1. Carbon Dioxide absorbs heat from solar radiation. The physics of that has been pretty clear for about 100 years, thanks to Arrhenius and others.

2. Humans are burning a lot of hydrocarbon fuels that have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

3. You would expect the heat absorbed by the extra carbon dioxide has to go somewhere.

4. Our global climate and weather should be affected by the extra heat – there is more energy driving the fronts and cyclones around. You’d expect some impact on eco-systems, an increased likelihood of extreme weather events, and some movement of humans and other species to new habitats (including tropical diseases occurring in temperate regions)

5. You can’t make any useful conclusions about the changes in global climate from individual episodes of good/bad weather – weather is a chaotic system, which means tiny changes in the starting conditions have huge changes in the final weather outcome. Indeed, chaos maths was first discovered by a meteorologist.

6. Carbon dioxide is clearly not the only thing driving changes in global climate – there are solar variations, Milankovitch cycles etc. In particular we don’t know nearly enough about the role of methane as a greenhouse gas, and the impact of aerosols in mitigating the greenhouse effect.

7. The fuss/controversy about the ‘hockey stick’ graph and the East Anglia data set/’climate-gate’ are confusing to most of us. The climate scientists seem to be trying to measure subtle changes in global average temperature (against a background of much larger daily and seasonal changes). However, changes in average temperature don’t kill you – its the possible increase of extreme events that’s damaging. Its a problem if a 1 in 300 year flood actually happens every 25 years.

8. At some point we will have to move to a renewable non-fossil fuel economy so it makes sense to invest in these technologies. Given the sources of much of the world’s oil and gas (We’ve all helped to make Chavez, Bin Laden, and Putin rich and/or powerful men by consuming large amounts of fossil fuel) there are probably good political reasons for doing so.

9. The cost of converting large quantities of the world’s power supply to renewables/nuclear could be huge (the International Energy Authority are talking about a trillion dollars a year for the next thirty years!), but its not dissimilar to the amounts Governments are spending/talking about spending to reflate the world economy out of the current recession/depression.

10. Although a lot of attention is focused on the impact of transport (from SUV’s to air travel), actually the biggest source of greenhouse gases is the heating lighting and air-conditioning of buildings (about 40% in the UK for instance). Reducing the carbon footprint of buildings can usually be achieved by decreasing their energy consumption – in other words it can save you money to reduce your emissions. There are lots of easy gains here – there is typically a 500% difference in energy consumption between the best and worst office buildings for example. So it makes sense to ‘turn the lights off when you go home’.

Do I have biases? Well I have sufficient technical background to understand some of the climate science but I’m not a practicing researcher in the area – I come from a physics chemistry background not climatology.
I am an ex-employee and current shareholder in a major oil company.