http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/environment-book/desertificationinsahel.html

Deserts aren't static.  I ignore the chafing over such things.  They're blaming everything in the book on us, but what we do in these areas is shift, not propel for the most part.

You can speed up the rate at which a drought stricken area becomes sand dunes, but it gets the desert label purely based on rainfall for a reason.  Where man has made deserts is in places where we've diverted water, such as the Three Gorges dam in China.  That's not necessarily altering the climate though, it's making a trade.  You stop the water from going one place, and end up with it somewhere else.  They've traded a massive lake and vast tracts of irrigated farmlands for an expanding desert.

The Saharan has been advancing and retreating for as far back as anyone can find.

Exactly what I wanted to say. Climate is a complex thing, not just rainfall and temperature, and a barren place having only sand (or other rocks) is a Desert, no matter what level of rainfall or temperature you want desert to begin with (like 250mm or something), if the area has little to no plant cover, than it is a desert, and the semi-desert climate has been changed.

Again, nice point there. Take Hungary as an example. Drying up several thousands of km2's of swamps and removing forests next to the rivers HAVE NO EFFECT ON THE CLIMATE? I can say they have. Moisture levels are lower, relative temperatures are changed drastically. Maybe the rainfall is around the same level, and temperatures have just risen a small amount, but climate is so much more..

Yes, and many places are strongly connected to the groundwater level, as in dryer periods  plants can only use that water. Like Hungary, we are using so much groundwater in some decades plant coverage will die out in many places..

Everyone knows this, BUT, human presence and activity can change this, overherding and bad water management are not natural circumstances... Like the whole existence of mankind is not a natural phenomena, machines are not natural, almost anything humans do are unnatural, especially bringing online long inactive power sources of millions of years (fossil stuff) and changing the natural ecosystem EVERYWHERE.

Without humans it is hard to determine what would happen, but you can clearly see humans have huge impact on the whole planet. No other race before was able to wipe out this many races, destroy this amount of forests, ruin this many water systems, poison the atmosphere, soils, waters, oceans. Couple this with a major extinction event noone knows where will it stop.

And saying that these above all have NO EFFECT on the planetary climate or the planet as a whole system, is blind, like you don't even want to realise these things.

Well then ... what kind of a CO2 increase would be noticeable, according to you?

Basically you question everything I am learning at university, like my professors are idiots and don't know anything about climate and stuff.

It's not that your professors are idiots, people are idiots in general.

Evolution has been the dominant theory in explaining life on Earth pretty much since Charles Darwin came up with a hilariously poor explanation for the divergence of species.

Academia loves it.  So much so, that they go to great lengths to avoid such addendum's as intelligent design.  Twenty years ago, the evidence for evolution was about as good as the evidence for the flying spaghetti monster.  The gaps(which are conveniently predicted never to be closed) in the fossil record are still immense today.  Quite a few species have turned out not to actually be different species at all.  Neanderthals are alive and well, living in the Balkans.  They're just people.

The theory has evolved over time, but it became widespread and accepted in academia long before it became what it is today.  I consider it a likely explanation, many biology teachers consider it the only possible explanation and are unable to even discuss the possibility that it's wrong.  It was wrong, it probably still is wrong.  What are the odds that we've actually got it licked?  It's not as if someone can wait thousands of years while they watch molecules form protein chains.  If it turns out they don't, well shit, we have to rethink the start yet again...

Science is a progression of one dud theory after another.  Some of them change over time as new things are learned, as evolution has, or the theory of relativity.  Some are just plain wrong, like early theories on light, fire, how basic elements were composed.  Academia jumps all over them and starts banging away at it like they're laws.  They're not.  Consider how hilariously wrong someone would have been a century back, teaching gravity and time to their students.

AGW isn't gravity.  We can model gravity pretty damned well.  We can't model our climate worth a damn.  We take approximations, and match them to approximations just fine, but when they advance a few years into actual climate data, they're way off and diverging further with every year.

When you expect some insignificant little prick teaching classes to actually be right about something new, and changing all the time, you are expecting something truly impossible.  They aren't even keeping up with it, they're busy teaching classes on information that is probably years out of date in many areas.  They're also using government approved teaching material in many cases, which may or may not actually represent what was known at the time they decided to add it.

I don't expect infallibility from people.  I expect the opposite.  Take your science classes with the same respect you'd give art appreciation.  One need only look at what cleaning things like the Sistine Chapel has resulted in to know that every last one of those people teaching about the beauty in the dirty walls was a fucking moron.  They did such a thorough job of deluding themselves that an entire industry was going into convulsions over how they were ruining beautiful artwork by revealing bright colors under the centuries of grime.  The one thing you really need to learn from your education is critical thinking, and it's the one thing you wont by simply accepting everything they teach you.  Question it.

The true definition of group think, your teachers obviously also believed this as well.

It is no wonder their are so many zombie movies and that only a so small a percentage of the population is left to fight off the hordes. I, like psychoak, am done with responding to a mindless drone.

Now I understand better. Those who question evolution, are no longer scientific, and meaningful debates cannot be longer sustained with them. I understand everything has questionable things, but because of those completely questioning the whole existence of them if a bit.. naive, or I don't know what word to use here. Evolution is just around us, those who cannot see are as blind as a rock, along with those who cannot feel the constantly change in this world, why can't the creatures be constantly changing? ...

I have had and still have long and endless (and every time, pointless) debates about many topics (including evolution, conspiracy theories, politics in my country), now I realise the debate between those who foolishly think mankind cannot influence the planet and the climate and those who actually understand what mankind does to the world, is one of those topics. No matter what you say, it is like a religion, no side will change viewpoints unless unquestionable proofs are discovered, and it is unlikely to happen..

It is strange how developed world people want to comfort themselves that mankind is not that huge problem for the planet as it seems to be.

Except it doesn't work that way. Since the end of the last ice age, CO2 has risen from about 200 ppm to about 400 ppm, and temperatures have risen about 4 degrees celcius.

They don't believe that because they think the temperature measurements are faked (because of the corrections for known biases).

According to deniers, CO2 plays no role, because there are other processes that also change temperature.

Perhaps they should look at the prehistoric data, those represent changes between greenhouse conditions and back, and those cannot be faked and those have no human influence (unless you believe that mankind walked with dinosaurs haha).

It would be best to learn from those data, instead of waiting till the temperature rise becomes high enough to dominate the other processes - because by that time we risk that it's too late to prevent feedback events, extensive melting of icesheets, significant climate shifts which disrupt agriculture.

Well... that's exactly what they claim.

A glacial? They'll enhance the greenhouse effect, they won't cause a new ice age...

That's a regional effect, not a global effect. It won't cause another ice age, global temperatures are too high for that.

But I just don't get the deniers. How can someone deny so much paleo-data?

How can someone deny de CO2 warming effect? It's the only long-lived factor that we know of that can influence climate in the long run, and there's so much evidence for a high correlation of CO2 and temperatures...

So if there were periods of high CO2 in the ancient past, and they were associated with high temperatures (the higher the CO2, the higher the temperature) then how can you ignore this ?

And how can you ignore ancient situations where the level of CO2 and the temperatures were so high, that half the planet was uninhabitable? Really, how can you deny that such a thing happened?

Oh, here's another alarm about the methane in the Arctic:

http://m.livescience.com/41476-more-arctic-seafloor-methane-found.html

Interesting... apparently as much as 50 billion tonnes of CH4 could be released. Its effects won't be long-lived of course, but it'll get converted to CO2, about 150 billion tonnes of it... or about 5 years of human production.

I think I agree with the skeptics here, I doubt that methane forms a "bomb" - it takes a while to melt a hundred meter deep layer of sediment, that just doesn't happen overnight. If it takes say a century, then the effect of CH4 will be hardly noticeable. Only the longer-term effect of CO2 will be present for a long time, it will shorten the timescale for us to find a solution for the warming problem with several years.

Yes, some scientists say that, but there are always people like that, they are just being stubborn.

If you look at Canada and Siberia, far away from the Gulf Stream, you see warming and melting of permafrost. There is just no way that ice sheets can start growing there, or anywhere on the planet under these conditions.

Without the Gulf stream, temperatures will be a little bit colder in Europe. It's not like there's a cold Gulf Stream all of a sudden that will cool Europe down.

I'm not an expert on this btw. Maybe you could point me to an article on the climate effect of the Gulf Stream? It's especially important for the Netherlands, because it makes the winters mild...