Good News on Global Warming

TheSync writes "OK, CO2 levels are rising, but iAfrica has a report that atmospheric methane concentrations are leveling off. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas, accounting for one fifth of total warming. Researchers don't know why this is."

Comments

Re:Correlation != Causation

[Red Rocket]

Correlation != Causation

That's a solid scientific principle.

Another one is that you don't experiment on production systems without some kind of backup. Do you have a backup atmosphere somewhere that we can use if the methane and CO2 we're adding to this one cause it to break? If not, then it's time to put a halt to the experiment.

Re:Inverse Time Capsule

[Sylver Dragon]

Actually, its both sides who are playing fast and loose with the facts. One of the things that still irks me to no end, is hearing some enviromentalist go off about how the global temperature has raised so much in the past century. While this is technically true, it ignores the fact that for the first part of the 20th century there was a slight decline in temperature, then the Global Pacific Occilation hit, circa mid-70's, and since then, there has only been a slight increse in global temperature. However, most envromentalists, don't see fit to inform people of this detail. Instead, they just smooth over this natural occurance, and use it to justify thier position.
Fact is, there has been some warming in the past century. Part of this is probably anthropogenic in nature, but you also have to keep in mind that we were comming out of a little ice age at the end of the 19th century, and that the GPO happened in the middle of the data set, which throws it all out of whack, and don't forget that recent studies have shown that solar output had been incresing slowly. While all of these factors together may not account for all of the warming seen in the 20th century, they do account for a good part of it.
This isn't to say that we should abandon all clean air policies. Quite the contrary, we should be working to make the air cleaner (have you ever seen LA in the summer, when the wind isn't blowing?) But, we should at least try and base the arguments on more than Global Warming, which is so poorly understood. Also, blaming one gas so heavily (CO2) is rather dumb, there is a lot more to it than that, but this is what gets center stage, and gets the research dollars.