> I still don't really see what's wrong with the statement that I made. Would you argue that we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, solar cycles? Or CO2 sequestration?
Do we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, hurricanes? No. But when the weather service warns a category-5 hurricane is approaching your town and expected to make a landfall tomorrow afternoon, you don't just ignore that (after all, they don't know everything, and the prediction can (and sometimes does) go wrong) and go on a picnic.
Do we know everything about general relativity? No, but that doesn't stop us from trusting airline pilots who are in turn relying on GPS signal which actually works only because the satellites are compensating for general relativistic effects.
Do we know everything about solar cycles? No, but we have Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), and numerous other satellites whose entire purpose is to observe the sun. If the sun is emitting more solar radiation than before, we'd know.
Let me just quote wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation#Solar_variation...
> The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) concluded that the measured magnitude of recent solar variation is much smaller than the amplification effect due to greenhouse gases but acknowledges in the same report that there is a low level of scientific understanding with respect to solar variation.
In other words, even if we don't know a lot about solar variation, we know enough to rule out the possibility that its effect is large enough to drive global warming. Unless we could somehow hypothesize a new mechanism completely overlooked by scientists so far and somehow that mechanism explains current global temperature trend and we find that the global warming effect was due to the sun instead of CO2 (which would mean that all the current climate models, which agree with measured CO2 and temperature, are actually spectacularly wrong).
Occam's razor says it's CO2.
I'm sorry, the science IS settled. I won't call you an idiot, you might be just misinformed and (due to the misinformation) cannot discern peer-reviewed science from FUDs.
* About economics, I'll just say "building 10,000 nuclear plants" is not the only way (actually, probably not even the cheapest way) to reduce CO2 emission.
And if you're looking at economics, you can't ignore the potential cost of the global warming being real (more likely than not) and we do nothing or very little to stop it (sadly, also likely). During the WW2, USA poured enormous resource into development of nuclear weapon, even when nobody was sure if it's going to work at all, because the cost of doing nothing (and finding it out when Nazis developed one first) was considered unacceptable.