Too Good not to share!

It's because CO2 & methane are transparent to visible light but more opaque to infrared. The solar energy comes pouring in via the visible spectrum, but the heat can't leave so easily via the infrared spectrum due to that opacity. Kids' version:
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-co2-and-other-greenhouse-gases
idealized quantitative model: https://www.climate-policy-watcher.org/coriolis-force/a-simple-mathematical-model-of-the-greenhouse-effect.html

Nope. With multiple data points we can solve for multiple variables simultaneously. Detailed climate models account for all the variables you list and more. They are verified and calibrated based on 700,000 years of prior climate data.
http://web.mit.edu/globalchange/www/climate.html

Nope, not 50 years, 700,000 years, covering about 7 ice ages. The climate data comes from bubbles in glacial ice, and is corroborated by data from sea floor sediments.
https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores

Here's where the various data sets were collected:

The most salient thing about the 700,000 years of climate data is the rate of change during those previous 7 ice ages compared to the current rate of change this century.

Fair question. Equally fair: where does the money for climate denial come from? The US oil industry makes about $110 billion per year; coal another $20 billion. Big Oil spends $3.6 billion per year on advertising; a sum equal to about 8X the whole NSF climate budget. You're not naive enough to believe none of that money goes to propaganda, are you?

@dakotaviper @hippyjoe1955
The global warming / climate change we're seeing in the last 100 or so years is MUCH different from anything measured in the glacial & sea sediment records covering the last 700,000 years. CO2 is rising 100x faster, and temps 10x faster.

"How is Today’s Warming Different from the Past?" https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php "As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming."

How is today's CO2 increase different? https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide "The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago."

Fact is, anthropogenic global warming is accepted by a YUGE segment of the scientific community. Would you accept the consensus opinion of the American Physical Society AND the American Chemical Society? How about the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and at least 15 other national organizations of publishing scientists? See https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

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@hippyjoe1955 says: Yes, it is, thru the well known greenhouse effect.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-greenhouse-gases-trap-heat-atmosphere
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesciencenarratives/what-is-the-greenhouse-effect.html

FALSE. GIANT straw man fallacy.
High CO2 levels will raise avg temperatures, causing polar ice to melt, raising sea levels and flooding $100 trillion worth of seaside land & structures.

Reducing CO2 is about preventing that disaster, as I posted elsewhere here.

According to Brittannica
How do we know? From oxygen isotopes in Cretaceous fossils.

Sea levels, according to Brittannica:
How do we know? Because sedimentary rocks in the interiors of continents contain the fossilized remains of marine organisms such as clams, oysters, and corals, demonstrating that they were deposited below the sea. The extent of all this sub-sea sediment is far too large to be explained by ordinary rising & subsidence of land masses.

What's really funny is that they keep forcing the 'science' aspect of everything else except Climate Change.

This Planet has been in a Constant State of Evolution for hundreds of millions of years. And these so-called educated buffoons are demanding that we stop Mother Nature from Evolving.

Addressing the question of changes in insolation & Milankovitch cycles:

In previous ice ages, without massive human release of CO2, the initial temperature increases weren't due to CO2, but once the temperature ball got rolling, CO2 was very much a contributor.

https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

More from the same source:

In the current century, humans have raised CO2 levels by 10% already. Are you prepared to deny that much CO2 increase won't boost the greenhouse effect to a point where urban areas next to the ocean experience serious flooding?

Here's another way to look at climate change; thru the lenses of probability and cost benefit analysis.

The total stock capitalization of American businesses traded on the stock exchanges is around $48 trillion. Someone on Quora calculated the land & resource value of the whole USA at $5000 trillion. So I don't think it's unreasonable to value US seaside land buildings & infrastructure at the very round number of $100 trillion.

If you are CEO of a $100 trillion corporation, and some of your people are telling you the whole thing could be flooded in 20 years or 40 years or whatever, what's the prudent thing to do? Answer: ask for cost benefit analyses.

This approach removes the whole "religious war" aspect of the question and focuses on insurance style calculations.

What are the cost estimates for protecting your $100 trillion from floods, and what's a reasonable probablility estimate that the doomsayers are correct? The religious war approach pins those probabilities at 0% and 100%, but suppose you allow a 25% probability that the doomsayers are correct, or, alternatively, that they're only 25% correct (25% is just for the sake of argument; I'm not married to the figure).

With that assumption, you now have $25 trillion at risk, so what's the prudent amount to spend to insure that $25 trillion?

A quick google says homeowners insurance costs about $3300/yr for each $1 million of value. Scaling to $25 trillion, that works out to $82 billion per year, or a 12 year investment of about $1 trillion.

So there's nothing outlandish about a ten year one trillion dollar green energy plan, especially given that the plan includes plenty of jobs, infrastructure upgrades, and goods purchased from American businesses.

@hippyjoe1955 says
Are glaciers shrinking? What does the photographic evidence say?

Muir Glacier, Alaska

Muir Glacier and Inlet, Alaska, 1880s and 2005

Carroll Glacier, Alaska, 1906 and 2004

Grinnell Glacier, Montana, 1926 and 2008

Bear Glacier from space 1980. 1989, 2011

Bear Glacier from the air 2002, 2007

Glacier shrinkage driving global changes in downstream systems
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1619807114

Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z

There is something going on on an ecological scale. Bugs dying off en masse etc. But the answers they are giving.....carbon capture, nitrogen reduction, methane is just being used for more control. Look into ESGs

It should be some kind of consolation to confirm that you can find ignorant fools like that one even where you don´t expect them to be.

He is not a founder or co founder of Geenpeace Canada. After 16 yrs with Greanpeace...he now works with some of the biggest polluters around

Once upon a time, an oil billionaire, Charles Koch, decided to "red team" the whole climate science establishment. He hired a known climate skeptic with impeccable credentials - a physics professor at UC Berkeley named Richard Muller. Muller hired chemists and more physicists and they built their own climate model (these things run on supercomputers) from scratch, making their own assumptions about how the variables interact etc.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/converted-contrarian-argues-humans-to-blame-for-climate-change/

The climate change scam is a way for the elitists to strip of us our liberties in the name of 'saving the planet!" Restrict what we can eat, what we can do, what we can say, and if we oppose, we're selfish polluters. It's insidious.

There's a silly rumor going around that volcanoes emit far more CO2 than human activity. That silly rumor was debunked in 2009, LOL!!!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/

Want more details?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-much-co2-does-a-single-volcano-emit/?sh=4c086085cbf5

What about Greenland and Antarctica?


https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147728/shrinking-margins-of-greenland

Antarctica
[media=https://youtu.be/AmSovbt5Bho]

https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/265/video-antarctic-ice-mass-loss-2002-2020/

https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/estimating-glacier-contribution-to-sea-level-rise/

How I wish, that that were so.

But its such a money maker😉