The equilibrium temperature is more complicated than how much of the greenhouse stuff is there in the planet. The more a substance absorbs the suns energy at one particular wavelength the more it will equally emit. And any reflection of the suns rays away from the planet will also reflect the heat back down to the earth (the greenhouse effect where this whole phrase came from). Whether a cloud is a net gain or loss the equilibrium temperature of the planet depends on the nature of the cloud e.g. hight (ok now WHY I dont know, thats how far I can fact check the experts but if you do know and can explain then please do).
Of course the amount of and nature of the clouds does depend on the temp of the planet in a feedback. One of the reasons we don’t have the consensus on how hot it’s becoming.
Im particularly interested in getting the scientific knowledge to the point where we can safely think about dumping a large amounts of say SO2 at the right height in the atmosphere to directly cool the planet and save the massive potential costs.

iii) yes thanks it was Koch and i think particularly unfair that the media were sneeringly laughing that they had funded research into the issue that did not give there preferred result. Surely that is an example of good science?
Lomborg has always believed that the world is getting hotter (as ever one here does). But was not convinced that at the lower predicted temperature raises there was a problem that it was worth spending the huge amounts of money on.

Slowjoe thanks that the one i was thinking of.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/07/how-a-global-warming-skeptic-came-to-change-his-mind/

The “Koch-funded” science may be the Berkeley Earth Surface Temp project(BEST), fronted by Richard Muller.

Despite being on record in the 1980s that MMGW was the biggest threat to mankind, Muller claimed to be a sceptic undergoing conversion last year. Conveniently, he issued press releases while his papers were being rejected by peer-review. I say conveniently because the reviewers were thus bound by confidentiality rules.

BEST had funds from Koch among others.

In it, he asks a similar question:

All right, you may be saying. Perhaps this is the state of climate science, as the IPCC itself tell us. Nevertheless we read every day about the dire consequences of global warming. What if I am wrong? What if a major temperature rise is really going to happen?

Shouldn’t we act now and be safe? Don’t we have a responsibility to
unborn generations to do so?

And then he provides a very lucid answer. You will be able to find it in the document as per the link above.
Actually, I think the entire document is very lucid, and somewhat prescient too – given that he wrote the talk in 2005, before the leaking of the Climategate emails.

Land and rights passed to the eldest son (the other children must go – there is no room for them, hence “Vikings”?), they have managed to cling on their narrow land “between the mountains and the sea” for thousands of years.

Climate has not broken them, they have never relied on slavery or serfdom (in defiance of Marxist “science of historical stages”) and they remain to this day – having survived the Nazis and Labour governments.

Although the E.U. (if it gains even more power in Norway) may finally succeed in destroying the farmers and fishermen of Norway.

Call it the revenge of the Emperor Charles the Great of France-German, for it was he who started the war against the northen peoples (more than a thousand years ago) with his attacks on the Fresians and his threats against the Danes (which led the Olderbergs, who still sit on the throne of Denmark, to turn their Realm into an armed camp against him).

It is also possible that the “Viking Age” was, in part, a response to the genocidal wars of Charles the Great.

Of course military tenure (you hold the land in return for fighting to defend and my family – not for money rent) and hereditary jurisdiction (being able to go to the principle land holder, the clan chief, for judgement – rather than to a government appointed judge) lasted in part of Scotland till the 1740s

(by the way – modern historians confuse hereditary jurisdiction with serfdom, there were in fact very few serfs in Scotland and very few in France in 1789 – the lord having his own court does NOT mean the population are serfs, they can leave the area at any time, unlike serfs the lord has no power to stop them or to bring them back, the lords court is for things like disputes over the ownership of cattle – a Royal court would be too slow and too expensive for most ordinary people to use anyway, they still are).

The ancient Franks and Visigoths (as well as the Irish Scots) would have had no difficulty in understanding the culture of the Highlands – even in the mid 18th century. Whereas people (including Scots) whose minds were dominated by English (or Roman) law, were baffled by it.

However, it was indeed the CLIMATE that destroyed most of the people of the Highlands – not insisting on money rents and so on.

Unlike the high Middle Ages – the small farms of the Highlands were just not viable in the tough climate (hence the people were very poor – and always on the verge of starvation).

And the various “reforms” in the Highlands were failures.

The big “infrastucture” schemes (roads, ports and so) were well built – but economic loss makers (this did not stop Scots trying the same policy in India – where the tax demands to pay for it helped lead to the Indian Mutiny of the 1850s).

And the landowners got deeply in debt – as they had to pay a percentage of the costs (not all the money was from the taxpayer).

The “Highland Clearances” were also an economic failure.

Why raise sheep in Scotland and send the wool to England – when England already had sheep (and far more and far fatter sheep)?

Whatever they did – the Scots landholders remained bankrupt, their CLIMATIC condition was just totally different from that of English landholders.

Thin soil, short growing season, cold and DARK winters……

A Scots person did not even get enough sunlight to ward off rickets (unless they had a lot of fish [perhaps a reason why Scots Feudal law utterly rejected the Roman law idea that anyone could fish in the rivers - NO, fish were a valuable resource who the fishing rights belonged to was very important, if the fish were not to be wiped out by over fishing] and so on in their diet).

Ironically many of the people kicked off the land in the Highland Clearances ended up doing better (in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand) than the people who stayed.

And had they all stayed on the land?

Then Scotland in the 1840s would have been like Ireland in the 1840s.

And that did not go well.

We should all be beside ourselves with gratitude to the programmers and their chiefs who, against the odds, concerned themselves with this issue sufficiently that in the end there was no problem and everyone made fun of this “imaginary” bug-a-boo.

NOTE–that’s a different situation from the one we are said by some (the “warming alarmists”) to face–in the one case, disaster was sure to strike if nothing was done, and that was sufficiently obvious that something WAS done. In the other, the historical and archeological evidence indicates that warming would, on balance, be good for us–even if the polar bears did eventually shed their white coats and go back to being plain old brown bears (grizzlies, it is said). And that whether or not attempts have been made to claim that the Mediæval Warm Period never happened–it DID happen, and grapes and grain grew in Greenland (which might be a nice place for you to go, Paul, in the event we did see significant warming).

This was coincident with the High Middle Ages–roughly 900-1300 A.D. in Scotland*, for instance. According to NOAA (always take its pronouncements with a large does of salt, however) the Mediæval Warm Period occurred from “the 9th through the 13th centuries.” From the page at

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html :

Norse seafaring and colonization around the North Atlantic at the end of the 9th century indicated that regional North Atlantic climate was warmer during medieval times than during the cooler “Little Ice Age” of the 15th – 19th centuries.

It was a time of flourishing for European man.

(Some of the subsequent remarks on that page are open to modification, I think.)

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_in_the_High_Middle_Ages

On the Y2K problem: while there was some hyping of the issue, the problem was a lot more significant than just “2 cases” – I say this as someone who made the switch from Chemistry to IT before 2000. Part of the problem was that it was not a single bug – it was a whole bunch of them, many of which would only affect in-house IT systems (as opposed to commercially available software) and many of which would have minimal effects if not fixed. The big problem was trying to work out which ones would cause real problems; the simplest solution was to fix them all.

I deliberately moved into a job developing new software in the late 90s, as fixing Y2K-related problems was both tedious and had a short career horizon.

On point (ii): it’s not clear whether you mean consciousness or consensus, but you’re wrong if it’s the former – there has been an awareness of the possibility of MMGW since the mid-1970s (if not before); awareness of the greenhouse effect goes back much further.

If it’s the latter, then you are right, but for the reasons I laid out in my previous comment – the media has been presenting an image of consensus (initially, more-or-less accurately) since the late 1980s.

Waters absorbtion IS dependent on its tempreature and state. Thats why you get hot bits and cold bits in food quickly microwaved (the hot bits absorb the energy faster than the cold parts.)

No, this isn’t true (ignoring peak spreading due to the Doppler effect, which is minimal at Earth-normal temperatures, and reflection from ice which is minimal outside of the poles). Hot spots in microwaved food are due to the shape of the microwave oven and the food container – see here, for example.

Apparently I do need to continue the point I was making – given that the amount of water on the Earth’s surface is vastly greater than the amount of water vapour, the vast majority of the greenhouse effect will be due to the oceans. Consequently, the global climate’s temperature sensitivity to concentrations of carbon dioxide will be vastly smaller than if the major elements of the greenhouse effect were levels of carbon dioxide and water vapour (and therefore MMGW, while real, will be vastly smaller in scope than many fear).

On (iii), you may be thinking of the Koch brothers – I haven’t seen any instances of Koch-funded scientists saying that catastrophic MMGW was a real problem, but if you can point me to some, I would be interested in reading it.

Lomborg has always (to the best of my knowledge) been a believer in the danger of MMGW – his dissent has been in the form of proposing alternative ways of minimizing its effects, for which he has been pilloried by the “true believers”.

ii) I again realise my research is out of date but 10ish years ago there was NOT any conciousness on how hot the earth was going to get and how fast. It was a large part of the problem is that many different studies has a huge range of predictions (all higher) what action to take would depend on which modle turned out to be the best. The media’s reporting was however predictably disgustingly sensationalist ( and in an asside aid agency’s purger themselves to the public to report more and more inflated casualty number knowing that the highest number is the one the papers will report with their quote).
I don’t quite get your point on the O-H bonds absorbing heat. Waters absorbtion IS dependent on its tempreature and state. Thats why you get hot bits and cold bits in food quickly microwaved (the hot bits absorb the energy faster than the cold parts.)

iii) Ok this bit is i know weak. I cant remember the name of the one i was thinking of or I would have put it earlier. Is it the Coke or Kole brothers? something like that? billinairs who heavily finance republican tea party candidates? i was listening to a scientist they had sponsored on CNN’s global public square saying basically he had thought the evidence was weak and got this funding to look at it in detail and did what good science should do and reported that there is strong evidence of MMGW. The other one is Bjørn Lomborg : The Skeptical Environmentalist. Who while making many points about the value of tackeling greenhouse gasses does not now say it isn’t happening.

@Ted totally agree with TED on this. What you go on to say however im not sure about. If there is a potential cost to the planet in terms of billions of dollars / lives lost / homes relocated, either by paying for non-sense wind farms or the loss of whole coastal cities ect, surely best to use the science to find out which one is the least bad.

Alaska?