Solar cycle 24 is about to start and cold weather trends like this winter is a harbinger of future cooling due to solar cycle activity. This winter was a prime example. The last time we had a winter this cold was 109 years ago. Everyone knowledgeable about this sort of thing are castigated and made fun of by the same people that warned us of global cooling. If your wondering what happened to global cooling just look up the Mount St. Helen's eruption. According to the Global Cooling crowd the Mount St. Helen's eruption should have put us into an Ice Age lasting decades. They were proven wrong and the only thing that happened were really pretty sun sets for a couple of years. The current scare the population into paying more tax disaster scam artist are made up of failed government officials and so called scientists drawing money from the government in an effort to prove there is Global Warming. Currently there is no evidence whatsoever of any global warming taking place. Here is a link to information on Solar cycle 24. Just watch the slow cooling effect caused by the approach of what is thought to be a record setting cycle.
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/images/latest_eit_195.gif

If the current long term warming was due to the solar cycle, then the upper atmosphere wouldn't be cooling, it would be warming right along with the lower atmosphere (the troposphere).

But the fact that above 50k feet it's actually getting cooler (while the surface is as warm or warmer as it ever was) is proof positive that less radiant heat is is making it's way to the upper atmosphere because it is being absorbed by increasing levels of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.

It's simple chemistry and physics... but hey, if you wanna make it a political argument, it'll just make your side look like idjits in the end.

Since scientists are really only working with information from the last 100 years or so, it's very difficult for them to say with any certainty what is happening. Perhaps this is how the world is ... it gets a bit warmer, it gets a bit cooler, it gets a bit warmer, it gets a bit cooler ... perhaps weather is cyclic. After all seasons are cyclic, why not the whole climate pattern.

Ok.. let's go with your premise (even though the science behind GW is about 250 years old)

Do you think we SHOULDN'T err on the side of caution, given that you're insinuating that we don't know WTF we're doing to the biosphere?

That's actually not true. Paleoclimatologists use cores from glaciers and ice packs to get information about atmospheric gases, carbon loads, and net precipitation that goes back tens of thousands of years. More information comes from pollen and particles embedded in the ice cores and in lake sediments. The pollen tells you what kind of plants were dominant, and since plants have very specific climate requirements, that gives an indication of the minimum/maximum temperatures. Other particles such as ash and volcanic dust can show specific events that affected regional climates. Then there are tree rings, which give year by year indications of good or bad growing conditions. All of these layers, ice, sediments, and tree rings, can be cross-referenced with great precision, which makes it possible to distinguish regional climate changes from global ones.

In addition, we have written records from Europe and Scandinavia (probably elsewhere, but my field was medieval European history, so this is what I know) that go back far more than 100 years. People were not measuring temperature with the precision we can now, but they sure as heck paid attention to the weather year to year. Good crops and bad, floods and droughts - those records go back 2000 years. They come in the form of stories and tax records, but the information is there, and now historians are correlating the written record with the above mentioned paleoclimatology approaches.

EXACTLY my feelings. If there's even a chance we're screwing things up, we need to stop and re-assess! It's better to stop, then discover it was a false alarm*, than realize fifty years down the line that we really screwed ourselves over irreversibly.

*highly unlikely, given the available evidence, but hope springs eternal.

In addition to the medieval history, I took most of a degree in biology, with an ecological systems emphasis. And when I started combining those fields, I saw stuff that scared me. People are very, very bad at maintaining whatever ecosystem they happen to be able to get their hands on - and now that encompasses the entire planet. It's one thing for a city-state of a few thousand people to log off all their forest cover, lose their topsoil, and die of malnutrition (or get taken as slaves by the next nation over) - but we don't have anywhere left to go.

-8 this morning.
All I want is to be warm.........

It actually got pretty sunny today, but it was definitely cool - even with a sweater under my windshell.