scientists who have either backed off or complete switched sides in this debate. There is a Senate Minority report that currently lists 1000 such scientists (up from 350 in 2007). With regard to non-scientists on the Oregon Petition, look up the so-called scientists on the IPCC reviewers list. You’ll find the same thing – most are politicians, not scientists.

2. It basically hasn’t done much of anything for over a decade. 1998 was indeed a warm year. Cherry picking can show a lot of so-called trends. Meanwhile, we are emerging from the Little Ice Age and the general trend should be upwards. AGW theory says that is should be severely upwards, which it clearly is not. Please look at records from the 20th century. There have been two other periods with similar slopes to the 1980-2000 slope that worked up everyone on the pro-AGW side. Most importantly, the record is so short-term, it can’t have much meaning with respect to a planet that is billions of years old and has clearly experienced warmer periods in recent history. These periods have to records, but the empirical evidence is substantial.

1. The sun clearly has some effect on our planets climate. Other planets such as Mars have been shown to be warming recently. While the sun’s impact may or may not be substantial, it shouldn’t be ignored by any models, etc. More important that the sun may be clouds, which could possibly work to counteract warming. The models try to account for clouds, but admittedly don’t account for them very well since it’s unclear if they are a positive or negative force on warming.

So, in summary, many of these debunked arguments have been oversimplified so they can be brushed aside easily. If you truly care, you should dig into them and try to find out what the real arguments are and allow yourself to truly understand the other side. Despite what you may think, there is plenty of debate left in the realm of Climate Science, a field which is in it’s infancy and has clearly been hijacked by politics in some way or another.

As for my, I believe man impacts the environment and has created warming via CO2, but that activity is dwarfed by our use of water in farming, etc. There is only weak evidence that AGW is creating a positive feedback loop, and beyond everything, humanity is incapable of stopping its carbon usage. We’re better off preparing for any possible environmental changes (building sea walls, etc) that we are chasing a pipe dream of purging ourselves from fossil fuels.