A movie producer? Really?
Hmm, didn't you call me out for an ad hominem? So, look at what you're doing! But really ,David Puttnam stopped being a movie producer in 1998 when he retired to focus on two things: The environment and education. He was also the chair of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Climate Change Bill. So, he actually does know what he's talking about.
Requiring the original question be addressed before any supposed redress is hardly "shifting the burden of truth". Your attempt at framing it as so is whats idiotic.
Nobody is denying we are in a period displaying high co2 nor that earthlings are adding to that number.
Nobody said co2 was the only cause. Such a blowhard.
I like the quote you provided also. Note he refers to co2 warming global temps as a "notion". He then follows with weasel words. We admit they are coupled, but with temps rising first.
.CO2 increases predominantly follow global temperature increases. Sorry...not the other way around.
We have had decades of record setting CO2 levels yet the global temps have not budged in15 years.
Whats up with that ?
Oh this is going to be fun! Because you're using all these old climate denier arguments. CO2 increases
predominantly follow... meaning in some cases they don't. However we do know one reason for this is that as the oceans heat up, they release more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. One thing about the argument you just stated is that if we see increased CO2 we know that the global temperature is
increasing. See how that works? It's not hard.
But why is this bad? It creates a feedback loop. More CO2 captures more heat causing the oceans to grow warmer which in turn releases more CO2 which captures more heat which causes the oceans to grow warmer which in turn... so on and so forth.
Oh and as far as weasel words? "We had the medieval warm period when it was
at least as warm... Then we had a general warming today where none of it was caused by humans." Right, we already know that the Earth does this because of its rotation around the sun, duh no brainer. However, this is not the argument at hand. What the argument at hand is that greenhouse emissions are currently making the climate change
much more quickly than it has before.
As far as the argument (that you didn't make) that "CO2 levels were much higher in the past!" Absolutely correct, one of those times was around 4 billion years ago when Earth did not support any life. Another time was when all the life that Earth did support was in the oceans. It's not a conducive environment to humans. Once again, in the long run, the Earth will still be here but whether or not we can survive is the question.
As far as the global temperature not moving for 15 years? Half truth, you know it. If you took the time to research your own assertions you'd see there's ton of information out there on it. Since you seem to not be able to, I'll write it down here for you. That is a weasel statement if I've ever heard one, also, and it's also the same reason why you'd never be able to understand macroeconomics. In the span of the Earth, 15 years is like a millisecond. What we're looking at is an overall trend, and 15 years does not cut it. NOAA for example has been tracking temperatures going as far back as the 1880s and comparing them to todays temperatures. You're probably trying to quote something Steve Goreham the executive director of Climate Science Coalition of America when he said "Global surface temperatures have been flat for 16 years." However this is not true. NOAA data shows that in 2012 the surface temperature was 0.47F higher than it was in 1997 over land, and 0.11F higher on the ocean.
This is an increase in temperature. Even if the temperatures increase by 0.1F or 0.01F that's still an increase. Moreover, Steve Goreham's claim used data beginning in 1998 when El Nino was about, so it was an already exceptionally hot year, thus every other year subsequently will look cooler in comparison, or if there's another exceptionally hot year about the same. As far as the past 15 years 2000-2015?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php?_ga=1.70699733.450084631.1441936288 You can go there and put in the data yourself and you will notice that there has been an average rise of temperatures over the 15 years of ~0.142C.
Once again, we know that the Earth goes through cooling and warming periods. That's not what we're worried about when we say man-manned global warming. What we're worried about is the effect that we have on the environment and that we're causing this warming period to approach
much more rapidly and this could be absolutely detrimental to the survival of many species including our own. Most of these cooling and warming periods happen over hundreds if not thousands of years. This one is happening over the span of a hundred years and there really is no other explanation than we're the cause.
QED.
If you have a tumor in your leg and go to an oncologist and he tells you it's a tumor, are you going to go to 100 oncologists, have 97 tell you it's a tumor, then go to a dentist who tells you it's not a tumor and believe the dentist?