So they do realize that the earth has not been warming and even slightly cooling for nearly the last 20 years? How cold does this earth have to get before they give this up?

Meanwhile the republicans and their sponsors deny we have anything to do with the global meltdown. It's a rejection of reality.
Learn more at.... AAAS Climate Change What We Know

This must be the global warming advocate's fallback position: If there is no warming (which there hasn't been), then predict global cooling as the next stage. So no matter what happens they can (try to) claim they were right.
As mrhuckfin said, "How cold does this earth have to get before they give this up?"

mrhuckfin, I am also a skeptic on these huge issues and picking sides but recently I found out about this
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2015/noaa-analysis-journal-science-no-slowdown-in-global-warming-in-recent-years.html
and thought it was interesting I am waiting to see what others say about it though.

@mrhuckfin Right, so you would refer to the >360 consecutive months of above average temperatures we have had as 'cooling'? Try reading an actual source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201505 Think it's a cunning US plot? Try another country: http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/feb_wld.html Where's your data?

Global warming or not ? Well Its a sort of hockeystick with a bend in the handle indicating a 'not' trend.
The only thing that can be said for certain is that the climate will eventually change man made or otherwise. the only question is when and how fast.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter, reducing reliance on fossil fuels I not only good environmentally bit its going to be a requirement - fossil fuels are a finite resource.
But even that is not the real problem - its over population that is our biggest enemy!

Synchro: Forty years ago the overwhelming scientific consensus was we were entering the next ice age. Scientists, like the MSM are bought and sold by TPTB. The truth was extremely hard to come by, until the internet. Giving us "reports/info" from govt. sites is meaningless. They lie for power and profit, reducing their credibility to zero.
The older I get (now 72) the more amazed I am at how controlled people allow themselves to be. Some would rather die or suffer their whole life than admit that the overwhelming evidence points to govt. being the fundamental source of cultural/societal destruction. Doing so means they would have to grow up and be responsible for their own lives, which frightens the hell out of them. The illusion that "big brother" or Uncle Sam is protecting them is clung to by Americans just as firmly as '30s Germans stuck by Hitler, the Soviet people stuck by Stalin, the Chinese worshiped Mao, and most people stick by their masters, self-enslaving but calling themselves "free".

Don- I would have thought that in your 72 years you would have noticed how much things can change in '40' years. Science keeps moving, pushing no answer is final (wouldn't that be nice). It keeps getting refined.
And that government you distrust and think everyone else is controlled by (not you of course), in a democracy, that government is you. That government has done, and continues to do, more to help you than any entity you could name. that computer you're looking at huge government R&D, same with internet, cell service, roads, safe(ish) foods, sheesh I could go on and on.
I know, I know the problem with recognizing that somethings wrong, and therefore needs to be fixed, can be very inconvenient.

More alarmism.
Actually, having bottomed out around 2012, Arctic ice area cover and multi-year thickness have recovered to around 2006/7 levels, Antarctic sea ice area is at an all-time high for the satellite measurement era, as is the total Global sea ice coverage.
According to the RSS and UAH satellite databases, there has been no warming for around 18+ years, and a cooling trend for the last decade or so.
More important for the catastrophists, the vital increase in atmospheric water vapour - without which there cannot be any dangerous feedback - has entirely failed to materialise. Two of the three analyses of the NASA NVAP satellite data - by Vumlum and Vonder Haar - show no discernible trend since the late 1980s, and the third by Solomon et al shows a 10% decrease over the decade post-2000, correlating quite well with the pause/slight cooling trend.
As for extreme climate events, total cyclone energy is down globally, and not been a single hurricane has made landfall in the continental YSA for over nine years.
The technique is to take a clearly periodic function, cherry-pick a suitable section from the upward/downward section of the curve - depending what the object of the exercise is - and linear regress it to Armageddon.

It was announced that by 2010, the Gulf Stream will come to a sudden halt because of the influence on the thermo-haline circulation from the global warming, then, the volcanoes erupted, cooling the atmosphere. It was also shown, from geological records, that entrance of volcanic ashes in the atmosphere is associated in the middle term to an increase in the speed of Sea currents, the problem may be complex, and some warnings too simplistic, but we do already have a Caspian Sea becoming dry, and impending dangers of fast changes in the northern Europe winther temperatures, that early forecats about global warming pointed to an average increase of more than 3º C above lat 45º N, along with a rainfall increase of 10% or even more above lat 65º N (see Roger Revelle). I'd replenish the Caspian Sea, e.g, from Obi river water, at least, the Caviar producing fish will appreciate this. + salut