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Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared
Numerous news outlets are reporting the findings of a study from the Research Council of Norway — a government agency — which concludes that (in Bloomberg's version) "After the planet's average surface temperature rose through the 1990s, the increase has almost leveled off at the level of 2000, while ocean water temperature has also stabilized." The New York Times' Dot Earth blog offers some reasons to be skeptical of the findings.
[quote]Do you know what the problem with that argument is? The problem is that regardless of what the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming actually is, it *started* with substantial political and corporate interests framing it as certain and apocalyptic.[/quote]
Actually when scientists first started warning that the consequences of CO2 could be extreme and dire there where no political interests interested at all in the topic. Fouriers warnings in the 1870s about the greenhouse effect where pretty much ignored until the early 1900s when data started to come in that the infrared absorbsion properties of CO2 he had observed in the laboratory and he postulated would affect the atmosphere where turning up localized around roads and automobile heavy areas. From that point CO2 climate change was pretty much confirmed in theory and observation but still a bit abstract until later in the 1900s when new data found that some of the droughts and changes in arctic and oceanic conditions where directly caused by it.
Unfortunately the other thing that happened in the 1900s was a growth of anti-science activism around creationism and various health kookery, and some of this bled over into physics denialism which found an apreciative audience amongst conservative audiences who had decided that tempering the carbon economy was "socialist". And now here we are with half the planet insistent on denying the evidence in front of their eyes.
We've had nearly a 150 years of physics to get here, and now its "political interests" that are making the carbon molecules absorb infra red.
Well congratulations conservatives, it wasn't us scientific folk that decided atoms have a liberal bias, you goons.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
If these are the questions that you're asking now that you don't believe the "global warming narrative," you clearly didn't have a very thoughtful basis for your original belief either, if you're indeed being truthful about your personal conversion, which I must say that I found doubtful. Honestly, I would have expected a heck of a lot more thought out of an astrophysicist.
What is of concern is not prehistoric change and long-term trends. There are many ways to influence a physical system and the concern is about very recent, very rapid change that is human-induced. It doesn't matter if there have been different past driving forces, or that there is a very slow, long-term trend. If we're causing a much larger, much faster change with our present activity, none of the distractions that you mention are particularly relevant.