If we had a valid climate model we could predict the weather more than 24 hours into the future.
This is completely non-sequitur. Climate is long-term statistical trends. Weather is the statistical noise obscuring the trend. Climate models are not attempting to predict weather and weather models are not used to model the climate.
What data can we put into the model to validate it?
Almost 200 yrs of direct temperature measurement. Temperature reconstructions based on 800 thousand years of ice cores including borehole temperatures and O16/ O18 analysis, 5 million years of O18/ O16 analysis of foraminifera, 500,000 years from speleothem growth rates, 26,000 years of tree ring data, a few million years of fossil coral reefs and glacial deposits.... The list could go on.
What data can we put in that can predict the future?
The laws of physics and the relative influences and fluxes of forcings.
We have almost exactly 20 years of "Calibrated data" ( I must emphasize the calibrated part ).
No, we have several million years of calibrated data.
So in my line of work to make a meaningful measurement you are supposed to have a measuring device at least 10X ( ten times ) better than the thing you are trying to measure.
To measure a temperature change of 5 deg C. , I need a measurement device that can read to 0.5 Deg C ( 1/2 a degree ) as a minimum.
That is a convention of your line of work, not a universal standard. You can in fact measure changes smaller than the resolution of a single metric- a fact that many test kits for the hobby actually take advantage of. You simply use multiple methods to take the measurement.
If for example I have a thermometer that reads 100 +/- 3 deg and one that reads 97 +/-3 deg I know the actual temperature to +/-1.5 degrees. In theory, using just those 2 thermometers I could get a reading to 1/3 of the margin of error of either. I can also add more measurements and then run statistical analysis to determine the distribution of results and shrink the size of the 95% confidence interval.
Now, we can use "historical data" ( farmers almanac, farming data, etc. ) , but is that accurate to within 0.5 Deg C?
The global instrumental record is 159 yrs long and is accurate to within to 0.05-0.15 deg C.
I am not arguing that. however....ONE volcanic eruption can easily spew more CO2 than humans make in 5 years.
This isn't even close to true, and it's not hard to check either. All volcanoes combined pump out about 200
million tonnes of CO2. Fossil fuel combustion alone is responsible for about 27
billion tonnes a year. That's several orders of magnitude more than all of the world's volcanoes produce each year.
Factoid like this one reflect ideological arguments rather than skepticism and interest in the truth. Even if it was true it would be irrelevant to the issue. Natural sinks and sources of CO2 are roughly in equilibrium so unless there is a dramatic increase or decrease in vulcanism (much bigger than a single large eruption), the amount of volcanic CO2 being cranked out has almost no effect on climate.
As I pointed out earlier, the effect of Global DIMMING might be an even LARGER worry than global WARMING due to increased CO2.
Well it might be. And we also might all be destroyed by aliens tomorrow night. However, there is no evidence to believe either one is true. We have a pretty good idea that dimming was due to man-mad particulates- which we reduced. Since that reduction the trend has reversed. Other than wishful thinking, why should we assume that the trend will reverse again and fix our problem?
The Earth's climate has been regulating itself for far longer than humans have been present ( through MUCH larger ecological effects than humans ) and it has always corrected itself.
Well, I don't think anyone is concerned about the continued existence of the Earth. Global warming certainly won't affect that. However, human civilization hasn't had to deal with Earth's correction periods and a lot of them would be quite problematic to civilization as we know it. Yes, things will eventually return to normal in a few million years no matter how badly we screw it up, but in the interim things won't be very much fun for people.
We have only been watching carefully enough to make "Scientific" evaluations of the trends since satellites have been flying.
We have Calibrated & Continuous data for only about 20 years.
Neither of these statements make sense. We have continuous, calibrated data from proxies dating back several million years. We have calibrated and continuous data from direct measurements for about 350 years and continuous, calibrated global data for 150 years. Even the satellite record is 30 years old.
Beyond the confusion about the age of the records, why do you assume that satellites are the only scientific basis for trend analysis? Why do you believe satellites are more reliable records than surface observations?
