re: AC hot flush
"there's been no statistically significant increase in temperature for the last 15 years"
"This is from direct readings over 140 years. As expected, they fluctuate a lot year-on-year, but the trend is upwards. I'm not saying this proves AGW, I'm just disagreeing that we aren't witnessing average temperatures increase."
First and foremost, an upward trend over the last 140 years does not show statistically significant increases in temperature. Statistically significant. The simplest way to explain this to someone uneducated like yourself is to say that the Earth has been this warm or warmer before, therefore it is not statistically significant. That is a broad brush, but I don't feel like doing into pages of depth on a tech news forum.
In analytics, they call this the trumpet of doom phenomenon. The temperature went up today, it went up yesterday and the day before! Based on this localized trend the temperature will never stop going up and we will all burn to death.
Who are you to claim that the last 140 years is a complete cycle? All evidence points to the contrary.
It's a shame that most people are too short memoried or too young to remember the 70s when temperature had a localized cooling trend and we were all going to freeze to death.
CO2 and Temperature correlate. That is all we can say based on the evidence collected by the world at this point. We cannot say they have a causal relationship, because there is evidence that points to either side of the causal relationship. The largest store of CO2 is the oceans. When the temperature rises, the oceans release CO2 into the air. This causes melting of ice, which cools the oceans and reabsorbs the CO2.
The only danger we would be supposedly in, is if we somehow pushed the natural system off one end or the other, so it could not automatically adjust to back to equilibrium. But there is no evidence that this is even possible, or at what point that would occur. It's a shame that the cult of global warming has effectively killed positive things like efficient use of energy by wrapping it up in their ecoterrorist agenda.