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Prospects Rise For a 2015 UN Climate Deal, But Likely To Be Weak
An anonymous reader writes with news that a global climate deal seems to be on the horizon. "A global deal to combat climate change in 2015 looks more likely after promises for action by China, the United States and the European Union, but any agreement will probably be too weak to halt rising temperatures. Delegates from almost 200 nations will meet in Lima, Peru, from Dec. 1-12 to work on the accord due in Paris in a year's time, also spurred by new scientific warnings about risks of floods, heatwaves, ocean acidification and rising seas. After failure to agree a sweeping U.N. treaty at a summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the easier but less ambitious aim now is a deal made up of 'nationally determined' plans to help reverse a 45 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990."
The agreement allows China to continue building coal-powered plants, expand its economy and cement its place as the world's leading polluter -- perhaps even doubling its output until 2030 or some year around that time, when China's carbon emissions are expected to peak.
At that point, the Chinese promise that they will implement some vague action plan at some vague point in the future. All we need to do is trust them. The agreement contains no binding language requiring any goals to be met.
The only way to reduce carbon emissions is to improve our technology to the point that non-emitting technologies are cheaper than emitting technologies. Electric cars, etc.
The reason politicians won't come to a meaningful agreement is because the population doesn't want it. Most people aren't willing to give up their car (or even double the price of gas) for the sake of global warming.
It would be easier to get everyone to agree to switch to nuclear energy than to agree to meaningful limits on CO2 emissions, and you should be familiar with how difficult of a political problem that is. People don't want to switch to nuclear because of.........actually I don't really know why, but even in countries that actually want to do something about CO2 (like Germany) are switching away from nuclear, so that tells you how hard the problem is.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
News Flash: the Republicans are taking control of the Senate in January.
It would be easier to get everyone to agree to switch to nuclear energy than to agree to meaningful limits on CO2 emissions
Even though going nuclear is the only practical solution, I don't think it's any easier - you have decades of people devoted to scaring people about anything nuclear, and those groups are still around piping that tune - even to the clear detriment of the earth and environment. They just are too afraid to do anything else.
even in countries that actually want to do something about CO2 (like Germany) are switching away from nuclear, so that tells you how hard the problem is.
Exactly my point, if even GERMANS can't be rational about this there is no hope for anyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That hottest year in 1998 did give opportunity for a lot of profitable agenda driven nonsense; remember to live as Al Gore says, not as he does with his 20+ family equivalent carbon footprint (give the hypocrite some credit, it used to be 30+ until he put some "green" tech in his mansion)
Of course, the fact of global cooling showing that most the issue was cyclical rather than man-driven might get notice even from the unwashed masses soon
It isn't just the right-wing media pundits who are climate deniers. Look no further than the new House Majority Leader from the great coal state of Kentucky, re-elected with money from the Koch Brothers, (who are kinda big on coal). Or the Frackin' State of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who disagrees with 800 actual scientists on the matter, since forever. In fact James Inhofe wrote a anti-science book, titled "The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future", and among other things he oversees the Environmental Protection Agency.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Grea...
http://stateimpact.npr.org/okl...
Well, what else are they gonna do? No-one in the real world is going to hire them to do a real job.
That hottest year in 1998
According to NASA, the years 2005, 2007, and 2010 were hotter. On the 5-year average, all the years 1999-2011 were hotter than 1998. Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
Look up cherry-pick in the skeptics guide to science, 'cause that's just what you did on a decadal trend.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
A single year does not a trend make. It's a decadal trend. Average the temperatures on a decadal basis, and you will see that there was never an abatement from warming. Furthermore, most of the heat (90+%) goes into the oceans, which makes them rise (because they expand) and the signal is much less noisy. No abatement there either. And besides, 1998 wasn't the hottest year on record -- that's is an ambiguous statement -- and it was hot because of a record El Nino. The next record El Nino will blast 1998 to bits, unless there is some mitigating circumstance such as huge volcanic eruptions in the same year. And I say all of this fully aware that you cannot possibly understand it -- being a "skeptic" and all.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If only the sun's output showed a trend. Gee, a bunch of ideologues with ties to industry providing you with the "truth" of climate change, eh? Sad.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The deal is actually the opposite. America doesn't really need to do much to meet Obama's target. The natural market-driven growth of renewables will do it, so long as the GOP doesn't play pick the winners and losers by slapping regulations. (*cough* Kansas *cough*). It may well cost the US consumer $0. China, on the other hand, is deploying huge amounts of new energy, and will fundamentally need to shift their plan in order to have emissions peak in 2030. But they want to do it anyway, since -- pollution, and they will be at the bleeding edge of renewables technology with will own carbon by 2030. Heck, wind is already price parity with coal, and solar is dropping fast. See Levelized cost of electricity by source. And I say all of this knowing that you cannot understand it, because you are a "skeptic" with the "truth". (Somehow not a contradiction -- but that's human nature for you.)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's amazing how replete with projection "skepticism" is. You probably don't even know what that means, and almost certainly couldn't process it if you did.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I've never met anyone who can argue successfully against action on climate in an open debate. The whole denialist movement is merely a desperate papering over of the fact that a small number of people don't want to do anything about climate change.
Why?
Well, generally they can't even articulate that.
Very few people actually fall into this category, fewer still sincerely believe that rhetoric, the problem with dissonance is that it is hard to keep straight in your mind. So in an open debate, denialism always loses.
Not that this is a problem for politicians, they are well versed in the art of not engaging in open debate, and lie sufficiently well that they can pretend to take action, and at the same time make sure that the short term interests of their fossil fuel industry patrons are protected.
The freaks are really posting today.
I fully agree with you - but - carbon dioxide is not in any way "pollution". It's plant food. It has likely contributed to our greening planet, which has caused deserts to shrink and our food output to reach record highs.
Either we explicitly want to cut down on CO2 production due to our skilled models saying it will hurt us - and/or we stop various forms of pollution. It's very unscientific to pretend there the same thing.
it's in my head
Those years were "hottest" only on a multi-year averaging system. I'm not denying we've had a hot spell.
According to current definitions of "pollutant", CO2 fits the bill. http://www.skepticalscience.co... And "plant food" and "pollutant" are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Phosphate is also a plant food and a potential pollutant at the same time.
The years 2005, 2007 and 2010 were the hottest on single year basis, not averaged. See the source link I provided. And based on records from Jan through Oct, it looks like 2014 is going to end up in the top 3 again, which means that there will be 4 years that were hotter than 1998, which was an outlier year with record high El-Nino.
If only the sun's output showed a trend. Gee, a bunch of ideologues with ties to industry providing you with the "truth" of climate change, eh? Sad.
Actually, the amount of relevant radiation that reaches the earth shows a pretty compelling correlation with global temperatures. It's certainly a better correlation that the CO2 concentrations.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I've never met anyone who can argue successfully against action on climate in an open debate.
Well, since you are being the judge of 'successful,' I'm not surprised you've never seen that. You are no different than most people in that you don't like to lose your own argument.
In the case of climate change, people and politicians are happy to help the environment. You will rarely see a politician who says he wants to hurt the environment.
It's only when you get down to specific propositions that people object. How much are you willing to help the environment? Are you willing to double the price of gas (to decrease demand)? Are you willing to significantly increase your electric bill? The answer to these for most people is no, they aren't.
But if it's just 'doing something', sure, I'm in favor of 'doing something,' as long as it doesn't negatively effect me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So let me get this straight:
Delegates (ie, representatives and their entourages, servants, security, family, etc) from 200 nations will all be taking their private jets to a city located in a subtropical desert during the summer, where they'll sit around for a week in luxurious air conditioning discussing an agreement that they may decide to agree to a year later when they all travel by private jet to Paris to do it all over again.
And we're expected to take these people seriously when it comes to what they say concerning carbon emissions, global warming, and how to stop it? If they wanted to be taken seriously, they'd hold the meeting using Skype and live stream it for everyone to watch, but then they couldn't enjoy the luxury of emitting a hundred million tons of CO2 to have their discussion about how to emit less CO2.
What a bunch of clowns!
There will be no strong environmental law as long as American corporations have the same rights as human beings. Holy Profit trunmps the environment--and everything else.
According to current definitions of "pollutant", CO2 fits the bill.
According to Skeptical Science. Which is kind of like saying that under current definitions of "safe", cigarettes fit the bill (according to Philip Morris).
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You want ties to industry? How about cap and trade being written by the same geniuses that gave us credit default swaps? At the end of the day you can wave whatever flag you want because the only "solutions" being pushed are nothing but a reverse robin hood scam where the actual polluters get carbon "indulgences" while those that can't afford to offshore their wealth get royally fucked in the ass to benefit the 1%...surprise surprise, the rich getting richer by stealing what few cents out of each dollar they don't already hoard.
Its nothing but a case of "tighten your belt peasant to save teh earf!" being sold to ya by guys like Rev Al Gore who sips his wine while riding in a fleet of SUVs to his McMansion...but he is "green" because he pays himself carbon credits from his own company LOL! It just shows you how badly the greenies have been had, when a guy can take money from his left pocket and put it in his right and get credit (as well as a tax break) for being "carbon neutral" LOL!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The problem is the people in general. They do not want to be inconvenienced, burdened, overly taxed, or told they have to go without something they are already taking for granted while wealthy and rich people gets to still enjoy it. It is a step backwards in society from any rational sense of reality.
This is why the governments who are concerned should not be trying to force more expensive tech onto people, they should not be trying to tax them in hopes that someone will get fed up and create a better alternative before replacing the government and ignoring their concerns. The governments, the UN, all those concerned, should be investing in direct research to make cleaner alternatives and perhaps even cleaner fossil energy sources that are both cost competitive and safe which could be implemented by any country at little to no royalty costs. If instead of Kyoto requiring countries to tax energy use in excess of so much emissions or penalizing some countries while ignoring others (Seriously, out of 157 or so countries, only 37 had limits on carbon emissions and of those 2 had limits they would reach in the future) and instead put as much effort and attention into researching and developing energy sources that would effectively meet those goals while being cost competitive, we would likely not be talking about this right now. We would likely either realize there isn't good alternatives or be instituting them as they are more productive and profitable.
But it would seem that everything done is for some other agenda. You can see those agendas if you look around enough.
I'm in favor of 'doing something,' as long as it doesn't negatively effect me.
Burning coal is "doing something" and it is negatively impacting everyone..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I938 may have been hotter in the contiguous US but globally it wasn't anywhere near the hottest year.
It was climate change before it was global warming. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1958 titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1989. "Catastrophic" was just something the climate science deniers added so they could try and mock climate change.
Way to take phrases out of context.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've never met anyone who can argue successfully against action on climate in an open debate. The whole denialist movement is merely a desperate papering over of the fact that a small number of people don't want to do
Why should we care about what you think "successful" means? Use of the term, "denialist" indicates you aren't serious about debate. But I'll put forth a serious argument in case you decide to change your mind.
I grant that there is global warming and it probably is due in large part to human activities, particularly, greenhouse gas emissions and albedo changes. But there are plenty of problems going from that to asserting that we should act on it, particularly, the recent calls for reducing human carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050.
First, the evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is poor. The data sets gets really tenuous once you get further in the past than an actual temperature record (about 150 or so years ago). And actual measurement of global mean temperature is much more recent with satellite measurements. The most important parameter in climatology today, the temperature forcing of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels is unknown to at least a factor of 3 (1.5 C per to 4.5 C per is current IPCC estimate).
Second, the evidence for urgency concerning global warming is similarly poor. Extreme weather (particularly of any sort that is not a temperature high) is particularly dubious with poor statistical records of most such data past the 20th Century. Similarly, there's no evidence for a tipping point in the near future or damage from sea level rise or ocean acidification. It's all vague claims. Much is made of the increase in flood insurance claims while ignoring that most of the increase in these claims come from the US and are due to the US's very generous and cheap public flood insurance.
Third, there is a persistent bias by both scientists and policy makers towards exaggerating the effects of climate change. The numerous climate change models used over the past couple of decades have overstated global mean temperatures. Climategate showed that climatologists would have substantial disagreement over scientific issues, but hid those problems from the public. Several scientists (most notably Michael Mann) are notorious for consistently churning out poor but politically convenient research in content and timing.
A recent pause in global warming resulted in a search for the "missing" heat. Currently, that discrepancy is asserted to be heat absorbed by the oceans, but it is just as likely to have been radiated to space. Why look for the former, but not the latter?
Economic effects of AGW are consistently skewed in favor of portraying AGW as more harmful and portraying distant future costs as more harmful. Similar biases exist in policy makers, most notably the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has consistently exaggerated the research and pushed one particular solution: radical CO2 emissions reduction. Similarly, we have vast spending among developed world governments based on the assumption that AGW is an urgent matter.
And let us not forget the media who routinely eagerly exaggerates what claims are made.
Fourth, the economics of CO2 emission reduction is severely understated. People routinely ignore the economic impact of environmental regulations over the past few decades. That resulted in the massive movement of industry to the developing world from the regulated developed world.
The current proposals to heavily reduce CO2 emissions are at least of the same scope (due to the impact on energy production and transportation). So what makes this current proposal likely to create economic opportunity rather than a second wave of economic transfer of industry, commerce, and wealth to the developing world (and other non-complying regions)?
My view is that you need to have a better reason than some vague suspicion that AGW
Are you sure? Here's the usual solar activity / climate graph and there's no clear correlation between the Sun's activity and temperature, but a very obvious link to CO2.
The article you link shows how cosmic rays can seed cloud formation, which may well be correct, but I don't think there's any evidence of the next step, increased temperature.
They don't, and I have a suspicion that you know it, otherwise you really need to reappraise where you get your information from and your understanding of "scientific method".
You simply saying that all the research into AGW is poor and that it's all spun etc. doesn't make it so. You really are a denialist, and it's tragic that you are so caught up in this game you can't even use your own brain. You are a real human being who has handed over their thought processes to others. Again - it's tragic.
I could point you to many sources which show you're wrong, but I've seen others do just that and you still come back as if those interactions never happened.
If you actually read the site you'd see that the definition comes from the EPA. Linking to that particular page when this nonsense crops up saves time, as that page shows that calling CO2 is accurate in the English language, and also under EPA guidelines.
If it's clearly so wrong, debunk it. We can wait.
B) PLEASE read the scientific papers on this subject, as they do not claim that. The only possible way you can believe those claims to be true is if you go elsewhere for your science education. The land ice is shrinking massively, and sea ice is expanding, and temperatures have been increasing for 20 years, just not as much as expected, which has been countered by the rise in sea temperatures.
Please enlighten yourself, as you seem intelligent, but you get your science information from non-scientists.
Which of course explains why last winter it was so cold that all of the Great Lakes froze over after not having done so in more than 100 years. Yep. Any "hotter" than this and we'll go into another ice age.
It has never been as hot in the world as 1936. Its been a long time since Canadian border states had temps at 121 degrees Fahrenheit. Would that the planet were actually as hot as they used to say it would get we would have a whole lot less energy used in the wintertime. Of course that has not happened. It won't happen either but it would really be good if it did. It would also be nice if there were no more snow exactly like the Hadley Climate Research Center said in the year 2000: "We have in all likelihood seen our last snowfall. Snow would become a rare and exciting event. Children would grow up not knowing what snow looked like." Who says all that tax money given to them was a waste?
If there were a link and CO2 were causing global warming then it would be warmer now being that there is more of it now than there ever was in modern times. Unfortunately it is now colder than its been in most people's lifetimes. People are having to use more heating oil and nat gas to stay warm in the winter than ever before.
Oh really? Well then you had better get the nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and other nuclear power sources like the sun to just shut down.
Tragic is having grown adults look at the Great Lakes freeze solid and not thaw completely until late June of this year and claim the planet is "hotter than its ever been before" despite record breaking cold. It has not been that cold since 1912.
When you can deny actual observed reality because an "authority" told you to disbelieve reality you will believe anything you are told by that authority no matter how false it is. You lose the argument by hollering "denialist" at anyone that doesn't go along with the con. If the people that hurl that phrase about were told by the same authorities that Jews were causing global warming there would be another holocaust. To save the planet, of course.
It is warmer now than it's ever been in modern times, according to the people who try to measure global temperature. Here's the NOAA global temperature since 1880:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201410.gif
I realise that it's horribly cold in a lot of the US at the moment, but globally the world is very warm.
We often miss an important distinction between weather and climate. We don't have very good accuracy with weather year over year. Hell, we can't even predict the weather over the next 10 days, forget next year. Weather can wildly change week over week, year over year. Climate on the other hand measures changes over vast periods of time, 50 years, 100 years, 10,000 years, etc. Those are easier to guess because they're at a global "macro" level. The concern regarding global warming is at the climate level, not the weather level. All the hoopla over global climate change is all around the climate temperature rising a mere few degrees over the next 100 years. Between now and then it's expected we'll have hot and cold spells varying from month to month, year to year. Record breaking cold snaps and hot snaps are just examples of changing weather. Looking at just single hot years and cold years in varying weather patterns is like a pharmaceutical focusing on but a few patients during a live human drug test and ignoring the 1,000 others.
CO2 will continue to rise as long as we stay with per capita normalization, which is based on estimates in nations like China and India, combined with ignoring nations like China and India.
The fact is, that CO2 emissions is NOT tied to ppl, but GDP. As such, normalization needs to be based on emissions per GDP.
In addition, many nations love to cheat on information about estimates. What is needed is a single means of measuring all over the world. That is what OCO2 will bring us. It can measure CO2 flowing IN and OUT of a nation.
The best solution is for nations to put a tax on consumed goods predicated on where the parts come from and the amount of CO2 / GDP from the worst nations. In this fashion, it rewards nations that lower theirs (or stays low), while punishing those that are too high.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It has never been as hot in the world as 1936.
Yes, it has. Globally every year since 1990 has been warmer than 1936.
Its been a long time since Canadian border states had temps at 121 degrees Fahrenheit.
Actually, that would be Steele city in North Dakota on July 6th, 1936. No other Canadian border state has ever recorded a temperature of 121 F. Also note that North Dakota and south Dakota both recorded record lows of -60 F and -58 F in 1936. However, as previously pointed out, North America is about 4.8% of the world's surface and around 16.5% of the land area A record-shattering warm year in the U.S. might be barely noticable in the global record. On average, the 2000-2010 decade was 0.5 C warmer than the 1930-1940 decade. Which means for 1936 to lift the global average, the average temperature in North America would have be 10 C above average for the entire year, if the rest of the world was experiencing merely average temperatures for the decade.
It would also be nice if there were no more snow exactly like the Hadley Climate Research Center said in the year 2000: "We have in all likelihood seen our last snowfall. Snow would become a rare and exciting event. Children would grow up not knowing what snow looked like." Who says all that tax money given to them was a waste?
That's not an accurate quote. Even the quote you gave contradicts itself. It's also important to note that he was talking about 20 years from when he said that, and if you check your calendar you might note that it's not 2020 yet. Additionally, I'd bet he actually said "if the current trends continue" but it was dropped from the quote in the article because it wasn't pithy enough with the qualifier. Of course, we have seen a reduction in the rate of warming in surface air temperatures since 2000 so it may take longer to get there than he predicted, but the world has continued to warm, so it may still come to pass that England sees very little snow.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
You want ties to industry? How about cap and trade being written by the same geniuses that gave us credit default swaps [nakedcapitalism.com]? At the end of the day you can wave whatever flag you want because the only "solutions" being pushed are nothing but a reverse robin hood scam [youtube.com] where the actual polluters get carbon "indulgences" while those that can't afford to offshore their wealth get royally fucked in the ass to benefit the 1%...surprise surprise, the rich getting richer by stealing what few cents out of each dollar they don't already hoard.
You're American. Everything your country does is part of "a reverse robin hood scam".
Fanatically anti-fanatical
You simply saying that all the research into AGW is poor and that it's all spun etc. doesn't make it so.
Indeed. I've described the sort of problems (not at all a complete list I might add) that do make all that research in AGW poor. It's those problems, not my words that are at issue here.
I could point you to many sources which show you're wrong, but I've seen others do just that and you still come back as if those interactions never happened.
I require evidence not sources. So many people just don't get that dropping links is not the same thing as providing evidence. The key property of evidence is that it allows me to distinguish between hypotheses, such as between "climate change requires us to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050" and "we know which side of our bread is buttered and are presenting our research in a politically convenient light in order to preserve our funding".
This is part of the deeply unscientific rhetoric surrounding advocacy of the catastrophic AGW theory.
We know the heat hasn't been radiated to space, we have satellites that measure this.
I used to think the same until I realized the first place that people had looked for the "missing heat" was the polar regions. Why? Because it was the only surface region which wasn't covered by an extensive network of weather stations and weakly covered by satellites.
Well, these regions also happen, particularly in the Antarctic, to be places where high altitude ozone and water vapor, both significant greenhouse gases, happen to be particularly low. That means a pathway for heat to radiate to space which is not well studied.
Repeat after me: the fact that the earth is absorbing more energy than it is emitting is not something that is even the slightest bit in dispute. The only question is: where is the energy going (probably the ocean).
I wrote earlier "I grant that there is global warming" so I already agree with this assertion. It is not in dispute by me. What is in dispute by me is both the degree of warming (which seems consistently exaggerated) and what, if anything, we should do about it.
Climate on the other hand measures changes over vast periods of time, 50 years, 100 years, 10,000 years, etc. Those are easier to guess because they're at a global "macro" level.
And they're harder to guess because one has to wait 50, 100, or 10,000 years to see if the predictions come true. Climate predictions don't suffer from the chaotic behavior of weather, but they do suffer from systemic bias of the climate modelers.
You simply saying that all the research into AGW is poor
The predictions are poor. Or do you just ignore the studies that have shown that the computer models don't match reality?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Only if you want to rape the earth with a chainsaw is nuclear the worst option.
People who are against nuclear may as well set fire to an acre of tires in their back yard, it would represent a tiny fraction of the pollution you have caused from the continued and future use of coal plants, you dirty bastard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
as that page shows that calling CO2 is accurate in the English language, and also under EPA guidelines.
Clearly your English needs some work, I can't tell WTF you're trying to say, here.
I see you've gone from quoting a propaganda site to a tyrannical armed bureaucracy that directly funds that propaganda, and many others. I don't think that's better.
The only thing about the Federal government worse than the IRS is the EPA.
As for EPA's determination of CO2 as a pollutant, the Office of Inspector General review their finding, and concluded that not only did they not follow basic scientific method in coming to their conclusions, but they didn't even follow their own guidelines (this from the report):
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's a peer reviewed paper. I kind of trust that better than "Dave the pot smoker" on /.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Why just since 1880? No "modern times" before then? We at least have writing for at least 4000 back, if not further. Why stop at 1880? Hmmm??
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
First, you're looking at a propaganda site. I don't know where that graph is from, but the "forcings" don't work, and most of the assumptions made in the forcing models have been invalidated by observations. For instance, many used a parameter for forcings based feedbacks from increasing humidity that assumed net increase in temperatures, but it turns out, from long-term observations, that net temperatures decrease with increased humidity (due to cloud cover, which can insulate at night, but the total cover over time shows that the filtering effect of clouds during the day produces more than enough cooling to make up for it.
Many of the other forcing mechanisms that were used in climate models have been invalidated as well. I don't know which models have incorporated which of these tweaks, I don't follow it that deeply. But it looks like C/(W/m2) is either worthless or 1.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
HadCRUT goes back a little further, 1850:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT4.pdf
There aren't sufficient historical records to go back much further with direct measurement. You have to start relying on proxies, like tree measurements and ice cores.
I think all the solar activity graphs look like that, they are based on the same satellite data. For example:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png
How can increased solar activity be causing global warming if solar activity is not increasing? Isn't it more likely that the huge increase in CO2, a strongly-warming gas, is the cause?
Well, since you are being the judge of 'successful,' I'm not surprised you've never seen that.
I'm using fairly standard criteria - said criteria being based your ability to provide verifiable proof of your assertions. What did you think? That mere rhetoric would convince us?
I'm using fairly standard criteria - said criteria being based your ability to provide verifiable proof of your assertions. What did you think? That mere rhetoric would convince us?
I don't think there's anything that will convince you. If someone provided proof, you would find a way to explain it away.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, you'll never know unless you or one of your buddies actually post some proof, some day.
Here's the real problem:
Every time someone proposes a solution to climate change, people don't want it. It's not just politicians. That was the fact that started the thread, and it still stands.
Sure, if 'do something' means turning off your lights when you leave the room, people favor it. When it comes to doubling the price of gas, people don't.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why should we care about what you think "successful" means?
You've engaged in fallacy. Nobody cares about your feelings. If you can post proof of your numerous assertions, then post it, otherwise your assertions remain in the realm of paranoid delusion. e.g:
First, the evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is poor. The data sets gets really tenuous once you get further in the past than an actual temperature record (about 150 or so years ago). And actual measurement of global mean temperature is much more recent with satellite measurements. The most important parameter in climatology today, the temperature forcing of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels is unknown to at least a factor of 3 (1.5 C per to 4.5 C per is current IPCC estimate).
So essentially you are saying that in fact, the situation could be MUCH WORSE than what is predicted by current models. And this would motivate us to not take action on climate change why?