So I was at work today, and with all the bad weather he had plenty of time to shout at the boss and another co-worker about global warming. It was a good 2-on-1 handicap match. “Talking” debates are not really my thing since no opportunities exist to check claims, reference sources, show graphs, etc that you could do in online/text correspondence, and so basically anything goes. Even totally wrong claims like “Volcanoes spit out more pollution than humans do.”
The boss and the co-worker were very skeptical. I’m not sure how scientific our exchange was– they spent most of the time trying to convince me I should be very cautious in trusting the general scientific community, and I spent most of the time telling them that they should trust physics, but no one budged. They’re intelligent group of folk (one trained in biology) but not really familiar with the climate science literature, so I tried to avoid ideas like “radiative forcings,” “water vapor feedback,” “stratospheric cooling,” and other concepts. So we didn’t really discuss “how CO2 influences climate” or even radiative feedbacks, and it probably was worthwhile as a philosophy of science talk if anything.
Climate Change 