Slashdot Mirror
Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars
MCraigW writes "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes might have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Mars, it appears, has also been experiencing milder temperatures in recent years. In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide 'ice caps' near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."
So you mean only source of heat and energy for the planet is responisble for it's weather and tempreture? Wow. I bet these guys went to post-graduate school to figure that one out.
Take THAT hippie environmentalist tree huggers! I'm gonna go set a pile of styrofoam on fire in celebration.
I am more worried about carcinogenic crap in the ground, in the water and in the air than global warming. .. the global cancer rate is going to go up.
Under the guise of "global warming isn't real"
Thanks a lot.
We need clean nuclear power ASAP charging our electric cars, not driving around cancer fumers.
We must destroy the sun!
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Let's suppose that the orbit alteration is not the case. Wouldn't it still make sense to prepare for the worst? Why not stop CO2 emissions, we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming than we are heating up the planet with CO2 and being wrong about not having a human global climate impact.
Global warming is such a politicized issue from both sides, and a lot of money from both environmentalists and big oil is going into 'proving' it, that it's really quite difficult to know what is happening at all. This is in addition to the natural difficulties of the subject, who can say for sure what is happening in such a big place as the earth? Sure we have the satellites measuring temperature, but we know they had errors once, how do we know they are not in error still? Anyone who says they 'know' global warming is/isn't reality ought to be treated with suspicion.
That said, taking care of the environment in general is a good thing. So either way we ought to research renewable energy, keep recycling, etc.
Qxe4
crackpot:
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.
"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."....
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.
But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.
It is common knowledge that the sun goes through cycles in which its output is increased thereby increasing the the solar radiation that strikes its planets. However we are still putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere which act to trap the solar radiation on the Earth. No reputable scientist will claim that every fraction of a degree in temperature increase is due to human influence on our atmosphere but they do know that the methane and carbon dioxide that we put continually pump into the atmosphere acts as a solar trap and can't help but raise the overall temperature of the planet.
Why not stop CO2 emissions, we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming
Think of what stopping CO2 emissions will do to those poor defenseless plants! You plant-killer! We at PETP (People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants) will not stand idly by and allow you to suffocate all those dandelions! Dandelions have feelings, too!
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If you don't know why, you can't fix it. Duh.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Pluto - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warmin g_021009.html
t a_trunc_sys.shtml
j r.html
Triton - http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980526052143da
Jupiter - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
LUKOIL and Exxon?
When the temperature hits 200 F in a couple of years, we will be glad to know we didn't cause it.
Either way, no way I'm giving back my Oscar! -Al
Ya but what changes? Can we measure said changes?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there are solar physicists around the world observing every measurable characteristic of the sun (that we can measure from here) all the time. Seems a bit silly to infer what's going on with the sun by looking at Mars instead of the sun itself. Unless some solar observations back this up, this'll probably be the last we hear of it.
I highly doubt that you are qualified to present papers on the subject, or that you have any involvement in science.
Solar forcing is already taken into account in today's models of climate change, and estimates range from no substantial effect to around 5% or so of warming being caused by the sun - the rest is nearly all anthropogenic.
Furthermore, if you read the article, the person proposing this as the SOLE means of heating really doesn't understand the greenhouse effect, or the role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Please stop trolling - you are wrong, the person pushing this is wrong, and the evidence is out there on this already if you would but look.
Because if we try to change what's going on without understanding the situation we might easily decide on a cure that's totally ineffective. If C02 emissions aren't a major factor (And I'm not saying they aren't.) then lowering them won't help much, if at all. It's better to spend a little money learning what's really going on before we spend a huge amount of money on possibly useless countermeasures.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Sir it's always good to see another of the same persuasion and I fully endorse your article and I would
ask you to do the same for my reply to this heresy. Here is what I told these man-made global warming
denial morons just a few minutes ago countering their childish theories with sound science-inspired deep
thinking on the matter:
As far as your latest apologist whacko theory is concerned, it is more than obvious that vast amounts of
CO2 and Methane are carried away from Earth's atmosphere by solar wind into space where it is deposited on
the other planets of the solar system. That's why we're losing the martian polar caps! It's YOUR IMMENSE
CARBON FOOTPRINT that's causing it so WE REALLY NEED THAT CARBON TAX YESTERDAY!
I can't wait for the day we can take them to court for their hate crimes and then lock them away for good.
Oh please. How dare you profane my Internet with such hooey. That makes about as much sense as their claim that a study of temperatures for the last 150 years is invalid just because it only represents .00075% of the time man has been on the planet and .00000003% of the earth's existence.
Just think of that number: 150. That's a big number. If someone walked down the street and offered you a $150 wouldn't you be happy? That happiness is what the Republicans want to take away.
-Al
Without knowing why it's happening you don't know what to fix or if you even can fix it. Say for instance it's the sun and it's only the sun causing global warming. What in the hell are you going to do about the sun? I'll tell you what you're going to do about the sun. You're going to sit there and put on your sunblock and shut the fuck up. The sun owns our ass like George Takei owns.... somebodies ass. What if it is "Intelligent Warming because God is chilly"? What are we going to do about it?
The part where we try and figure out the cause is the most important part there is. Otherwise we stand a good chance of wasting resources we don't have or screwing something up that isn't broken to begin with.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It must be those SUVs NASA is operating on Mars that is the cause of the temperature rise...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You see, There most likley won't be any verified or serious studying of this theory. This isn't the first time this has been noted and there wasn't any serious studies contradicting them. To date. almost every "sun is the cause" theory has been dismissed by the pros without citing were it is wrong or why the common view is better. You will see words like junkscience thrown out as it's dismissal. You will see that it doesn't fit the current models (when the current models are structured incorectly to show any association with the sun). You will see things like Exxon is behind this. You will see things like psudoscience being thrown out. You will see statments like we didn't understand exactly what the studdy is saying. You will see all kinds of stuff discrediting this view except for facts.
And yes, I agree with waiting to celebrate. Someone could have made a mistake. But when every thing is out there and all the objections and discrediting revolves around blasphemy because the religion says otherwise, I will celibrate that this study was corect. And yes, I did just liken the global wamring science to a religion. It has become one for some people. I'm not saying you, but some people.
As usual, some useful discussion of these issues can be found on RealClimate.org. The following two articles are worth a look, though neither is especially recent:
The punchline from the latter article is, "There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth..."
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
News at 11, the ocean is wet.
God spoke to me.
Not at its age. Far too young.
I thought the Sun was middle aged...isnt that when you usually expand?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Or, in modern vernacular, "chill out, dude."
Seriously - you can't "do" something helpful, unless you have a clear reason why you are doing it.
After all, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"... which I personally think is a result of the Law of unintended consequences.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Unfortunately, I just lost my mod points by replying to a previous comment in this thread. But this is not a troll; there are plenty of scientists observing the sun directly, whereas we know bugger all about the weather patterns on mars. If there were significant changes happening to the sun, we would already know about it. Anyway, does the source of global warming actually matter much?
The bottom line is the correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature is well known (you can reproduce it in a simple lab experiment), so does it actually matter, in the end, what the source of warming is, if we aleady know how to prevent it? That is, even if the recent increases in temperature are due to some other cause, we know for sure we could reduce the effect by reducing human output of greenhouse gases (exactly how much we can reduce it by, is another question...).
It's sad when contributors pick and choose only the parts of an article that support their own viewpoint and hope that readers are unwilling to read the whole article. Anyone who has RTFA can see that fully half of the article is a repudiation of this man's hypothesis by most of the scientific community:
Choice quotes
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University. "And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
To add to this, I'd like to point out that global warming deniers are quick to dismiss 650,000 years of data about earth's temperature as not being representative of the facts, but they jump on 3 years of data (and data confined to a local area and not the whole planet) as evidence against global warming, solely because they think it supports their opinion. If they were serious about science, they would apply the same rigour to the arguments they agree with as to the arguments they disagree with.
I came here for a good argument
Searching through for his previous works he has never published anything on climatology. This would be make his speculations well outside his field of study. Now, being a physicist myself I know that knowing physics gives you better understanding many other things. But, his one article doesn't get precedence over the mounds and mounds of other published work by people in the fields of climatology, environmental sciences, atmospheric sciences, etc. who are considered experts and are well published. If anything he might just be mentioning global warming to get money, as some /.'ers assumed about the deep sea temperature oddities article a while ago. Both sides can do it you know :).
Patrik
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
Now the liberal Martian bacteria are suggesting imposing CO2 quotas while the libertarian single-celled organisms don't want to impose any regulations.
No word from the conservative cells.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Scientists *have* noticed a slight expanding at the sun's equator. I hear they recommended solar situps.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
"Why do we have to waste time arguing about the cause? If a guy comes into an ER, and passes out, they don't stand around arguing about why he passed out before they help the guy."
You've never watched "House" have you...
Geting back on topic, moving to more efficient vehicles has other advantages than just reduced CO2 emmissions, oil will eventually run out.
Seriously. I don't care WHY you think the Earth is warming, all I care about is people trying to DO something about it.
I'm waving a magic stick around. What are you doing to stop global warming?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
It doesn't even go that far. Err it does exactly as your saying.
See how those sentences sound totaly different but convey the meaning I want to have? I will let you in on this secrete of mine in case your wondering what the hell I'm doing.
Like you said, The IPCC when making this statment about humans likley to be causing global warming, were looking for a rock and found a rock. They didn't pay attention to the dirt, the bugs or worms in the soil, they were lookin for a rock and found a rock. And now they are saying that area over there is full of rocks. But when you look at it, You see rich farm land teaming with life and nutrience and a couple of rocks. The IPCC didn't go on a quest to find out what was causing the earth to warm, the went on a quest to find if it was warming and if humans could be the cause. And they found that. Yes, humans could be causing the earth to be warming. But they statment shouldn't be taken as more then that.
I have also looked at all these reports that the vast majority of the science comunity belives humans are causing global warming. And all these reports revolve around a few peer review articles were a sample of scientist were asked it the papers were flawed and to make sure tey used good science. The people who said they didn't see any flaws or that good science was used were counted as people supporting the outcome of the papers. The minor few who had an objection with them for some reason, were counted as disagreeing with them. The endresult was the vast majority of scientist agree with global warming and that humans are the cause. But the questioning had nothing to do with this. It is a play with words and misinterpretations of wording used for a specific purpose.
The relevence here is that it is possible to create a model, perform experiments, be completly and scientificly acurate and still get it wrong. This is the nature of science and why people check others work. And this is why science finds new discoveries that change the way we think about things.
So you are right. Their job was to find evidence of global warming and that humans were the cause. They did exactly this. But the GP is very wrong in making the asertion that this rules other explainations out. It doesn't touch the validity of other explainations. What he doesn't seem to know is that the truth doesn't change with popular opinion. The truth always is and we change how we understand it. This change in understanding changes popular opinion. He has stopped trying to understand the truth and just wants to regurgitate popular opinion. Even when it is wrong.
Now the line about truth not changing came from someone else. I wish I could quote him on it but I forget his name and what context it was said in.
So, your recommendation would be to cause oh lets just say a 10-15% decline in global GDP because it *MIGHT* help... Here are the FACTS:
1) The Earth has been warmer than it is now before! We are not seeing temperatures outside the spectrum of nature, and even assuming worst case according to the IPCC we won't be outside normal for more than 500 years.
2) CO2 levels are not high now. There was an article in Scientific American which documented this, CO2 over the last 2 million years has fluctuated between ~200ppm and ~1400ppm. Right now we are at about 300ppm.
3) The Sun and the Orbit of the Earth both fluctuate and are beyond our control and both influence the climate much more than anything we could possibly do.
4) The Earth has been through many cycles of ice age and temperate age all before we were here.
5) The last temperate age melted almost all of the polar ice and caused sea levels to rise 4-6 meters this was 125k years ago. It is safe to assume it will happen again (with our without us)
6) We are still coming out of the last ice age, and we haven't seen temperatures comparable to the last temperate age yet, so we can easily assume temperatures still need to go up before the cycle starts again.
These things are completely beyond our control, if we spend billions (and I'd argue it would cost many trillions) to "fight" global warming, well if you want to fight against the solar system, go ahead but I'm not giving you my tax dollars to do it.
Stars move up and to the left in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H-R_diagram.png during their main sequence lifetime which means they
get cooler but more luminous. It it the luminosity that is most important for the temperatures of planets. Watch the evolution here http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys230/lectures/star _age/evol_hr.swf and you'll see that a factor of 2 in a billion years is about what
the evolution looks like. That is less that a part in 100 million per year. So, main sequence evolution is not the sort of thing we can
measure right now. There are changes in solar brightness at a larger level and on shorter timescales though recent changes do not account for
the measured warming. See a rough calculation here http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html.
s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar: It's steady. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
However, the same things that will reduce CO2 emissions (taking fossil-fuel powered cars and coal-fired power stations out of service) will also tackle some of the biggest sources of these other pollutants. In fact, it's my guess that the savings in health costs would, on their own, go a long way to offsetting (if you'll pardon the pun) the costs of tackling CO2 emissions.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"But this is not a troll; there are plenty of scientists observing the sun."
Your post is not a troll but TFA certainly is.
For anybody wondering about the attribution of various +/- forcings affecting climate, including variations in solar flux, please see figure SPM-2 in the 2007 IPCC SPM report. For those who like the Mars idea as expressed in TFA please explain why 3yrs of data should be accepted as a trend, let only accepted in preference to a theory that has made some accuate predictions and has an observational record that uses multiple idependent lines of inquiry for periods that are up to a few orders of magnitute longer?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"In probability theory and statistics, correlation, also called correlation coefficient, indicates the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two random variables. In general statistical usage, correlation or co-relation refers to the departure of two variables from independence, although correlation does not imply causation." Methinks the parent got it right. Green house gases go up and temperature goes up, that's a correlation. The causation argument is something that can be debated by all.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Probably just that correlation doesn't imply causation. There's a strong (negative) correlation between the number of pirates plying the seas and global warming, too, but that doesn't mean the solution to global warming is to increase piracy on the high seas.
You can only measure the changes with Habibullo Abdussamatov's patented
Space Solar Limbograph
I am not making this up.
He has a point. In this case, the lab work shows causation and not merely correlation. The correlations are between atmospheric CO2 and temperature. People hesitate to call the relationship there causation because there is inadequate time resolution. You don't know for sure that the increase in CO2 came before the increase in temperature or the other way around. However, we stand on the brink of a brave new world: I urge skeptics everywhere to take the experimental approch and reduce the CO2 concentration to the pre-industrial level.
This is the only sound science approach. If we're not sure about global warming, we need to check on this. Let's track temperature changes as we remove carbon from the air just as quickly as we've put it in. It is the only way to settle the debate.
Yes, in an ideal world, we should know the cause before we act. However, there is such a thing as paralysis through analysis. If we spend too much time studying the problem without doing things, we are likely to end up with a harder problem to solve once we know what the cause is. We need to strike a balance, by continuing to study the problem and learn more about the causes and best solutions, while at the same time enacting partial solutions based on our best knowledge of what is going on. We have to balance the risk that our initial countermeasures are useless (unlikely IMHO, but they might or might not be as helpful as we hope; they might even be harmful, I suppose) against the risk that if we wait to get started the problem becomes harder and more expensive to solve. My intuition is that the result of that analysis is that we shouldn't yet panic, we should keep researching the problem, and most importantly we should start trying for the low hanging fruit in terms of greenhouse gas reduction.
Objection to form.
Lack of foundation.
we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming than we are heating up the planet with CO2 and being wrong about not having a human global climate impact.
How is this insightful? This kind of thinking shows everything that's wrong with the environmental movement: a complete disregard for cost/benefit analysis. You're saying that it's somehow "better" to impose arbitrary restrictions on the economy of a completely unknown cost, in the hope that whatever you did creates some kind of unspecified benefit.
This is no better than a medieval doctor removing a few pints of blood because it's better to remove your blood and be wrong than to leave you with a cold and do nothing.
If you want to help the environment, present your solutions in the way every other idea needs to be presented: here are the expected benefits, here are the expected costs, and here is how we're going to be accountable for these benefits and these costs.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Maybe the sun needs to lay off those Jimmy Dean sandwiches for breakfast every morning.
That global warming has been politicized doesn't invalidate the science, any more than me being upset over the germ theory would invalidate that. I defer to physicists on physics, mathematicians on mathematics, and climatologists on climatology. Are you suggesting I should reject what climatologists say about climatology, just because of a political controversy? That seems a bit silly, especially considering the stakes involved. The "politicization" is unfortunate, but it's not my fault that the left wing noticed environmentalism first and the conservatives feel duty bound to oppose everything liberals do, even when the science is clear on the subject.
More jobs, arr!
You make a very good point and I agree 100% with you.
The point is that North America peaked in Natural Gas production in about Jan 2001. I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak. We do have coal available and we do have nuclear. But most houses don't have a coal furnace anymore.
If we start building the IRF reactor system which was designed by Argonne Labs (and shut down by clinton's administration in 1994!) then we have over 60,000 years of uranium supply on hand already mined... this for a fleet of about 110 reactors. North American can produce 100% of its power from nuclear - but we need about 1200 reactors to do it. We havn't started to build any. Any new reactors are years away.
Then we have the biofuels people. If we take ethanol for instance, it can be produced from pretty much any plant material. Plants are sugar polymers for the most part. We can break these polymers down. This is what fungus do and this is what yeast does... its just yeast needs to start wtih pretty simple sugars whereas a fungus like Trichoderma reeshii can break down celulose and this is why its used to make stone washed bluejeans. How effective T. reeshii will be in celulose to ethanol production is open and then we have that about 50% of plant material is not cellulose but instead is ligins and pentosans - which fungus like Pleurotus and Lentinula spp (and many other species can digest). Whether they will produce alcohol is an open question.
Ethanol from grain is viable. To do this cost effectively is equaivalent to brewing beer at $2.50 per keg. To produce all the liquid fuel North America needs we would need to consume more than the worlds production of grains. Please note: One tonne of dry plant biomass is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil and this is if we can convert it for free.
So, I'm not particularly worried about CO2 levels. CO2 is a fertilizer and encourages plant growth. I am however quite worried about fuel supplies in the not too distant future and I think we are already starting to see supply constraints.
People should start by doing what they can... like insulate their houses for instance. Instead people run around and point their fingers at CO2 levels (and understand practically nothing about it). Heating houses creates CO2 - so why won't they do something that they can do and save themselves money in the mean time? Are they bound and determined to freeze in the dark?
My father who has now passed on is an example. He refused to properly insulate his house. When I grew up and it was 40 below outside there was frost on the walls of the bedroom. He put in an oil furnace about this time and was burning a tank up every 3 weeks. He'd been told oil was cheap and insulation was expensive I guess. I was pretty little but still old enough to remember the 1 1/2" of rock wool he was putting in the walls and I asked him why he didn't fill the whole wall up? He said it was not "cost effective". That xmas my mother and father were looking at their oil bills wondering how they were going to heat their house.
At this point, that house is going through 18 cords of wood per year. It is still not insulated.
A similar size eco-designed house is using 3/4 of a cord per year.
This is what insulation and good design can do. It doesn't cost much extra to build it right in the first place. For instance, R50 fiberglass in the walls will cost about $1 buk per square foot during the construction phase. After the house is finished you need to tear walls down.
If houses in North America were properly insulated they would be much cheaper to heat and much more comfortable to live in. So why won't people do it? It will greatly reduce CO2 emissions.
What really worries me is what the next generation is going to do. Gas hit $17 bux on the Henry Hub a little over a year ago. Next year it might hit $20 bux. While we have a short reprieve, I am personally close enough to the Oil and Gas business t
No offense, dude, but go take a physics class. That goes for whoever modded _that_ "informative" too.
1. Heat flows from the sun to the earth, and from both to the vast expanses of open space anyway. It's not the outside space that's heating the Earth, but the Sun.
2. The laws of thermodynamics have to do with atom/mollecule movement, and transfer of heat between bodies in contact. The only (ok, vast majority of) energy flowing in or out here has _nothing_ to do with thermodynamics as such, since there are no two bodies in contact exchanging heat (i.e., exchanging mollecule movement by impact.) What is happening there light being absorbed and radiated, and yes that can happen in the opposite direction just as well. There are relevant laws there, e.g., Stefan-Boltzman, but the second law of thermodynamics isn't it.
E.g., you can cut sheet metal with a focused laser beam even though the heated point is basically a hell of a lot hotter than the laser. It will absorb the light anyway. E.g., to address your "inside" and "outside" concerns, you can fry an ant with a magnifying glass even though the ant ends up hotter than the surrounding air. That's because the energy comes from the sun, not from the outside air.
So, sorry, the GP post was right, you are wrong.
But to get back on topic, what's happening is that the earth receives some radiation energy from the sun, and it radiates some back into space. The equilibrium temperature is when the energy radiated equals the incoming energy. Basically if energy E is incoming, then the equilibrium temperature T is when surface times emissivity times Stefan-Boltzmann constant times T to the 4'th power equals E. That's all.
The "insulation" and its non-uniformity across wavelengths messes things a little, but as long as the temperature variations are relatively small, the wavelength don't shift horribly much, so basically the proportionality stays. And a global warming of 1 Celsius (which at least at one point was all the heating Earth had experienced) isn't enough to throw it off the hook. If the Earth's temperature is, say, approximately 300 Kelvin (for the sake of a nice round number), we're talking a third of a percent increase. Since the rest is constants T1^4/T2^4=E1/E2, so it only takes an increase of (1.00333)^4=1.0134, or 1.34 percent increase in incoming energy to fully explain it. Better yet, since Stefan-Boltzman applies to the Sun too, to fully cause it, the Sun would have to experience the same heating the Earth does. A third of a percent heating of the sun creates the extra energy to heat up the Earth by a third of a percent.
So that's basically all the debate here: did our "insulation" change over time, or is it simply that the Sun got slightly hotter? The former wouldn't explain why Mars is heating up too, while the latter fully does.
Funny the things one can learn by paying attention in physics class, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, your recommendation would be to cause oh lets just say a 10-15% decline in global GDP because it *MIGHT* help...
The Stern report, authored by the former World Bank chief economist, says more like 1% of global GDP to prevent a 10-20% drop due to warming.
The Earth has been warmer than it is now before!
I suppose if a huge asteroid were on course to hit Earth, your argument would be "the Earth has been barren and molten rock before! let's not do anything!"?
CO2 levels are not high now.
CO2 levels in the last 720,000 years never went over 300 as we know from the EPICA ice cores. We're over 375 right now.
I love that you're smarter than thousands of climate scientists, essentially every relevant scientific organisation, and the 154 nations who had to unanimously sign off on the IPCC's conclusion that there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part. When's the Nobel being awarded?
...read page two of that article. Abdussamatov is a nutcase, and neither recent overall warming of Mars nor any attribution to increased solar output are serious scientifc propositions.
Stephan
I agree that nuclear is the way to go to reduce CO2 and preserve our lifestyle and economies, but the Argonne reactor type is actually called IFR 'Integral Fast Reactor'. Read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reacto
In todays 'climate' (no pun intended) that project should be revived immediately.
Our whole electricity usage could be converted to nuclear, our heating could be converted to electric. That would cover about 2/3 of our CO2 output (numbers for the UK). Serious attention to 'plugin hybrids' ( http://www.calcars.org/vehicles.html ) could convert a lot of our consumer car miles to electric as well. Where are we at? 80% reduction already? The LA smog won't be the same...
X.
Abdussamatov is a nutcase,
Why do you say that? Does he hurl vitriolic condemnations at people who disagree with him? Does he try to shout them down, or demand that their funding be cut off?
BTW, you fulfilled my expectation that there would be an ad-hominem directed at the researcher in question within the first ten replies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Sun is not really all that old, being founded in 1982 and all. I never knew that Java had a part in global warming though. Yikes.
Nope. The proposition that manmade greenhouse gases are causing "an enhanced greenhouse effect" is the proposition of a nutcase called James Hansen.
And you swallowed the lie whole with a side of bad climate modelling.
Funnily enough Triton is warming as is Pluto
Of course the biggest lie you've swallowed is that all of this is somehow disinformation by Exxon. It takes a very wide gullet to manage that one but you've taken it in your stride.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Most all the political solutions (kyoto) have included their policies that were once rejected. And yes, most of hollywoods considers itself liberal. They do control a good part of the distribution proces.
Instant Kyoto compliance to help offset Al Gores inconvenient electric bill.
But when every thing is out there and all the objections and discrediting revolves around blasphemy because the religion says otherwise, I will celibrate that this study was corect. And yes, I did just liken the global wamring science to a religion. It has become one for some people. I'm not saying you, but some people.
You mean like this or this?
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
The worst case scenario according to IPCC is only a 1 inch sea level rise in 100 years, how is that going to cause a 20% drop in GDP?
t y&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:off icial&client=firefox-a
? type=worldNews&storyID=2007-02-02T212335Z_01_NOOTR _RTRJONC_0_India-286068-7.xml
No, it's not. They're predicting 4-30, and they've been widely criticised for being too conservative on the issue - ignoring unusually fast melting in Antarctica and Greenland, for one thing.
Sure if sea levels rise 6m it will displace quite a few people, but I still don't think it would cause that much upheaval.
10% of Bangladesh would be under water with a 1 meter sea rise. That's about 15 million refugees in one nation alone, and you can be sure Bangladesh can't afford to pay 10% of their population's land just to let it get eaten up by the ocean.
A 6 metre sea rise would also destroy Miami and a number of other major cities on the East Coast of the US. We're talking about pretty huge repercussions with that big of a sea rise.
The Stern report isn't just pulling numbers out of their asses.
As far as the asteroid is concerned what would your recommendation be?
You're missing my point. The OP stated that the Earth had seen much higher CO2 in the distant past. My point is that just because it has happened previously doesn't mean it'd be fine if it happened again - after all, the Earth started up molten and airless, but that wouldn't be conducive to human survival today.
That is what you environmentalists don't get, you never factor in risk/reward
Again, read the Stern report. For a 1% cost of GDP we protect 10-20% of GDP. How is that not factoring in risk and reward?
On the CO2 front I guess Scientific American got it wrong then I'm just quoting their article verbatim... So either they are lying, or you are, but whatever.
If you have the article in front of you to quote from, surely you can provide a citation?
I'm reasonably sure I'm not lying, and so is NOAA: Vostok's 420,000 years of data and EPICA's 650,000 years of data, for your perusal
The IPCC did not state anywhere any sort of statistical probability as you state.
http://www.google.com/search?q=IPCC+90%25+certain
" The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.
That is a toughening from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last report in 2001, which judged a link as "likely", or 66 percent probable." - http://in.today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx
How does that not support my statement, quoted as follows: "there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part"?
I don't see #1 - the 60% chance figure - in the 2006 IPCC report. Sure you're not looking at the 2001 report?
Sorry, I got cut off before I could add:
g as.html
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/vol
>snipComparison of CO2 emissions from volcanoes vs. human activities.
Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 1998) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2.]. Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 13.2 million tonnes/year)!
The IPCC has released radiative forcing data for the various greenhouse components, and CO2 is by far the largest component.
You're making the mistake of conflating ozone depletion with global warming, too.
The Mars data is often misunderstood.
"The shrinkage of the Martian South Polar Cap is almost certainly a regional climate change, and is not any indication of global warming trends in the Martian atmosphere. Colaprete et al in Nature 2005 (subscription required) showed, using the Mars GCM, that the south polar climate is unstable due to the peculiar topography near the pole, and the current configuration is on the instability border; we therefore expect to see rapid changes in ice cover as the regional climate transits between the unstable states.
Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted."
Funny how three years is good enough to prove Martian global warming to the same people who tell us 150 years of data (and 720,000 from ice cores) just isn't enough to base a conclusion off.
Yes, the enlightened people all know that it's really vegetarians that cause global warming. It works like this: Vegetarians eat more plants. Plants are good as they scrub CO2. Cows, on the other hand, emit 500 liters of methane per day, each, which is a HUGE factor in global warming. Put two and two together and you see that in order to save the earth, we need out outlaw vegetarians and start force feeding them raw meat.
Where's Al Gore? We need him to fix his documentary. Oh yeah - he's in his mansion that uses 15 times more energy than the average home... I bet he is a vegetarian too...
I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies. These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.
Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!". There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.
PS: I did climate modeling in grad school. If you think it's so bloody simple and we're all just idiots, let's see you build a model than predicts anything useful.
Stephan
I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies
Actually since Pluto is moving further away from the Sun and continuing to warm despite that fact, it indicates that something doesn't fit the "Constant Solar Constant" BS
So you've failed the reading test. Will we get a conspiracy theory?
These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.
I didn't posit a conspiracy since the astronomers are simply reported experimental results. By no means do all or even most astronomers believe the global warming hysteria, nor all climate scientists.
Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!".
I didn't say that he did then, although he has exactly no scruples about doing it now. Nevertheless the decision to back the greenhouse theory was a political decision taken during the Carter administration, as described in a book called "The End" published in 1988.
He also has no scruples about rewriting recent climate history making the late 20th Century warmer and the early 20th Century colder. This isn't conspiracy but cold hard fact. History being rewritten according to a hypothesis. It's just like Wikipedia.
There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.
Actually it survives not because it makes the best observations (it doesn't) but by a scorched earth policy of accusing any critics of complicity with Big Oil or the Republican Party. Comparisons with Holocaust Deniers abound, and Hansen keeps altering history to fit his pet theory.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
In the US, poverty is defined by the government as falling below a certain income level. If you are single and not someone's dependant (as in a child or a university student where your parents are paying your way) poverty is defined as making less than $10,210, for a family of four less than $20,650. Now compare that to an African nation, Congo in this case, where the per capita GDP, not income, is $700. Clearly the two countries have a different definition of poverty. Over in Congo, making $10,000 would put you in the top earners, perhaps even the top percent whereas in the US it is considered to be poverty.
You have to be real careful when you see estimates across countries of many things because often they don't use the same metric. There's not a global poverty metric and really, there can't be. The US is richer and thus it makes sense to consider poverty to be at a higher level than a severely impoverished country. That doesn't mean their plight is the same.
I know. I regularly predict stock prices fifty years out and haven't been wrong yet.
Sometimes, just for fun, I predict presidential races eighty and ninety years in the future. Compared to predicting the next race it's a breeze.
Trouble is, I don't have a friggin' clue whether my predictions are right but they sure are easy to make. Maybe you can explain why climate prediction is any easier long range then short and how anyone would know whether long range climate predictions were worth a shit?
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The Law of Unintended Consequences, colloquially expressed as DON'T FUCK WITH MOTHER NATURE, needs to be applied here. If the Earth is warming up from natural causes and we try to stop that, it could be a real disaster (as opposed to "sky is falling" fake disasters).
I didn't posit a conspiracy since the astronomers are simply reported experimental results. By no means do all or even most astronomers believe the global warming hysteria, nor all climate scientists.
All true climate scientists believe in global warming.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Climate is the average of the weather in an area over a long period of time. Climate, therefore, does not equal weather, but is directly defined by it.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
Wow, another Slashdotter getting modded up for pointing out that correlation != causation.
You know, repating "correlation does not equal causation" is not an excuse to ignore any line of statistical evidence you choose. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but often it is damn suggestive. Most of the evidence linking lung cancer to smoking is "merely" correlation too.
Beside that, experiments do not show merely a "correlation" between CO2 and warming. It is known and very obvious adsorption physics that greater absorption in the IR spectrum than in the visible causes greenhouse warming, when the gas is subjected to visible light and coupled to a heat sink ("the Earth"). The heat sink re-radiates in infrared, and a gas which absorbs more re-radiated heat than incoming visible radiation will inevitably lead to overall warming. As noted by the grandparent, this is easily demonstrated by laboratory experiment.
This is, in fact, the reason why the entire planet is not a frozen iceball: if you leave the greenhouse effect out of the energy balance equations (incoming radiation = outgoing radiation), you'll find that the the temperature of the Earth should be much lower than it actually is. Something is trapping heat, we know for sure. The greenhouse effect is a proven mechanism, and lo, the amount of warming you should get from it is equal to the missing component of the energy balance.
People still debate about global warming, but I can't believe that people are still skeptical of the very existence of the greenhouse effect.
So in short, he doesn't support your position...disagrees with those you agree with...and generally is "contrarian" to your position...therefore the man's obviously crazy.
This isn't the first time I've heard that other planets are warming too. Additionally, the Sun being warmer is apparently quite accepted and I would think fairly easy to measure. The "fact" is, it is warmer. Yes, humans may be contributing to Global Warming but it was going to warm up anyway and human contribution is an almost insignificant percentage. Its enough of a percentage, however, to capitalize on now isn't it!
Nonono, you're telling the joke all wrong! It goes like this:
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
I cool water in a controlled laboratory experiment, and it freezes. Water in the real world
There are many variables in the Earth's climate, but none of them change the fact that CO2 and other gases produce a greenhouse effect, and they don't change the magnitude of that greenhouse effect. Those are physical facts.
The uncertainties are not in the greenhouse effect. The uncertainties are: how much warming and cooling is there from other sources, and how much do feedbacks amplify those effects. the simple fact is that there is no physical proof that we have warmed the earth or that we can alter its course. There is never any "proof" in science. The fact that we have warmed the Earth is, however, supported by evidence at this point that is now beyond reasonable doubt. We have altered the course of its climate. It is also a basic physical fact that we can alter the future course of warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (How much alteration is economically feasible is a different matter.) there is speculation, lab models, and computer simulations, but nothing conclusive. You are woefully underinformed about the evidence. You can start by reading the IPCC reports.
The uncertainty is not about whether CO2 in the real atmosphere causes warming. It's about the warming and cooling contributions from other sources — how much of the total warming can be attributed to each source. (The direct contribution from CO2 can be calculated directly from adsorption physics, but there is uncertainty about how feedback effects amplify its contribution, as well as the contribution of other sources.)
There is not now enough remaining uncertainty to attribute global warming to non-CO2 sources; see the IPCC estimates in Figure SPM-2 of their latest publication.
Christ, man. This is not POLITICS or ETHICS or anything where OPINIONS is all that counts. This is SCIENCE.
I'll call a man crazy if he disagrees that the Earth orbits the sun, and it is not just because he disagrees with my "opinion".
It's religion when you question alternate, science-based theories. It's religion when you brand your opponent's as "deniers" and question their scientific credentials. It's religion when you look to it to solve your future worries and give you guidance how to live your life today, and most importantly, it's religion when it allows you to tell other people how to act.
It's religion. Calling it "science" doesn't make it science anymore than my calling myself a duck enables me to fly.
Mine is Good
It's ok, they've got grad students doing it. They're expendable.
I agree with you! And the cautious, humble approach right now would be to assume we ARE affecting the environment. If we're wrong, we waste a few trillion dollars. If we're right, we saved many times that (and some things that are priceless).
Jeremy
What's wrong with ad hominems anyway? They're a perfectly decent form of argument, with solid backing from a simple application of Bayes' theorem.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
heretics like him should be burned at the stake, the world would be much better of without the vile contrarian rants of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
That's the thing about science; it's not about `truth', it's about progressively more accurate approximations of reality. For a lot of cases, a fairly coarse approximation is all that is required; Newtonian mechanics is valid for all of the situations 99% of people will find themselves in. If you are on the leading edge of science, however, then relying on superseded approximations is a mistake.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Got any data to back that up? We are talking both accuracy and precision. I want to see the manufacturer specs on the actual equipment that has been used at the hundreds of temperature measurings stations around the world for the past 100 years or even 30 years. Go ahead and try to find that data. Or are you claiming that it is not relevant to the discussion? I want to see numbers. After all numbers, quantitative data, is what we are talking about here. If it is so obvious then show me. If you can't do that at least talk about the temperature measurement tech we are dealing with here. Do the temperature measurement stations use infrared tech? At least cite which type or types of thermometer have been used around the world to measure these obvious changes.
The simple fact is that temperature measuring technology that is actually used to measure the air within a useable temperature range is highly imprecise and highly inaccurate. Most will only be able to measure temperature to within +/- 2C! And that assumes calibration that needs to be performed on a periodic basis. And digitals generally fare even worse than analogs at least if you ignore miniscus parallax issues (which of course you should not). It is interesting to me that everyone (on both sides) seems to dance around the very issue of where the rubber meets the road, the nature of the very equipment that seems to be predicting the end of our species, not in the distant future, not 10,000 years from now, but in less than a century. That would seem serious enough to at least warrant a discussion of such issues.
Francis Bacon, the great philosopher of science, cautioned against letting a theory stray too far from the data. This theory is so far from it that hardly anyone even bothers to talk about the uncertainties in that data. As if our methods of measurement, not just in the US in 2007, but in the Soviet Union in 1943, were perfect and absolutely without error. And what about human error, errors in recording the data? We seem to be assuming no human error whatsoever in the the recording of the temperature readings. Did they have automated computer temperature logging in the 1920s in Indonesia or Siberia? Do they even have it today? Such questions should at least be occuring to you. The fact that they are not makes me wonder about whether you really care about the truth.
I would sneer at the idea that it would mean the end of our species and openly laugh when you claim to have evidence that would prove it without the slightest doubt. So much so that any person to deny it is a crank. In fact, barring any unproven, unforeseen, effects, I would quite like an extra 5-10F increase at the lattitude where I currently live. Just means that there would be some migration away from equatorial regions. Some of us already regard them as inhospitable, especially at midday. Bad for some, good for others. On the whole, it sounds like a wash. Certainly not the end of all terrestrial life on our planet.
Actually all of them are. hehe. Okay. Sorry about that. Couldn't resist.
But in a positive way. Show me someplace, anyplace in the world where property on the coast is worth less than inland (discounting the costs within cities)? The owners of such property tend to be (comparitively at least) wealthy. It is true even in Indonesia (one of the poorest countries in Asia).
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The simple fact is that temperature measuring technology that is actually used to measure the air within a useable temperature range is highly imprecise and highly inaccurate.
Got any data to back that up? I want to see the manufacturer specs on the actual equipment that has been used at the hundreds of temperature measurings stations around the world for the past 100 years or even 30 years. Go ahead and try to find that data.
If you want to assert that the accuracy and bias of temperature measurements is something other than what studies have shown it to be, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate that — and even moreso, that these errors introduce a systematic upward bias into global temperature averages of a magnitude sufficient to render the observed global warming an artifact of measurement error.
Thermometer intercomparison studies do exist; I saw one cited in a similar Slashdot thread last month, which I've spent the last 20 minutes trying to find. As I said, if you want to dig around on Web of Science or Google Scholar long enough, you can find them too.
Most will only be able to measure temperature to within +/- 2C!
That is completely absurd. Even thermometers hundreds of years ago could accurately measure temperatures to better than 1 degree accuracy. Meteorological thermomenters in the 20th century are far more accurate.
And note again that the combined average of many thermometers are more accurate than any single thermometer.
I would love to know where you are getting these "facts".
This theory is so far from it that hardly anyone even bothers to talk about the uncertainties in that data.
Idiot. Read any paper on the instrumental temperature record and you will find discussion of the uncertainties in the data. Track the references back far enough and you will eventually find the calibration and bias estimation procedures used.
We seem to be assuming no human error whatsoever in the the recording of the temperature readings.
No, we do not. Human errors, both random and systematic, can be and are estimated. Search the literature for "bias correction", "cross validation", etc.
Such questions should at least be occuring to you. The fact that they are not makes me wonder about whether you really care about the truth.
I have not claimed that the instrumental temperature record has zero error. I merely claimed that the errors in the record are much smaller than the warming trend observed. The fact that you know nothing about how that record is calibrated and debiased tells me you certainly do not care about the truth.
I would sneer at the idea that it would mean the end of our species and openly laugh when you claim to have evidence that would prove it without the slightest doubt.
No one has claimed that global warming will "end our species". But the existence of global warming has been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
I would quite like an extra 5-10F increase at the lattitude where I currently live.
I doubt that you would, as temperature increase is far from the only effect of global warming. And nice of you to care so much about people at other latitudes.
Just means that there would be some migration away from equatorial regions.
Oh, yeah, "some" migration. I'm sure you would like to support the costs of that relocation, too, along with the social and political unrest which accompanies it. (More likely, you would prefer your fellow taxpayers, or ideally other countries altogether, support it.) Not to mention your complete lack of ethics in supporting climate change which results in the relocation of other populations which conveniently don't include you.
Actually all of them are. hehe. Okay. Sorry about that. Couldn't resist.
Not all of the world's population centers are located close to sea level at the ocean front,
That is completely absurd. Even thermometers hundreds of years ago could accurately measure temperatures to better than 1 degree accuracy.
I work for one of the leading global suppliers of meteorological equipment. The issue isn't with how accurate the sensors can be, it's if they are being properly calibrated and maintained. In the US we do a fairly good job, although if a sensor is reporting off by a degree or two it is within accepted functional range and will pass any inspection.
Humans build robots on earth.
Earth starts to have global warming.
Humans send robots to mars.
Mars starts to have global warming.
Obviously robots are the cause of global warming.
The solution to global warming is:
DESTROY ALL ROBOTS!
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
It's a shame that this is posted AC, because I want to "friend" this poster.
Sure, CO2 is a cause of global climate change. I'll go with that, but it's just too early to start branding those who question the current theories as unscientific, crazy, or politicized. We did this to Galileo, Newton, Einstein...
We party on anthropogenic CO2 (a small faucet on a really big bathtub) because it's easy to fall into the trap of favoring the simplest solution to a problem (if reducing anthropogenic CO2 by 70% can be labeled "simplest"). Even after one of my friends warned me not to do it, I favored trying to pin my '85 Volvo's inability to start on the fuel-pump relay. I didn't do this because it was the most likely culprit. I did this because it was only $40, and it was easy to fix.
$300 later, the car runs, and it wasn't the fuel-pump relay that needed to be replaced.
Science is more about asking questions than knowing answers. If those who know the answers scoff at those who ask new questions, science isn't being done.
Who's arguing that?
I've seen a few people in this very thread arguing that, although the person I was responding to above to actually meant something else, if you look at the replies. But look around: you'll see people who insist that just because we can measure the greenhouse properties of CO2 in lab, doesn't mean that the greenhouse effect actually works in the atmosphere.
In fact, the scientist being discussed in this thread also denies the greenhouse effect, with some mumbo-jumbo about how CO2 rises in the atmosphere and releases all the heat it has stored.
Is the planet getting warmer? This is the only "consensus" that exists, and even that one isn't so monolithic when the question of "over what time period" is addressed. By itself, this is nothing new; the planet is dynamic and will always be changing.
That's true, but it's also true that we are causing an accelerating warming right now and have been for a century or so, which is not necessarily something we would prefer to happen.
The implied premise that there exists some sort of ideal state for the planet and that any change from that state is a Bad Thing, is the enviro-cult's equivalent of the Eden myth.
There is no such premise. It is, however, a fact that civilization on Earth right now is adapted to a particular climate, and there are costs to adapting to a different climate, especially when the climate change is rapid.
Is the warming being driven by the CO2 input? There is no consensus whatsoever on this point, as it hinges on how dominant that input is.
Far to the contrary, there is a widespread scientific consensus on this point. Pretty much the only people who dispute it are American conservatives.
From what I've seen, it's a pretty small one, likely negligible.
On the contrary, it is the dominant factor. It's pretty obvious that "what you've seen" on the matter does not include any actual climate science.
Try reading the IPCC FAR SPM (here), such as Figure SPM-2. The increase in CO2 forcing is very large compared to the other changes in forcings over the industrial period.
We already know that CO2 is swamped out by H2O on that front.
Wrong.
I get really tired of explaining this, but here goes again:
There is more H2O in the atmosphere than CO2, but that doesn't mean that global warming is attributable more to H2O than CO2. The H2O in the atmosphere provides much of the baseline natural greenhouse effect, which totals about 30 C, and explains why the planet is not a frozen iceball. To understand the warming that has occurred since 1850, which is a change in temperature (of about 1 C), you have to see what has changed since then. The change in CO2 far outweighs the change in H2O, and is responsible for most of the change in temperature.
IMO the presumption that all other inputs have been steady-state is absolutely preposterous.
There is no such presumption, once again pointing to your total ignorance of climate science. But hey, whatever reinforces your ideology.
In point of fact, climate models use variable time series for solar irradiance, anthropogenic and natural aerosols and particulate matter, anthropogenic and natural greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon cycle, land use change, and so on. They do not fix the inputs as "steady state".
Will the consequences be catastrophic?
Probably not, unless Greenland's ice destabilizes more readily than we thought (which is possible, there is unexplained rapid ice loss going on, but if it happens it probably won't be for a few centuries).
It will, however, likely be economically unfavorable, and even hardline economists who specialize in climate change agree with that. It's not going to be so unfavorable that we need to cut all emissions, but all the o