This was an interesting blog to read. If I may, I have a small comment (that just clarifies things relative to physics).
we should first acknowledge the fundamental laws of nature:
1. The 1st principle of thermodynamics - conservation of mass and energy
2. Very important for the matter at hand, the 2nd principle of thermodynamics: the continuous increase in entropy
The first principle of thermodynamics only requires total energy to be conserved for isolated systems. It says nothing about mass that is just one form of energy among others (and mass is indeed not conserved in numbers of processes). Moreover, it only applies to isolated systems. Similarly, the second law only applies to isolated systems.
Here, Earth is an open system, that can be well approximated by a closed system that receives energy under the form of electromagnetic radiation, and emits radiation too. And we can then use the first principle to say that the total variation of internal energy of the system is equal to the difference of the energy provided as heat to the system and the work done by a system on its surrounding. Making use of the property of those radiation is sufficient to demonstrate the raise in temperature (cf. Manabe’s climate model and the Nobel prize of last year).
For what concerns the second principle, I can probably recommend this article that seems quite interesting (note that I haven't read it all). It says that relating climate change end entropy is damned hard. The shortcut taken in this blog is therefore maybe a bit too harsh :)
Cheers!
Thanks for the additional info. I read the abstract of that paper and I reflect that the fact that it takes two Cornell University physics experts to say that "relating [the two] is hard" means (to me at least) that the science in this respect is not fully settled. Also, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ...
And then I want to point to the tag of my blog: it says "#politics", not "#science" :-)
Note that I didn't want to offend you. My clarifications do not remove anything from the main meat of your blog, which I appreciated a lot. I apologise for this.
There are very few studies there. But they are indeed needed and this is a field where a lot has still to be done, as you said!
Cheers ^^
No worries, you didn't offend me at all!