[Paul Ward]

OK I'm beginning to see the flaw.

You state that all erath generated energy cannot escape into space (which I don't believe, I just don't have the facts to hand to dispute it and you have not yet proven it).

You state that 4% of "anthropogenic" energy is released by human metabolism. That is 4% of the energy in 2003 which was released and was twice the amount needed to melt the polar ice in your scenario.

People make up a tiny amount of the metabolic energy released by the earth - and that's been going on for millions of years. For instance, Antarctic Krill accounts for 2-5 the biomass of humans, and all species of both squid and termites exceed human biomass. Even allowing for the fact that these are cold blooded, results in total metabolic energy release of a very significant amount per annum.

Unlike fossil fuel energy release, this amount will have been fairly constant from when life on earth arose. When there were no or fewer humans, there were more of everything else, so the overall metabolic output of the earth will not have varied much bar ice-ages for literally hundreds of millions of years.

You claim that any heat energy cannot escape, therefore the earth by now should have reached temperatures where life any where would be impossible for all but extremophile bacteria.

You error is is in seeing a short snapshot and extrapolating without real basis.

Your 2003 figure of 417.12?10^15 BTU gives a figure of twice the energy needed (as per your calculations) to melt the ice. Taking the 25 years worth in your reference (25 out of 150 - not including millions of years of metabolic input that would dwarf this enormously) gives a total of over 10,836 (I didn't bother with the decimals) against the 417.12. In other words 26 times greater, giving 52 times the energy to melt your ice.

Patently global warming has not happened on a scale any where near that required by your hypothesis.

By the way 4% of the amount (human metabolism) over 1 million years gives a figure of 20,000 times the energy. As I said humans, whales, bison, ants - it doesn't matter metabolic output is metabolic output. So since the dinosaurs disappeared, we get a figure of 1.3 million and that's just for the "human equivalent" output. Assuming a standard 10% transfer rate between trophic levels and that everyone is vegetarian, 9 x this is released in botanical respirtion. At this rate the world would be have been vapourized long ago!

Unless you can provide some proper hard science, this thread will be closed.