[sjwalter]

There are several claims worth disputing, but in a nutshell:

1) The claim that "climate change" is a problem is on its face pretty dumb (are we shooting for climate stasis?)

2) The claim that humans are causing all the change is again pretty dumb (we didn't have climate stasis prior to our industrial revolution, now did we?)

3) Most climate alarmists don't really engage much with this outside of research papers, but there's really quite a lot of debate about how much the climate is actually changing (not as easy to ascertain as it sounds), and as well how much of the change is caused by humans (it's nowhere near 100%).

4) The claim that a warmer planet is necessarily worse for humans is... strange and not supported by history (in fact, looking back through ancient civilizations, they tended to thrive and grow with warming periods, and die off, sometimes precipitously during cooling periods--the name itself, greenhouse gasses, kind of hints a bit at this--that is, whaddya grow in a greenhouse?)

So, it's not clear entirely how much humans are causing the change (and thus how much we could realistically affect it in the other direction). But it's not also clear what amount of change is ok or desirable, or even what direction we should target.

[politician]

Historically, we weren't supporting 8B people on large scale mono-crop agriculture. When the dinosaurs were around and the atmospheric CO2 was at 5000ppm, no one was growing rice. Speaking of rice, the fact that rice germination fails at between 34-36degC is concerning when roughly 3-4B people around the equator rely on rice grown at 31-33degC to survive. It can be true that beneficial climate changes in the past are not beneficial to the present due to structural changes in human civilization.

At this point, we need a large-scale geoengineering project to reduce methane and CO2 levels in the atmosphere to protect our large-scale mono-crop agriculture practices OR the survivors of the food wars can return to subsistence farming among the corpse of past human civilization.

Placing blame here is useless - it doesn't matter if it's humans. Let's say it's not humans. Great, cool, super. Do we defend civilization or not?

[sjwalter]

For every acre of cropland that becomes too hot to grow in, shouldn't there be more cropland that becomes arable? Why does climate change literally only make things worse everywhere, and better nowhere? That's what it seems like when to talking to climate change alarmists. There can be no admission of even something so simple as uncertainty over any of the bold claims, much less any kind of identification of positives of climate change.

I mean, what if you're wrong? What if the planet gets 2C hotter and... everything's mostly fine? What if the planet gets cooler? Or what if we get the ideal (apparently) total climate stasis?

How likely are those scenarios?

[politician]

Due to the laws of thermodynamics, CO2 and Methane gases diffuse evenly throughout the atmosphere creating a blanket over the entire globe. As we add more gas to the atmosphere, the blanket gets more dense.

In the summer, you probably have a light comforter on your bed while in the winter you probably switch to a heavier comforter. While you're asleep your bed warms up under the comforter and it doesn't cool down until you get out of bed. In the same way, the CO2 and Methane gases are like a comforter that is wrapped around the planet. A low density of gases is like your summer comforter and a high density of gases is like your heavy winter comforter. Unfortunately, unlike your bed, it's not easy to switch from a heavy volume of gases to a light volume of gases -- if it were, then we could terraform Venus. Venus is covered in a CO2 and Methane gas atmosphere so dense that we could float a city on it and the surface is 900degC.