I don't know what data sources you're talking about, but that doesn't appear to be the case for the climate models I'm familiar with. You need a pretty large change in radiative forcing to significantly alter the simulation output, at least on the large scales that such models are typically used for (global and continental multidecadal trends). Alternatively, you can monkey around with the feedbacks, which is why the models have climate sensitivities which range over maybe 2-4 degrees. But to get a feedback effect stronger than that, you have to start making changes big enough that the models stop agreeing with observations.
I very often see articles saying the Dark Matter is found. This has been going on for years already. Articles titled "Dark Matter Found". But later another article pops up again saying "Dark Matter Found" and it'll have a totally different explanation
I don't think you're paying very close attention to what's being reported. Dark matter research isn't continually contradicting itself with new explanations every week.
In the late 1990s, some dark matter was found in the form of MACHOs (basically, brown dwarves and things), but it wasn't enough to explain what all the dark matter was. Since then, more attention has focused on WIMPs (new kinds of particles). Observational studies have continued which have been able to exclude some kinds of WIMPs (e.g., it can't be mostly neutrinos or other very light particles). There are a handful of leading candidates for what most of the WIMPs are (gravitinos, axions,...). This has remained true for some time. Studies like TFA which provide particle evidence are pretty rare, actually; most of it comes from gravitational dynamics.
On 100 year time scales, variations in the Earth's orbit don't have anything to do with climate change. They're too small. Over 100,000 year time scales, they do become important: they lead to the Milankovitch cycles which are thought to cause the glacial-interglacial cycle.
Though presumably its advocates have models that supposedly show that acid rain would not occur.
They've shown that the total amount of acid rain worldwide would increase, but not by much. However, that can still harm some ecosystems, and if you do it worldwide you're introducing acid rain everywhere in the world, including lots of places that have never had it. The local increase can be substantial.
I seem to recall that they spoke in terms of scattering actual particles, not sulfur dioxide aerosol.
News reports often get that mixed up. They don't always distinguish between solid particles and liquid droplets. They could have been speaking of either.
In any case, I think you'll agree that of the potential side effects of this idea, the risk of starting a world war far outweighs the risk of causing acid rain.
There are far worse environmental risks than acid rain. Spatially inhomogeneous adjustment of climate, changes in precipitation patterns, ocean acidification causing widespread ecosystem collapse, and the very large and rapid climate change we'd experience if we ever stopped doing it. The latter to my mind is the worst: imagine getting hundreds of years of global warming in the span of a decade or so if we had to stop geoengineering a century or two down the line.
The political risks may be worse than that. It's hard to predict what people would do. If we really could maintain a pre-industrial climate, or even a year 2000 climate, that probably wouldn't enrage anyone too much. But we can't do that perfectly, and what if countries start intentionally altering the world climate to something other than pre-industrial levels?
Acid rain is not to be sneered at, but it' ecological effects pale in comparison to nuclear war.
Speaking of nuclear war... ironically enough, one of the leading proponents of aerosol geoengineering is Lowell Wood, one of the inventors of the Strategic Defense Initiative. He worked it out originally with Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb. I think such people like grandiose engineering solutions to human problems.
Acid rain is indeed one of the problems people worry about. The most commonly proposed form of aerosol geoengineering is sulfate aerosols. (I'm not sure why this is the most commonly proposed; perhaps it's the easiest to synthesize, or most effective at cooling.) The tiny droplets of sulfuric acid, later to become acid rain, are what scatter sunlight in the stratosphere and produce cooling.
I agree that the political ramifications are serious, although the ecological side effects can be quite serious too.
Particulate matter of the type you mentioned does, in fact, come down because of gravity. Even in the stratosphere. It takes a few years. That's one of the major objections to aerosol geoengineering.
I think you're right; the environmental kind of shot itself in the foot a while ago. But I don't think it helps that the U.S. Republicans seem to have made environmentalists into the new communists (at least pre-2001). The environmental mainstream isn't nearly as extreme as it is made out to be.
Case in point: until very recently, Al Gore's policy has been fairly middle of the road — mostly quite in line with both the scientific and economic climate literature — not "alarmist" and certainly not "rabid". However, a few weeks ago he came out with some "decarbonize in 10 years" policy, which is a radical departure from his previously mainline stance. I honestly don't think he believes that will happen or is even economically optimal, as he's actually pretty savvy on policy; I think he's just trying to shift the Overton window. But who knows...
It's not so simple. There are also inefficiencies in transporting gasoline to you, not just electricity. And there are large regional variations in how dirty your power supply is. I attended a talk by an energy engineering professor last year who was doing a detailed analysis of this issue for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He found that if you live in some states, PHEVs are a net win, and in others a net loss (in terms of CO2 emissions). He didn't look at pure EVs, but if PHEVs are a net win in some states I would expect EVs to be as well.
The lesson: if you want to get an electric vehicle, check your electricity source as well as you driving habits. (Hybrid electrics like the Prius don't come ahead, economically speaking, unless you do a lot of city driving, because they don't use the electric motor enough.) Someone needs to build a good CO2 emissions calculator that lets you input this information and estimate (a) their net change in CO2 emissions if they were to get this car vs. another one, and (b) the net time to recoup the extra costs in fuel savings over an equivalent non-electric vehicle.
This is why I said that the "evidence" against anthropogenic global warming falls apart once you get into details. Only without details does it sound superficially plausible.
Part of it pretty much lies in the raw data - such as cooling over the last few years
AGW does not predict that every year is monotonically warmer than the last; there are always ups and downs do to the vagaries of weather from year to year. Climate trends over a few years are lost in weather noise and consequently are statistically insignificant. Given the magnitude and autocorrelation of the noise, a trend needs to sustain itself for more like 20-30 years before it's significant. That's why it had to take a number of decades before climatologists finally decided AGW is real. If you look at a short period of time like a few years its short term trend can be positive, negative, or zero even almost independent of the underlying long term trend. That's why the error bars on trends get larger the less data you use.
Short term statistical fluctuations are inevitable, and you find such fluctuations elsewhere in the temperature record, both warming and cooling. You also find comparable fluctuations in the models, although since they're statistical in nature they don't occur in sync with observations. (That is, if the warming trend decreases for a few years in reality, it might increase in the models, or vice versa, depending on which way it fluctuates.)
One such period is around the 1940s, when for about a decade global temperatures fluctuated higher than what the models predict should have happened. You don't hear anybody claiming that the 1940s proves that global warming is worse than we think — and for good reason. Similarly, it's statistically illegitimate to pick out the opposite as proof that global warming isn't as bad as we think. Particularly in light of the warming in the preceding 100 years, which people are all too quick to ignore in favor of cherry picking a few other years that happen to disagree less with their ideology. Please note that almost all of the years in this century, for instance, have been warmer than any of the years in the 20th century (except 1998 with its giant El Nino).
There are other periods of cooling that you can see even in the last 30 years, ranging in length from 3-7 years or so. For any of them I could have made the same argument you make, and then utterly failed to predict the global warming that followed.
and the tendancy for the earth to warm and cool over eons
The fact that climate has changed naturally in the past has nothing to do with the evidence that the current warming is not natural. Past climate changes can be attributed to such natural drivers as changes in insolation, volcanism, etc. Those drivers can indeed explain some of the warming in the early 20th century. But they totally fail to explain the warming since then, since trends in those drivers disagree in magnitude, rate, and timing — and sometimes even in sign! — with the observed warming.
I question the data that looks back only thousands - instead of tens or hundreds of thousands - of years
The data over the last 800,000 years or so — namely, the glacial-interglacial cycle — supports anthropogenic global warming. It does not contradict it. Specifically, the amount of temperature change apparent in the ice age cycle cannot be explained without appealing to a CO2 greenhouse effect of the same magnitude that people are worried about today.
In that perspective, we are actually just now emerging from the last Ice Age
No, that already happened long ago. If you look at the ice age paleoclimate data, you find that the ice age cycle is marked by a rapid warming out of an ice age (3-5 degrees C in a few thousand years) followed by a slow cooling back into the next ice age (same change, over tens of thousands of
I think that the research on man-made climate change isn't conclusive. There's plenty of evidence out there that disputes it.
Really? What is this evidence, specifically?
It's only when you start getting into details that you realize how lame most of this supposed "evidence" is, and how little of it is supported by actual science and scientists.
China's per-capita emissions are so much lower than ours in part because they still have so many people living in poverty, using very little resources. That is in fact why China is ramping up their emissions so much: as a byproduct of economic growth for their people. Of course, our emissions are high compared to anybody's; we're just rather wasteful, energy wise.
The article talks about black carbon warming the climate, but it has nothing to do with your point. Your point was about what altitude the soot goes to, and the article I cited doesn't talk about that.
Beyond that, please note that the article says that while they may warm the atmosphere, they cool the surface, which is where we live. This is another article (by Ramanathan and collaborators) which says the same thing. One might then conclude that a removal of these "brown clouds" would warm the surface, consistent with TFA.
Wow, I think every sentence in your post is wrong or misleading.
I'm actually old enough to remember the "global cooling" scare.
Yeah, but do you remember the scientific facts it was based on? No, you don't, because there largely weren't any.
The global cooling scare wasn't anything that ever appeared in the scientific literature. If you look at the literature of the time, most scientists were already predicting warming, or didn't conclude one way or another. If you disagree, please cite the preponderance of journal articles published which predicted global cooling.
The "global cooling scare" was mostly an invention of the media, particularly an extremely over-hyped article in Newsweek. If you read it, you find that it spends a lot of time trying to scare people about dropping temperatures, which were indeed dropping at the time. It cites a number of scientists to support that. But when it comes to predicting that the temperatures will keep dropping, it becomes very vague, and doesn't cite anybody, just saying "some scientists think". It also confusingly works in some text about ice ages without specifying that scientists knew that the ice age cycle takes thousands of years to cool.
Another of the sources of this "scare" was Time Magazine, which again noted the cooling temperatures, and pointed the finger at either solar trends or air pollution. (The latter turned out to be most of the cause.) They went on to note all the terrible things that could happen if such a trend continued, but they stopped short of actually saying it would. They said that some scientists thought the trend would be temporary and that everybody agreed more data was needed before conclusions could be reached.
The other big media hype at the time was about the Rasool and Schneider paper which did predict continued cooling. Well, they were pretty much the only ones who did; they were using a climate sensitivity estimate lower than what was accepted at the time, and they also used a very large projections of aerosol cooling. It turns out they weren't very good economists: industrial aerosols didn't end up increasing the way they assumed. But the latter isn't a failure of the climate science. All projections are conditional on economic estimates of emissions.
Funny thing, all the same "causes" were pointed at then, too.
No, they didn't point to CO2 emissions as a cause of global cooling.
I suggest we look a bit further afield... say, that bright thing in the sky with a mind of its own??
Yeah, because climatologists are idiots and have never considered where the radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere comes from.
Solar irradiance changes were responsible for some of the warming in the early 20th century, but little of the warming since then can be explained that way, because solar trends have been mostly flat, modulo the 11-year cycle, for something like 50+ years. The recent warming that people worry about disagrees with solar activity in magnitude, rate, and timing. See Foukal et al.'s Nature paper in 2006 for a review.
Black carbon (soot) is known to both cool and warm the regional climate. See this article. I don't know which effect wins in Beijing. In TFA, Ramanathan says it's a net cooling, and he's pretty famous in this area so I'll believe it. (It's not just black carbon but also sulfate aerosols in air pollution which cool.)
I guess you missed the part about "respected scientific journals". Energy and Environment is not a respected scientific journal. It's a vanity journal. Not one member of its 20+ editorial board is a climatologist, meteorologist, oceanographer, atmospheric chemist, geologist, or any other kind of geoscientist. I don't think any of them are scientists of any sort. They're a motley crew of economists, political scientists, engineers, policy analysts, etc. The only thing they have in common is their ideology. The journal is a dumping ground for crackpots.
You're the only person here who seemed puzzled over the fact that models have assumptions. That's pretty obvious to anyone. No, turning knobs in a climate model doesn't actually perform an experiment upon the Earth. Sheesh.
The last time that I checked the predictions weren't matching the observed temps. We weren't having anywhere near the "predicted" level of so called global warming.
In point of fact, we are pretty close to the predicted level of global warming. Here is a comparison of the predictions made in the mid-1990s to the observations; solid lines are observations, dashed lines are models. This is from the Rahmstorf et al. paper last year in Science. They're a little off, but given the large year-to-year fluctuations in temperature and the high autocorrelation of those fluctuations, the uncertainty in the smoothed trend overlaps the uncertainty in the model projections (see the gray error bars); you can see that uncertainty for one model (GISS ModelE) here.
You need a much larger difference between observations and models to statistically conclude that there is a real discrepancy. As I said, this takes about 30 years; you can't conclude anything on the basis of 10 years. If current temperatures stay flat for another 10-15 years, we can start to say that there's a real discrepancy. Right now, we can't.
And if you look over more than the last 10 years, it becomes even more obvious that there is not some huge deviation between models and observations: see here (where the red line is the multi-model mean). This is from the IPCC AR4 report.
Note, for instance, that the deviation between models and observations in the 1940s is larger than the deviation today. But you don't see skeptics screaming that the 1940s disprove global warming. Maybe that's because (a) it's an example of where the climate temporarily warmed more than the models predicted, and (b) the discrepancy lasted about 10 years and then the models went back into closer agreement with observations. Discrepancies between models and observations on such short terms are statistically inevitable, and anybody who tells you that they always have to match up in perfect lock step is lying to you.
It's already in place today to speak out or voice any information against the entire global climate change thing will get you socially black listed and being called a long list of names to basically through out everything you've researched in order to keep their status quo.
Give me a break. GOOD science gets published. Hell, even BAD science gets published (looks at Schwartz's climate sensitivity estimate). You can find serious disputes in the literature about the effects on global warming on hurricanes, the magnitude of climate sensitivity, the trends in ocean heat content, etc. You are simply unable to tell the difference between a legitimate scientific critique and some armchair blog analysis. Case in point: "We weren't having anywhere near the `predicted' level of so called global warming."
It doesn't matter what the evidence says.
Maybe to people who have little knowledge of science.
In terms of total annual CO2 emissions, US ranks first with a CO2 emissions of 20% greater than China (which ranks second).
Those data are from 2004. China has just passed the US in CO2 emissions according to many measures (e.g. here), although some others project it won't happen until next year; it's hard to estimate accurately. This is due mostly to its massive construction of coal fired power plants. The US is still way ahead in per capita emissions though. (According to the above link, we're at 19.4 tons per person per year. Russia is 11.8, the EU 8.6, China 5.1, India 1.8.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what data sources you're talking about, but that doesn't appear to be the case for the climate models I'm familiar with. You need a pretty large change in radiative forcing to significantly alter the simulation output, at least on the large scales that such models are typically used for (global and continental multidecadal trends). Alternatively, you can monkey around with the feedbacks, which is why the models have climate sensitivities which range over maybe 2-4 degrees. But to get a feedback effect stronger than that, you have to start making changes big enough that the models stop agreeing with observations.
Oops, I meant neutralinos, not gravitinos.
I very often see articles saying the Dark Matter is found. This has been going on for years already. Articles titled "Dark Matter Found". But later another article pops up again saying "Dark Matter Found" and it'll have a totally different explanation
I don't think you're paying very close attention to what's being reported. Dark matter research isn't continually contradicting itself with new explanations every week.
In the late 1990s, some dark matter was found in the form of MACHOs (basically, brown dwarves and things), but it wasn't enough to explain what all the dark matter was. Since then, more attention has focused on WIMPs (new kinds of particles). Observational studies have continued which have been able to exclude some kinds of WIMPs (e.g., it can't be mostly neutrinos or other very light particles). There are a handful of leading candidates for what most of the WIMPs are (gravitinos, axions, ...). This has remained true for some time. Studies like TFA which provide particle evidence are pretty rare, actually; most of it comes from gravitational dynamics.
"And the Finnish language is bloody difficult to learn." (a little more than 4 mins in).
Even the Finns admit it ...
On 100 year time scales, variations in the Earth's orbit don't have anything to do with climate change. They're too small. Over 100,000 year time scales, they do become important: they lead to the Milankovitch cycles which are thought to cause the glacial-interglacial cycle.
Here is a page describing how this can be done cheaply for amateur astronomy.
Some reading on geoengineering:
An Overview of Geoengineering of Climate Using Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosols"
20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea
Though presumably its advocates have models that supposedly show that acid rain would not occur.
They've shown that the total amount of acid rain worldwide would increase, but not by much. However, that can still harm some ecosystems, and if you do it worldwide you're introducing acid rain everywhere in the world, including lots of places that have never had it. The local increase can be substantial.
I seem to recall that they spoke in terms of scattering actual particles, not sulfur dioxide aerosol.
News reports often get that mixed up. They don't always distinguish between solid particles and liquid droplets. They could have been speaking of either.
In any case, I think you'll agree that of the potential side effects of this idea, the risk of starting a world war far outweighs the risk of causing acid rain.
There are far worse environmental risks than acid rain. Spatially inhomogeneous adjustment of climate, changes in precipitation patterns, ocean acidification causing widespread ecosystem collapse, and the very large and rapid climate change we'd experience if we ever stopped doing it. The latter to my mind is the worst: imagine getting hundreds of years of global warming in the span of a decade or so if we had to stop geoengineering a century or two down the line.
The political risks may be worse than that. It's hard to predict what people would do. If we really could maintain a pre-industrial climate, or even a year 2000 climate, that probably wouldn't enrage anyone too much. But we can't do that perfectly, and what if countries start intentionally altering the world climate to something other than pre-industrial levels?
Acid rain is not to be sneered at, but it' ecological effects pale in comparison to nuclear war.
Speaking of nuclear war ... ironically enough, one of the leading proponents of aerosol geoengineering is Lowell Wood, one of the inventors of the Strategic Defense Initiative. He worked it out originally with Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb. I think such people like grandiose engineering solutions to human problems.
Acid rain is indeed one of the problems people worry about. The most commonly proposed form of aerosol geoengineering is sulfate aerosols. (I'm not sure why this is the most commonly proposed; perhaps it's the easiest to synthesize, or most effective at cooling.) The tiny droplets of sulfuric acid, later to become acid rain, are what scatter sunlight in the stratosphere and produce cooling.
I agree that the political ramifications are serious, although the ecological side effects can be quite serious too.
Particulate matter of the type you mentioned does, in fact, come down because of gravity. Even in the stratosphere. It takes a few years. That's one of the major objections to aerosol geoengineering.
Cavorite dust.
I think you're right; the environmental kind of shot itself in the foot a while ago. But I don't think it helps that the U.S. Republicans seem to have made environmentalists into the new communists (at least pre-2001). The environmental mainstream isn't nearly as extreme as it is made out to be.
Case in point: until very recently, Al Gore's policy has been fairly middle of the road — mostly quite in line with both the scientific and economic climate literature — not "alarmist" and certainly not "rabid". However, a few weeks ago he came out with some "decarbonize in 10 years" policy, which is a radical departure from his previously mainline stance. I honestly don't think he believes that will happen or is even economically optimal, as he's actually pretty savvy on policy; I think he's just trying to shift the Overton window. But who knows ...
It's not so simple. There are also inefficiencies in transporting gasoline to you, not just electricity. And there are large regional variations in how dirty your power supply is. I attended a talk by an energy engineering professor last year who was doing a detailed analysis of this issue for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He found that if you live in some states, PHEVs are a net win, and in others a net loss (in terms of CO2 emissions). He didn't look at pure EVs, but if PHEVs are a net win in some states I would expect EVs to be as well.
The lesson: if you want to get an electric vehicle, check your electricity source as well as you driving habits. (Hybrid electrics like the Prius don't come ahead, economically speaking, unless you do a lot of city driving, because they don't use the electric motor enough.) Someone needs to build a good CO2 emissions calculator that lets you input this information and estimate (a) their net change in CO2 emissions if they were to get this car vs. another one, and (b) the net time to recoup the extra costs in fuel savings over an equivalent non-electric vehicle.
This is why I said that the "evidence" against anthropogenic global warming falls apart once you get into details. Only without details does it sound superficially plausible.
Part of it pretty much lies in the raw data - such as cooling over the last few years
AGW does not predict that every year is monotonically warmer than the last; there are always ups and downs do to the vagaries of weather from year to year. Climate trends over a few years are lost in weather noise and consequently are statistically insignificant. Given the magnitude and autocorrelation of the noise, a trend needs to sustain itself for more like 20-30 years before it's significant. That's why it had to take a number of decades before climatologists finally decided AGW is real. If you look at a short period of time like a few years its short term trend can be positive, negative, or zero even almost independent of the underlying long term trend. That's why the error bars on trends get larger the less data you use.
Short term statistical fluctuations are inevitable, and you find such fluctuations elsewhere in the temperature record, both warming and cooling. You also find comparable fluctuations in the models, although since they're statistical in nature they don't occur in sync with observations. (That is, if the warming trend decreases for a few years in reality, it might increase in the models, or vice versa, depending on which way it fluctuates.)
One such period is around the 1940s, when for about a decade global temperatures fluctuated higher than what the models predict should have happened. You don't hear anybody claiming that the 1940s proves that global warming is worse than we think — and for good reason. Similarly, it's statistically illegitimate to pick out the opposite as proof that global warming isn't as bad as we think. Particularly in light of the warming in the preceding 100 years, which people are all too quick to ignore in favor of cherry picking a few other years that happen to disagree less with their ideology. Please note that almost all of the years in this century, for instance, have been warmer than any of the years in the 20th century (except 1998 with its giant El Nino).
There are other periods of cooling that you can see even in the last 30 years, ranging in length from 3-7 years or so. For any of them I could have made the same argument you make, and then utterly failed to predict the global warming that followed.
and the tendancy for the earth to warm and cool over eons
The fact that climate has changed naturally in the past has nothing to do with the evidence that the current warming is not natural. Past climate changes can be attributed to such natural drivers as changes in insolation, volcanism, etc. Those drivers can indeed explain some of the warming in the early 20th century. But they totally fail to explain the warming since then, since trends in those drivers disagree in magnitude, rate, and timing — and sometimes even in sign! — with the observed warming.
I question the data that looks back only thousands - instead of tens or hundreds of thousands - of years
The data over the last 800,000 years or so — namely, the glacial-interglacial cycle — supports anthropogenic global warming. It does not contradict it. Specifically, the amount of temperature change apparent in the ice age cycle cannot be explained without appealing to a CO2 greenhouse effect of the same magnitude that people are worried about today.
In that perspective, we are actually just now emerging from the last Ice Age
No, that already happened long ago. If you look at the ice age paleoclimate data, you find that the ice age cycle is marked by a rapid warming out of an ice age (3-5 degrees C in a few thousand years) followed by a slow cooling back into the next ice age (same change, over tens of thousands of
I think that the research on man-made climate change isn't conclusive. There's plenty of evidence out there that disputes it.
Really? What is this evidence, specifically?
It's only when you start getting into details that you realize how lame most of this supposed "evidence" is, and how little of it is supported by actual science and scientists.
Heavy boots.
China's per-capita emissions are so much lower than ours in part because they still have so many people living in poverty, using very little resources. That is in fact why China is ramping up their emissions so much: as a byproduct of economic growth for their people. Of course, our emissions are high compared to anybody's; we're just rather wasteful, energy wise.
The article talks about black carbon warming the climate, but it has nothing to do with your point. Your point was about what altitude the soot goes to, and the article I cited doesn't talk about that.
Beyond that, please note that the article says that while they may warm the atmosphere, they cool the surface, which is where we live. This is another article (by Ramanathan and collaborators) which says the same thing. One might then conclude that a removal of these "brown clouds" would warm the surface, consistent with TFA.
I forgot, I meant to cite this historical review of what climate scientists, as opposed to the media, were really saying at the time.
Wow, I think every sentence in your post is wrong or misleading.
I'm actually old enough to remember the "global cooling" scare.
Yeah, but do you remember the scientific facts it was based on? No, you don't, because there largely weren't any.
The global cooling scare wasn't anything that ever appeared in the scientific literature. If you look at the literature of the time, most scientists were already predicting warming, or didn't conclude one way or another. If you disagree, please cite the preponderance of journal articles published which predicted global cooling.
The "global cooling scare" was mostly an invention of the media, particularly an extremely over-hyped article in Newsweek. If you read it, you find that it spends a lot of time trying to scare people about dropping temperatures, which were indeed dropping at the time. It cites a number of scientists to support that. But when it comes to predicting that the temperatures will keep dropping, it becomes very vague, and doesn't cite anybody, just saying "some scientists think". It also confusingly works in some text about ice ages without specifying that scientists knew that the ice age cycle takes thousands of years to cool.
Another of the sources of this "scare" was Time Magazine, which again noted the cooling temperatures, and pointed the finger at either solar trends or air pollution. (The latter turned out to be most of the cause.) They went on to note all the terrible things that could happen if such a trend continued, but they stopped short of actually saying it would. They said that some scientists thought the trend would be temporary and that everybody agreed more data was needed before conclusions could be reached.
The other big media hype at the time was about the Rasool and Schneider paper which did predict continued cooling. Well, they were pretty much the only ones who did; they were using a climate sensitivity estimate lower than what was accepted at the time, and they also used a very large projections of aerosol cooling. It turns out they weren't very good economists: industrial aerosols didn't end up increasing the way they assumed. But the latter isn't a failure of the climate science. All projections are conditional on economic estimates of emissions.
Funny thing, all the same "causes" were pointed at then, too.
No, they didn't point to CO2 emissions as a cause of global cooling.
I suggest we look a bit further afield... say, that bright thing in the sky with a mind of its own??
Yeah, because climatologists are idiots and have never considered where the radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere comes from.
Solar irradiance changes were responsible for some of the warming in the early 20th century, but little of the warming since then can be explained that way, because solar trends have been mostly flat, modulo the 11-year cycle, for something like 50+ years. The recent warming that people worry about disagrees with solar activity in magnitude, rate, and timing. See Foukal et al.'s Nature paper in 2006 for a review.
Black carbon (soot) is known to both cool and warm the regional climate. See this article. I don't know which effect wins in Beijing. In TFA, Ramanathan says it's a net cooling, and he's pretty famous in this area so I'll believe it. (It's not just black carbon but also sulfate aerosols in air pollution which cool.)
I guess you missed the part about "respected scientific journals". Energy and Environment is not a respected scientific journal. It's a vanity journal. Not one member of its 20+ editorial board is a climatologist, meteorologist, oceanographer, atmospheric chemist, geologist, or any other kind of geoscientist. I don't think any of them are scientists of any sort. They're a motley crew of economists, political scientists, engineers, policy analysts, etc. The only thing they have in common is their ideology. The journal is a dumping ground for crackpots.
You're the only person here who seemed puzzled over the fact that models have assumptions. That's pretty obvious to anyone. No, turning knobs in a climate model doesn't actually perform an experiment upon the Earth. Sheesh.
The last time that I checked the predictions weren't matching the observed temps. We weren't having anywhere near the "predicted" level of so called global warming.
In point of fact, we are pretty close to the predicted level of global warming. Here is a comparison of the predictions made in the mid-1990s to the observations; solid lines are observations, dashed lines are models. This is from the Rahmstorf et al. paper last year in Science. They're a little off, but given the large year-to-year fluctuations in temperature and the high autocorrelation of those fluctuations, the uncertainty in the smoothed trend overlaps the uncertainty in the model projections (see the gray error bars); you can see that uncertainty for one model (GISS ModelE) here.
You need a much larger difference between observations and models to statistically conclude that there is a real discrepancy. As I said, this takes about 30 years; you can't conclude anything on the basis of 10 years. If current temperatures stay flat for another 10-15 years, we can start to say that there's a real discrepancy. Right now, we can't.
And if you look over more than the last 10 years, it becomes even more obvious that there is not some huge deviation between models and observations: see here (where the red line is the multi-model mean). This is from the IPCC AR4 report.
Note, for instance, that the deviation between models and observations in the 1940s is larger than the deviation today. But you don't see skeptics screaming that the 1940s disprove global warming. Maybe that's because (a) it's an example of where the climate temporarily warmed more than the models predicted, and (b) the discrepancy lasted about 10 years and then the models went back into closer agreement with observations. Discrepancies between models and observations on such short terms are statistically inevitable, and anybody who tells you that they always have to match up in perfect lock step is lying to you.
It's already in place today to speak out or voice any information against the entire global climate change thing will get you socially black listed and being called a long list of names to basically through out everything you've researched in order to keep their status quo.
Give me a break. GOOD science gets published. Hell, even BAD science gets published (looks at Schwartz's climate sensitivity estimate). You can find serious disputes in the literature about the effects on global warming on hurricanes, the magnitude of climate sensitivity, the trends in ocean heat content, etc. You are simply unable to tell the difference between a legitimate scientific critique and some armchair blog analysis. Case in point: "We weren't having anywhere near the `predicted' level of so called global warming."
It doesn't matter what the evidence says.
Maybe to people who have little knowledge of science.
In terms of total annual CO2 emissions, US ranks first with a CO2 emissions of 20% greater than China (which ranks second).
Those data are from 2004. China has just passed the US in CO2 emissions according to many measures (e.g. here), although some others project it won't happen until next year; it's hard to estimate accurately. This is due mostly to its massive construction of coal fired power plants. The US is still way ahead in per capita emissions though. (According to the above link, we're at 19.4 tons per person per year. Russia is 11.8, the EU 8.6, China 5.1, India 1.8.)