"Large swaths of the U.S. are experiencing the first “polar vortex” event of 2019, and The New York Times is out with an article suggesting cold snaps are becoming more frequent because of global warming."

https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/20/polar-vortex-not-global-warming/

“As the Arctic gets warmer and warmer, the severe weather picks up,” Dr. Cohen said.

and a different climatologist says

“The frequency of cold waves have decreased during the past fifty years, not increased. That alone shows that such claims are baseless,” Mass said.

  Now the climatologists are splitting and fracturing, like the political parties. Isn't science supposed to be based on conclusions from facts and evidence, not politics or a preconceived conclusion? At least I know where the NYT stands on the political issues. Global warming causes increased cold winters? Give me a break! 

"Global warming" is just a shorthand term used by the media.  What's really happening is much more complicated.  As more solar energy gets trapped in the atmosphere, the overall average temperature increases but locally, all sorts of things happen as that energy circulates.   In the short term some regions may get colder as major air currents (driven in part by the Earth's tilt and rotation) shift and move.  That makes the political situation even tougher as people, and nations, start trying to figure out who wins and who loses.

In the long run we'll all lose if temperatures get high enough.  Right now that's the track we're on.

Climate scientists don't all agree on the details or the short term forecast - we don't yet have the instrumentation or the computing power to answer every question.  It's like oncologists - 9 out of 10 may agree you have cancer, but differ on their guesses about progression.  If you want to pin your hopes on that 1  out of 10 who says he's not sure yet, be my guest - I'll have the surgery.

"Global warming" is just a shorthand term used by the media.  What's really happening is much more complicated.  As more solar energy gets trapped in the atmosphere, the overall average temperature increases but locally, all sorts of things happen as that energy circulates.   In the short term some regions may get colder as major air currents (driven in part by the Earth's tilt and rotation) shift and move.  That makes the political situation even tougher as people, and nations, start trying to figure out who wins and who loses.

In the long run we'll all lose if temperatures get high enough.  Right now that's the track we're on.

Climate scientists don't all agree on the details or the short term forecast - we don't yet have the instrumentation or the computing power to answer every question.  It's like oncologists - 9 out of 10 may agree you have cancer, but differ on their guesses about progression.  If you want to pin your hopes on that 1  out of 10 who says he's not sure yet, be my guest - I'll have the surgery.

Steven Hawking says by 2600 we'll have about 100 years to colonize in space and get off the planet or we'll all die. Pretty gloomy prediction. But just like your cancer scenario, the truth is, maybe we don't know, but there's a good chance that Hawkins is in the right area of predicting the future.

Most of my argument with global warming fear and doom, isn't that it's happening, it is. I want to know how we're going to stop it, and feeling good, politics or signing an accord is nothing functional or useful. How do we stop what's happening? Is that possible?

The vast majority of scientists agree on climate change. They may have minor disagreements about the messaging around it, but it’s disingenuous for conservatives to use these minor disagreements as some sort of evidence that climate change isn’t occurring.

The rest of your post amounts to confusion about special interests paying for “scientific” studies that “prove” the food they make a profit on is not unhealthy. One egg study, for example, was conducted on a small population of undernourished, underweight kids in Central America who had one egg a day added to their poor diets (along with other dietary changes). The added calories led to weight gain....no susprise there. And there was another study conducted on people whose cholesterol intake was already so high it was off the charts, and when an egg a day was added to their diets it made no measurable differences in cholesterol levels because their levels were already so high.
And of course media outlets need clicks and eyeballs, so they breathlessly report misinterpreted results of studies paid for by people selling you something.

True, somewhat true (special interests studies, not all of them) and true. Especially the last part about media outlets with click baiting headlines.

"I'm just pointing to an interesting contradiction, that warming causes cooling"

A very simplified way to look at this is that it's like what happens on a much smaller scale with a glass of water with ice on a hot summer day. First the water will become very cold as the ice melts and then will start getting warmer and warmer.

After a hundred years of research, study, and experience, climatologists can tell us with absolute certainty that tomorrow it might rain and it might not.

Logic fails when one person, which is why I started this, claims that global warming, causes colder Winter events.

I tried to explain this with the ice and glass of water example. When the icebergs melt the ocean will become colder and cold oceans make for colder winters. When all the ice melts then the water will start getting hot.

Of course the earth is not a glass of water with ice and is much more unpredictable.

You are grasping the problem, but don't seem to have a good understanding of scientists or the scientific process.  Scientists search for the truth by testing hypotheses.  If your hypothesis is contradicted by your research, then it must be wrong and you come up with a new, hopefully better, hypothesis that accounts for the new results.  If your hypothesis is not contradicted that doesn't mean it is correct, only that it wasn't contradicted by your experiments - it might or might not hold up in future work.  Because the truth is unknown, you have to always be cautious and there are often multiple ways to interpret the results of scientific research that can appear contradictory.  It is all part of the process and hopefully you eventually end up at the truth.  However, scientists have no vested interest in getting certain results - you report what you got, and if it proves your hypothesis wrong, then you start over.  Whoever turns out to be right in the long run usually gets the glory so there is an incentive to be the first to be correct, but certainly no incentives to get preordained results - it doesn't work that way.  The only exception might be if someone is being funded by an entity that wants to slant the results, but no ethical scientist will take funding from such groups without assurance of being able to publish freely whatever the outcome.

Climate change is not my area but we certainly know many facts, some of the most important being that the concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are higher now than they likely have been during the past several hundreds of millions of years at least, that the climate overall is warming, sea level is rising and the vast majority of all these changes have occurred very recently due to the activities of Homo sapiens.

What to do about it?  The rational world already decided on a way forward - the Paris accords, signed by almost 200 countries.  Those are not mandatory and are far from perfect but at least are a start.  To make a real effort we should eliminate coal and other fossil fuel sources as much as possible, plant trees, and promote birth control to reduce the size of the human population and slow its growth rate.  I'm not sure what else - I'm sure the experts have many other ideas for what can be done.  Wind and solar power can make a great contribution - come out to the midwest some time and you will see all the farmers making tons of money having wind turbines on their land.  They should provide tax incentives for the development of solar roof tiles and installation of solar panels on every rooftop.

We know a lot of what to do, the problem is getting anything implemented through the political process.  Developing countries want what everyone else has and don't want to slow their progress.  Developed countries are used to their advantages and don't want to give anything up.  Companies in energy industries - who have known full well the global implications of their industries for decades at least - buy off politicians and fight tooth and nail against every regulation.  Religions fight against birth control because it slows their plans for world domination.  Of course it doesn't help when some countries elect complete idiots to positions of power and many others are ruled by autocrats who only care about personal wealth.

Human beings have an amazing ability to ignore or deny problems that they don't understand and especially if it doesn't affect them directly.  If you don't live on Tangier Island then sea level rise so far is a minor a annoyance at most.  People think a cold snap in the northern hemisphere means climate scientists are wrong, ignoring the facts that those can be explained, temperatures over the world as a whole are up and Australia is experiencing one of their worst heatwaves on record.

Unfortunately, the political will for real change likely will not be there until it is too late.  Most people don't care if sea level rises a few inches or hurricanes get a little stronger.  When the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt - and they certainly will if we don't make any changes - then sea levels will rise tens of meters and almost everybody will be affected, but by then it will be too late to go back and could take millions of years to correct, and of course would not go back to the same anyway.  This is the real threat to our security and I hope people will make significant changes while they still can. 

However, I am not hopeful.  For example, I wanted to put solar panels on my roof.  Where I live the cost of energy is too low and the state has been bought off by energy companies to make solar more expensive.  I would have to pay $30 K up front, and might get it back over 10 years if lucky.  Since I will likely be retired and moved somewhere else by then it doesn't make economic sense to make a big cash outlay that someone else will benefit from.  I am fully aware that this would be best for the planet in the long term, but am making a short-term decision to benefit my greedy little self.  Most people do the same.  This is where we need enlightened governments.  If there were a 25% tax credit for installing solar panels - as there really should be - and if the state would allow net metering so I could sell any extra back to the energy company I would sign a contract to install solar panels tomorrow.  We need to provide economic incentives for people to do the right thing.  This would also likely stimulate the economy possibly being revenue neutral in the long term.  Although we have seen that increased revenues following tax cuts only exist in Republican fantasy land and don't pan out in reality, a tax cut to install solar panels might actually work.  In any event, to make any meaningful change requires resolve by governments and for voters to make intelligent choices.  Neither of those seems likely in my (hopefully overly pessimistic) experience.

84.7% of all stats are made up on the spot.

You know what’s really odd? This quote attributed to Mass only seems to appear in right-wing media that all pick up identical stories from one another. I can’t find a single reputable news source with that quote from him.

You all don't need to worry the problem was solved in 2016. In the email sent out to staff on Thursday morning, CSIRO’s chief executive Larry Marshall indicated that, since climate change had been established, further work in the area would be a reduced priority.

“Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change,” he said. “That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?” Marshall is handing out notices and 350 workers are to be sacked. Climate change is a fact, more research is not needed.

Global warming is way more of a US national emergency than any problems on the southern border (I won't even mention gun violence).

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59xpxa/the-next-financial-crisis-could-be-caused-by-climate-change

I wouldn't trust anything from Vice. That's as a bad a website as you can get for any kind of opinion.

The reality is that climate change is a natural phenomenon. The climate of the planet has been changing for billions of years and it will continue to change in the next million years.

There is no denying that climate change is real, but at the same time, there isn't much that we can do about it. We can try to cut back on emissions and pollution, but it needs to be done around the world and not just be used as a political tool in the United States.

People use Global Warming is such abstract ways that it doesn't make any rational sense. I'll give you one example. People said that the wildfires in California were caused by global warming. But no, they were caused by people being careless, they were caused by strong winds knocking down power lines, they were caused by a severe overpopulation of trees constantly fighting for the same water resources. And because of the lack of water resources, many of these trees are dying and environmentalists fight to prevent any kind of tree thinning.

When it comes down to it, people were filing lawsuits against PG&E for some of the wild fires. It's funny how money bring out the logic in people. And the reason why PG&E was so careless was because Jerry Brown vetoed a fire safety bill in 2016 that would have held companies like PG&E to be more responsible. People just ignored that fact that PG&E executives were working with Jerry Brown at the time and they were some of the people responsible for the wild fires in California in 2018.

We've gotten so much rain in California in the last few months that people has finally shut up about blaming global warming for everything.

One of the best, easiest and healthiest things you can do for the planet and yourself is to cut back on meat and dairy. If we cut our consumption of meat and dairy by 50% we'd exceed our goals for reducing emissions. That would take us back to the amount we were eating 50 years ago. Animal agriculture is a main driver of climate change, deforestation and mass extinction.