Thanks for the link. Here's another.

Check out Eric Holst's post about emissions from California rice farms. We've teamed with researchers from Davis and other organizations in an effort to identify options for rice growers to reduce emissions.

- some methane comes from rice paddies [and there has been work on designing rice strains and/or different growing methods to lessen such).

- Agriculture not only generates CO2 from land-use changes like cutting trees, but nitrous oxide is also generated, especially from over-fertilizing.

UC Davis is excellent at such topics: see for example:
http://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/agriculture.html

so since livestock are a main source of methane emissions do we need to put a cap on them? obviously there are much more livestock in the world now then there would be if humans did not have a demand for meat, etc. perhaps limit the numbers of livestock allowed in the United States and push for a global cap? they are a significant portion of GHG emissions as well…would you agree?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles,

and the figures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg

In the first figure, you may notice that the last 3 interglacials had sharp peaks on the CO2 (blue), temperature (red) and CH4 (green) curves. Those peaks also are a subset of the 65-degreeN insolation (sun) (orange) at the bottom. You'll notice the insolation is on its way down. Under unmodified conditions, the temperature would be slowly (10s of thousands of years) doing a slow slide down into the next ice age.

The last interglacial (the one we're in), at the left, looks different: the CO2 and CH4 lines didn't drop off, and the temperature didn't either. The peak temperatures of the last 3 interglacials were slightly higher, and the CO2 was lower. The temperatures have not yet had time to fully respond to the human-created forcing, i.e., even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, we'd keep warming for decades.

Without human-induced CO2+CH4+N2O+soot+land-use-changes,
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php is a useful website that lists commonly-heard arguments, with a pointer to a web page per argument, that gives an accessible, short discussion, laced with references to credible scientific papers. You might want to check:

[change] 2
[co2lag] 8
[lowco2] 28

There are lots of other online resources that explain this, so I won't try to duplicate them. However, I really recommend William F. Ruddiman's "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum": consider going to http://www.amazon.com/Plows-Plagues-Petroleum-Control-Climate/dp/0691133980/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205437616&sr=8-1, read my review there, and spend <$15 for the book. It's only 200 pages, but it puts a lot of issues together in a coherent way, and is very accessible whether one is very technical or not. See especially page 41.

Anyway, CO2 is the highest it's been in the last million years, and going up fast. The temperature is not quite as high as the short, highest peaks, found only when the Milankovitch Cycles yielded more light at 65degrees N. However, it's rather likely that we'll match those peaks, depending on policies.

The "Eemain interglacial", i.e., the one just before ours, 130Kyears ago, was slightly warmer than we are right now, and the sea level is believed to be about 4-7 meters higher than now, i.e., due to much of Greenland having melted. That of course is quite survivable, but rather expensive, given that 130Kya (or even 1Kya) we didn't have 6B+ people, of whom many live near the coast.

http://flood.firetree.net/ gives an interactive map in which you can set the sea level rise, and it grays out below-sea-level areas. Of course, as the Dutch know well, just because something is below sea level doesn't mean it's under water, but it does mean a lot of money gets spent to keep the water out.

For instance, see http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=38.1432,-122.0142&z=8&m=6, which is Northern California at +6m, i.e., big chunk of Silicon Valley below water [we can do dikes for that], but the San Joaquin River Delta, one of the richest farm areas in the world, is gone, and Sacramento has issues. (CA has 1000 miles of dikes already, and much of the Delta is already below water.)

If you don't live out here, you may not understand how the entire West is dependent on snowpack-melt for water, and on dams, aqueducts, irrigation, and AGW helps none of this. CA alone grows half of the US fruits & vegetables right now. Expect them to get a lot more expensive.

Now if you're elsewhere in the US, you might not care about us out here, but you should, because CA has the largest net subsidy (about $60B in 2000) to the Federal government (& other states)… Other big subsidizers include NY and NJ, and you can look on the map for the +6m effects on them. So is FL, but you don't want to look at that, nor at New Orleans.

No one expects +6m overnight. On the other hand, if you understand Peak Oil, you'll know that descendants 100 years from now may have to build big dikes and steel+concrete sea walls … but they won't have much petroleum to do it with.

Have you read both of Fred Singer's books? and Fred's SEPP website? (I had, and I was long puzzled by some of the motivations, until I talked to Naomi, whose talk cleared up a lot.)

"many scientists that appear to me to be very well qualified to say that C02 is not the prime cause of global warming, based on more recent science."

So, who are they, and what are your qualifications for assessing their qualifications?" In general, on the Web, unsupported opinions by unidentified posters are worthless, at best, so give me something useful. Are they active researchers? Do they publish in credible peer-reviewed journals? Do you read those? Do they mean what you think, or are you going on secondhand descriptions?

Anyway, I have a general interest in understanding why people believe they believe, so:
What do you read, and who do you talk to?

See comment #84 in http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/global-warming-payola/#comments for the sorts of people I learn from.

Nutrition advice is not physics, just as the stock market is not temperature. Neither is a good analogy.

A large number of people who don't understand the science (and a few who do) don't like it's conclusions don't believe it for ideological / political reasons, and your last paragraph appears to put you in that camp, as was Robert L. in http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/03/monckton_reckons_gore_is_the_s.php#commentsArea
See #6, and my comment in #20 about the difference between smart libertarians and those being scammed into acting against their *own* self-interest and especially those of their descendants.

Physics doesn't care about political viewpoint.

do you agree / admit that there have been times in the earth's past million years where global temperatures were warmer than they are today and CO2 levels were lower than they are today?

Please post some reputable rebuttal instead if posting more deceptive claims. You have to dig to get at the truth.