Climate Skeptic has a great 90-slide presentation on Catastrophe Denied: A Critique of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Theory. (Also available as a PowerPoint.) It delves into the theories and arguments of both sides, and is readily accessible for us scientific semi-literates.
One of his key points concerns feedback effects. Without positive feedback, fear of warming becomes untenable. CS examines the evidence, but also explains why any claim of runaway positive feedbacks must be viewed warily:
When a natural scientist looks at a natural process that is new to her, she is going to assume that process is driven by negative feedback, especially if that process has been stable for hundreds of millions, even billions of years. Take climate - it has been fairly stable within certain bounds for millions of years. . . .
But this hypothesis of incredible stability is hard to square with the positive feedback hypothesis we discussed before, that the climate is a car perched on the top of the hill, needing only a small nudge for it to roll out of control. This strong positive feedback case, and in particular the tipping point phenomenon that alarmists are always talking about in the news, make no sense -- they defy any intuition a natural scientist might bring to a complex process. Long-term stable processes are not balanced on the top of a mountain where they could be tipped over the edge, or else they would've already been tipped over the edge long ago. Something would have sent that car down the mountain millions of years ago if it was really so precarious. The same is true with climate.
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