No, he didn't make up a false quote. He put the Steve Chu quote in single quotes, and then went on to add his own text outside of the quotes. It's just editorializing (albeit easy to misinterpret as an actual quote, the way the sentence is structured).
Steven Chu did say "We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe". The submitter, Hugh Pickens, added "to make Americans trade in their 'love affair with the automobile' for a marriage to mass transit".
Chu never said that, and the linked article doesn't say that either. Chu wants to reduce fossil fuel consumption, sure, and increased use of mass transit might be one part of that, but he's not advocating taking away Americans' cars and forcing them to ride buses, or whatever hyperbole Pickens is implying.
All the linked article actually states is that "some energy experts" say that increased gas prices will "encourage consumers to buy more efficient vehicles, discourage suburban sprawl, make renewables more competitive and reduce U.S. reliance on imported oil".
Sorry, CERN, but you need to pick up the workmanship before you can be taken seriously.
OPERA isn't a CERN project. CERN sent OPERA the neutrinos, but the detector and timing hardware is OPERA's responsibility. I don't know why CERN stepped in to issue a press release about errors in the results OPERA announced. (Maybe they wanted to dissociate themselves from the FTL claims that were being indirectly attributed to CERN?) More here.
Re:So simulation models are not as good as we thou
on
Physics Is (NP-)Hard
·
· Score: 1
The whole point of the article is that such equations, upon which climate simulations do indeed depend, are not easily derived and may not be reliable in many cases.
No, that's not the point of the article. The point of the article is that there isn't any fast algorithm that can derive ALL dynamical equations PERFECTLY.
It is silent on which specific dynamical systems admit accurate approximations that can be efficiently identified from data. (This is, as I noted originally, very problem specific and depends on your quality metric and the granularity at which you want answers.)
Re:So simulation models are not as good as we thou
on
Physics Is (NP-)Hard
·
· Score: 2
Really? Then why did the authors say:
They didn't.
Seems like simulation of complex systems like climate are NP-Hard
No.
I guess you're going to make me repeat myself here. Try to pay attention.
What's NP-Hard is an algorithm which can identify the exact dynamical laws that give rise to a set of observed data. This doesn't say anything about the computational complexity of simulating of dynamical laws.
Furthermore, this result says nothing about the quality (i.e., accuracy) or computational complexity of an algorithm to identify approximate dynamical laws (e.g., computer simulations) from empirical data. For all we know, it's possible to identify approximate dynamical laws to a given system to an arbitrarily high accuracy, in polynomial time. They just can't be determined exactly.
Finally, this result has nothing in particular to do with any particular system, such as the climate, and it proves no results how hard it is to identify dynamics as a function of system "complexity". It's a statement about the ability of a single algorithm to identify all possible dynamical laws in all possible systems from all possible data.
which cast serious doubt on the models employed by proponents of human-induced climate change.
It sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here. It's apparently not climate models per se you have a problem with, but the fact that they're employed by "proponents of human-induced climate change".
The theorem doesn't say that identifying climate dynamics from climate data is any harder or easier than identifying gravitational dynamics from trajectory data, chemical dynamics from molecular data, etc. It just says that there isn't a polynomial-time algorithm that can identify dynamical laws from measurements of every possible system.
Re:So simulation models are not as good as we thou
on
Physics Is (NP-)Hard
·
· Score: 1
This result says essentially nothing about the quality of simulation models, either for the climate or any other complex system. It applies to exactly reconstructing the dynamics of a system. It says nothing about the quality of approximations to dynamical systems (i.e., simulation models), or the difficulty in constructing "good" approximations (where "good" is, in general, application-dependent).
Oops, HTML got garbled. And I got the timescale wrong (1.5 * 10^22 J of heat accumulation is over about the 10-year period of 1995-2005, not the "latter half of the 20th century".
Here's the intended post:
Your innumerate ranting about needing to do math refused to do any math. And come on, merely mentioning global warming's contribution to the Earth's mass budget makes one a zealot? Sounds like you have an axe to grind. Who's the zealot here?
Let me do the math for you.
Cumulative ocean heat uptake over the 1995-2005 decade, largely due to global warming, is almost 1.5 * 10^23 Joules for the upper 700 meters of the ocean alone (reference). By E = mc^2, this works out to about 1700 tons over about 10 years, or about 170 tons per year, as the article claims.
The mass-equivalent from global warming is not due to the energy released by combustion, but rather to the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect. The latter is about 100 times bigger than the former (rough calculation).
You are, at least, correct in saying that the mass equivalent of global warming is probably dwarfed by the error bars on the Earth's net mass budget.
Your innumerate ranting about needing to do math refused to do any math. And come on, merely mentioning global warming's contribution to the Earth's mass budget makes one a zealot? Sounds like you have an axe to grind. Who's the zealot here?
Let me do the math for you.
Cumulative ocean heat uptake through the latter half of the 20th century, largely due to global warming, is about 1.5 * 10^23 Joules for the upper 700 meters of the ocean alone (referencerough calculation).
You are, at least, correct in saying that the mass equivalent of global warming is probably dwarfed by the error bars on the Earth's net mass budget.
Exactly. Put a series of these on the west coast and we might even be able to seed the desert that occupies half of the US. I'm sure the central valley farmers would like to see the rivers return to normal.
Yeah, right. Artificially evaporate vastly more water than currently evaporates off of the ocean? I don't think you appreciate the scale involved (nor what that would do to the coasts if you put that much evaporative infrastructure in place).
Look, I know you like to remain willfully ignorant, but I'd really suggest reading some of the vast literature on glacial dynamics. It ain't that simple.
So no, for the end of the warm period to be 50,000 years from now would be quite divergent from the climatalogical pattern of the last million years, and leave us out of phase.
You need to read the literature on this subject. The glacial-interglacial cycles are not a perfect 100ky cycle (in fact, the cycles used to have a different period), and the relative importance of the eccentricity, precession, and obliquity cycles drifts over time. In fact, there is a lot of glacial dynamical theory which predicts an extended interglacial ahead. I didn't pull that 50,000 years number out of nowhere. For a couple references, see for example Berger and Loutre, Crucifix and Rougier. There is a third I saw recently that got a similar figure, and of course there are older papers too.
However, as I mentioned to the other poster, this is still very controversial within the geological community. There is a new paper by Tzedakis et al. that gets ~1500 years, and Ruddiman argues that the next glacial should already have started if it weren't for humans. On the whole, the papers I've seen tend to favor 20-50 ky rather than a shorter period of glacial inception. But this is way, way more subtle than "durr, it's a 100 ky cycle so we're due", and you can't predict anything at all from the past temperature record. At the very least, you need to study the Milankovitch forcings as well, and propagate those through a dynamics with long lag times to see what happens.
Go back and read his proposal. I think you're confused about his wording. He's proposing to add more water vapor to the atmosphere ("pumping it out" from the nuclear plant to the atmosphere) to increase the greenhouse effect in order to forestall an ice age. Removing water vapor from the atmosphere (if it could be done) would only hasten the ice age.
And speaking of "really basic", there isn't such a thing as the atmosphere being "full" or "not full". It doesn't get "full" (as in it can't "hold more water)". It's just that there's a balance of evaporation and precipitation that's determined by temperature. The atmosphere, on average, does not hold either more or less than the quantity determined by this balance, so it doesn't make sense to say that the atmosphere "hasn't filled up yet and can receive more water vapor", which you seem to imply in your offhand remark about "may not be totally full".
Unaware of the Svensmark theories and the support the CLOUD experiments provide, which makes them not worth engaging because of their demonstrated ignorance of the field; or
I'm aware of Svensmark's theories. I am also aware that solar activity over the last 40 years does not line up with the observed warming. I, too, am aware that the CERN/CLOUD experiments demonstrate very little about the real climate, and they are in fact incapable of doing so. Apparently, you are not.
Denying actual, physical, science in favor of unfalsifiable theory;
The greenhouse effect has a hell of a lot more physical evidence behind it than Svensmark's speculative theories.
For those who wish to follow up and make their own decisions on this or the other issues mentioned, wattsupwiththat.com is a decent source to find discussion of a wide variety of contrarian issues and positions
Snicker. Watt's site is a clearinghouse of amateur scientific incompetence. He'll post any drivel that appears to contradict mainstream climate science, even when it contradicts everything else on his site. The planet isn't warming. It is warming, but it's due to clouds. No, it's due to El Nino. No, it's due to random walk behavior in the climate. We can predict that the climate will cool over the next 30 years. No, actually the uncertainty in the climate will increase to +/- 100 degrees. And so on and so forth. It's just a soapbox for any idiot with a half-baked "theory".
But yes, I agree with you, WUWT is a great site to find discussion of contrarian positions. It's kind of an object lesson in how hopelessly wrong they are.
that the government-dependent cliques attempt to deny
Ah, and we round it off with conspiracy theories. Yeah, keep telling yourself you're an unbiased neutral arbiter of truth.
You're misremembering that I'm pretty sure. Quick google shows this at the BBC couple weeks ago:
The reason why that paper was published in a high profile journal was because that claim was controversial. As I said, most papers I've seen claim longer time periods; the most well known is a Berger paper, but I'd have to dig around for the references.
Also "starting in 1500 years" is a lot different from "a bit overdue".
A clever argument, but no: I'd argue for throwing up nuclear power stations now so they can pump out water vapor when the need arises. Water vapor is a way more effective GHG than CO2 is.
You can't control the water vapor content of the atmosphere that way. It's controlled by the planetary temperature, and if you try to add more than is "allowed" by the current temperature, it just precipitates back out before doing much.
Indeed, it's not actually clear that water vapor leaves enough stray IR around in the appropriate wavelengths for CO2 to have anywhere near the effect that IPCC models assume
Yes, it is clear, from basic radiative transfer physics.
and being able to measure the Sun's activity in any kind of quantitative fashion is of similar lack of vintage
Instrumental measurements of the Sun alone already tell us that solar changes don't line up with the recent period of warming.
Currently accepted models assume, with absolutely no supporting evidence for that assumption whatsoever, that they are a positive feedback.
That's not an "assumption", it's a conclusion from physical calculations, and there is also observational evidence (e.g. for the water vapor feedback, which you've already admitted is a greenhouse gas).
Actual measurements are unclear but support more the idea that they're actually a negative feedback.
Also not true; the vast majority of the observational climate sensitivity literature indicates a positive feedback.
Not necessarily, no. You can get at the error bars in several ways. One is to see what range of future warming is compatible with the warming observed to data, using pretty model-independent energy balance calculations. Another is to look at the multimodel spread. This could be accurate even if the models are wrong, if the way in which they're wrong affects the bias of the models and not their variance. More likely, the multimodel spread is somewhat too narrow, which is why it's called a "likely" range by the IPCC and not a "definitely" range.
All of this is beside my point, anyway, which is that nobody is claiming that the model predictions are "rock solid": they come with pretty substantial error bars.
Average global temperatures are up 4c in the last century, 2c in the last decade, and it is more severe near the poles. Coastal water levels have risen by a few inches in the last decade.
No.
Average global temperature is up about 0.8 C in the last century and probably about 0.1 C in the last decade. (True, these numbers are larger near the poles, and are also larger on land.) Sea level is up about an inch in the last decade, I think.
And we're not going to get a "runaway greenhouse effect" either (i.e., one where the oceans boil away). We will likely get a few degrees of warming for every doubling of atmospheric CO2.
Oh look, it's a "save us from the ice age" concern troll.
First, it is still hotly debated when the next glacial period is due, and most geological studies I've read actually put it at closer to 50,000 years from now.
But even if the next ice age were imminent, and you actually cared about preventing it, you'd argue for saving our fossil fuels and doling them out slowly to stabilize against the gradual cooling, when we need them, rather than using them all up now and overshooting, when we don't.
The projected increase in CO2 emissions doesn't come mostly from population growth, which will probably stabilize later this century. The projected emissions growth mostly comes from developing countries approaching the level of per-capita fossil energy use of the currently developed nations.
Most economists believe eliminating carbon emissions today would be disastrous, well beyond the scale of that climate scientists have predicted.
Most economists who publish on climate economics find that reducing carbon emissions passes a cost-benefit test, although the amount of recommended reductions are not always what the WSJ would count as "aggressive".
We shouldn't be accepting the results essentially heuristic computer models as rock solid predictions for the future
Who's doing that? The error bars on the climate model predictions are 50% or larger, not zero ("rock solid").
Their argument? Look at temperatures! Even if the temperature is warmer: that doesn't prove/disprove anything. The argument is causation.
"Look at the temperatures" isn't the actual scientific argument. The actual argument is causal and has to do with the atomic spectroscopy and radiative transfer physics of the greenhouse effect, along with the associated laboratory and observational studies that support that physics.
I'm not even going to pretend to say that I've thought out the science behind this, but I never hear anyone address: maybe things are warmer because there's more hot stuff?
World energy consumption is about 15 x 10^12 watts. Spread over the surface of the Earth (5 x 10^14 square meters), this is about 0.03 watts per square meter. Energy balance arguments show that you need roughly 4 watts per square meter to raise the temperature of the planet by 1 degree Celsius. (Divide this by about 3 or so if you include climate feedback effects that may amplify warming.) Let's say that "more hot stuff" raises the temperature of the planet by about 0.01 degrees Celsius. That's about two orders of magnitude smaller than the greenhouse effect of CO2.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he didn't make up a false quote. He put the Steve Chu quote in single quotes, and then went on to add his own text outside of the quotes. It's just editorializing (albeit easy to misinterpret as an actual quote, the way the sentence is structured).
Steven Chu did say "We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe". The submitter, Hugh Pickens, added "to make Americans trade in their 'love affair with the automobile' for a marriage to mass transit".
Chu never said that, and the linked article doesn't say that either. Chu wants to reduce fossil fuel consumption, sure, and increased use of mass transit might be one part of that, but he's not advocating taking away Americans' cars and forcing them to ride buses, or whatever hyperbole Pickens is implying.
All the linked article actually states is that "some energy experts" say that increased gas prices will "encourage consumers to buy more efficient vehicles, discourage suburban sprawl, make renewables more competitive and reduce U.S. reliance on imported oil".
I thought New Scientist already was science fiction.
Sorry, CERN, but you need to pick up the workmanship before you can be taken seriously.
OPERA isn't a CERN project. CERN sent OPERA the neutrinos, but the detector and timing hardware is OPERA's responsibility. I don't know why CERN stepped in to issue a press release about errors in the results OPERA announced. (Maybe they wanted to dissociate themselves from the FTL claims that were being indirectly attributed to CERN?) More here.
The whole point of the article is that such equations, upon which climate simulations do indeed depend, are not easily derived and may not be reliable in many cases.
No, that's not the point of the article. The point of the article is that there isn't any fast algorithm that can derive ALL dynamical equations PERFECTLY.
It is silent on which specific dynamical systems admit accurate approximations that can be efficiently identified from data. (This is, as I noted originally, very problem specific and depends on your quality metric and the granularity at which you want answers.)
Really? Then why did the authors say:
They didn't.
Seems like simulation of complex systems like climate are NP-Hard
No.
I guess you're going to make me repeat myself here. Try to pay attention.
What's NP-Hard is an algorithm which can identify the exact dynamical laws that give rise to a set of observed data. This doesn't say anything about the computational complexity of simulating of dynamical laws.
Furthermore, this result says nothing about the quality (i.e., accuracy) or computational complexity of an algorithm to identify approximate dynamical laws (e.g., computer simulations) from empirical data. For all we know, it's possible to identify approximate dynamical laws to a given system to an arbitrarily high accuracy, in polynomial time. They just can't be determined exactly.
Finally, this result has nothing in particular to do with any particular system, such as the climate, and it proves no results how hard it is to identify dynamics as a function of system "complexity". It's a statement about the ability of a single algorithm to identify all possible dynamical laws in all possible systems from all possible data.
which cast serious doubt on the models employed by proponents of human-induced climate change.
It sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here. It's apparently not climate models per se you have a problem with, but the fact that they're employed by "proponents of human-induced climate change".
The theorem doesn't say that identifying climate dynamics from climate data is any harder or easier than identifying gravitational dynamics from trajectory data, chemical dynamics from molecular data, etc. It just says that there isn't a polynomial-time algorithm that can identify dynamical laws from measurements of every possible system.
This result says essentially nothing about the quality of simulation models, either for the climate or any other complex system. It applies to exactly reconstructing the dynamics of a system. It says nothing about the quality of approximations to dynamical systems (i.e., simulation models), or the difficulty in constructing "good" approximations (where "good" is, in general, application-dependent).
"Convincing to me".
Laser guide stars.
Oops, HTML got garbled. And I got the timescale wrong (1.5 * 10^22 J of heat accumulation is over about the 10-year period of 1995-2005, not the "latter half of the 20th century".
Here's the intended post:
Your innumerate ranting about needing to do math refused to do any math. And come on, merely mentioning global warming's contribution to the Earth's mass budget makes one a zealot? Sounds like you have an axe to grind. Who's the zealot here?
Let me do the math for you.
Cumulative ocean heat uptake over the 1995-2005 decade, largely due to global warming, is almost 1.5 * 10^23 Joules for the upper 700 meters of the ocean alone (reference). By E = mc^2, this works out to about 1700 tons over about 10 years, or about 170 tons per year, as the article claims.
The mass-equivalent from global warming is not due to the energy released by combustion, but rather to the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect. The latter is about 100 times bigger than the former (rough calculation).
You are, at least, correct in saying that the mass equivalent of global warming is probably dwarfed by the error bars on the Earth's net mass budget.
Your innumerate ranting about needing to do math refused to do any math. And come on, merely mentioning global warming's contribution to the Earth's mass budget makes one a zealot? Sounds like you have an axe to grind. Who's the zealot here?
Let me do the math for you.
Cumulative ocean heat uptake through the latter half of the 20th century, largely due to global warming, is about 1.5 * 10^23 Joules for the upper 700 meters of the ocean alone (referencerough calculation).
You are, at least, correct in saying that the mass equivalent of global warming is probably dwarfed by the error bars on the Earth's net mass budget.
Exactly. Put a series of these on the west coast and we might even be able to seed the desert that occupies half of the US. I'm sure the central valley farmers would like to see the rivers return to normal.
Yeah, right. Artificially evaporate vastly more water than currently evaporates off of the ocean? I don't think you appreciate the scale involved (nor what that would do to the coasts if you put that much evaporative infrastructure in place).
Look, I know you like to remain willfully ignorant, but I'd really suggest reading some of the vast literature on glacial dynamics. It ain't that simple.
So no, for the end of the warm period to be 50,000 years from now would be quite divergent from the climatalogical pattern of the last million years, and leave us out of phase.
You need to read the literature on this subject. The glacial-interglacial cycles are not a perfect 100ky cycle (in fact, the cycles used to have a different period), and the relative importance of the eccentricity, precession, and obliquity cycles drifts over time. In fact, there is a lot of glacial dynamical theory which predicts an extended interglacial ahead. I didn't pull that 50,000 years number out of nowhere. For a couple references, see for example Berger and Loutre, Crucifix and Rougier. There is a third I saw recently that got a similar figure, and of course there are older papers too.
However, as I mentioned to the other poster, this is still very controversial within the geological community. There is a new paper by Tzedakis et al. that gets ~1500 years, and Ruddiman argues that the next glacial should already have started if it weren't for humans. On the whole, the papers I've seen tend to favor 20-50 ky rather than a shorter period of glacial inception. But this is way, way more subtle than "durr, it's a 100 ky cycle so we're due", and you can't predict anything at all from the past temperature record. At the very least, you need to study the Milankovitch forcings as well, and propagate those through a dynamics with long lag times to see what happens.
Go back and read his proposal. I think you're confused about his wording. He's proposing to add more water vapor to the atmosphere ("pumping it out" from the nuclear plant to the atmosphere) to increase the greenhouse effect in order to forestall an ice age. Removing water vapor from the atmosphere (if it could be done) would only hasten the ice age.
And speaking of "really basic", there isn't such a thing as the atmosphere being "full" or "not full". It doesn't get "full" (as in it can't "hold more water)". It's just that there's a balance of evaporation and precipitation that's determined by temperature. The atmosphere, on average, does not hold either more or less than the quantity determined by this balance, so it doesn't make sense to say that the atmosphere "hasn't filled up yet and can receive more water vapor", which you seem to imply in your offhand remark about "may not be totally full".
Unaware of the Svensmark theories and the support the CLOUD experiments provide, which makes them not worth engaging because of their demonstrated ignorance of the field; or
I'm aware of Svensmark's theories. I am also aware that solar activity over the last 40 years does not line up with the observed warming. I, too, am aware that the CERN/CLOUD experiments demonstrate very little about the real climate, and they are in fact incapable of doing so. Apparently, you are not.
Denying actual, physical, science in favor of unfalsifiable theory;
The greenhouse effect has a hell of a lot more physical evidence behind it than Svensmark's speculative theories.
For those who wish to follow up and make their own decisions on this or the other issues mentioned, wattsupwiththat.com is a decent source to find discussion of a wide variety of contrarian issues and positions
Snicker. Watt's site is a clearinghouse of amateur scientific incompetence. He'll post any drivel that appears to contradict mainstream climate science, even when it contradicts everything else on his site. The planet isn't warming. It is warming, but it's due to clouds. No, it's due to El Nino. No, it's due to random walk behavior in the climate. We can predict that the climate will cool over the next 30 years. No, actually the uncertainty in the climate will increase to +/- 100 degrees. And so on and so forth. It's just a soapbox for any idiot with a half-baked "theory".
But yes, I agree with you, WUWT is a great site to find discussion of contrarian positions. It's kind of an object lesson in how hopelessly wrong they are.
that the government-dependent cliques attempt to deny
Ah, and we round it off with conspiracy theories. Yeah, keep telling yourself you're an unbiased neutral arbiter of truth.
You're misremembering that I'm pretty sure. Quick google shows this at the BBC couple weeks ago:
The reason why that paper was published in a high profile journal was because that claim was controversial. As I said, most papers I've seen claim longer time periods; the most well known is a Berger paper, but I'd have to dig around for the references.
Also "starting in 1500 years" is a lot different from "a bit overdue".
A clever argument, but no: I'd argue for throwing up nuclear power stations now so they can pump out water vapor when the need arises. Water vapor is a way more effective GHG than CO2 is.
You can't control the water vapor content of the atmosphere that way. It's controlled by the planetary temperature, and if you try to add more than is "allowed" by the current temperature, it just precipitates back out before doing much.
Indeed, it's not actually clear that water vapor leaves enough stray IR around in the appropriate wavelengths for CO2 to have anywhere near the effect that IPCC models assume
Yes, it is clear, from basic radiative transfer physics.
and being able to measure the Sun's activity in any kind of quantitative fashion is of similar lack of vintage
Instrumental measurements of the Sun alone already tell us that solar changes don't line up with the recent period of warming.
Currently accepted models assume, with absolutely no supporting evidence for that assumption whatsoever, that they are a positive feedback.
That's not an "assumption", it's a conclusion from physical calculations, and there is also observational evidence (e.g. for the water vapor feedback, which you've already admitted is a greenhouse gas).
Actual measurements are unclear but support more the idea that they're actually a negative feedback.
Also not true; the vast majority of the observational climate sensitivity literature indicates a positive feedback.
No, what? That graph doesn't contradict anything I said.
Not necessarily, no. You can get at the error bars in several ways. One is to see what range of future warming is compatible with the warming observed to data, using pretty model-independent energy balance calculations. Another is to look at the multimodel spread. This could be accurate even if the models are wrong, if the way in which they're wrong affects the bias of the models and not their variance. More likely, the multimodel spread is somewhat too narrow, which is why it's called a "likely" range by the IPCC and not a "definitely" range.
All of this is beside my point, anyway, which is that nobody is claiming that the model predictions are "rock solid": they come with pretty substantial error bars.
Average global temperatures are up 4c in the last century, 2c in the last decade, and it is more severe near the poles. Coastal water levels have risen by a few inches in the last decade.
No.
Average global temperature is up about 0.8 C in the last century and probably about 0.1 C in the last decade. (True, these numbers are larger near the poles, and are also larger on land.) Sea level is up about an inch in the last decade, I think.
And we're not going to get a "runaway greenhouse effect" either (i.e., one where the oceans boil away). We will likely get a few degrees of warming for every doubling of atmospheric CO2.
Oh look, it's a "save us from the ice age" concern troll.
First, it is still hotly debated when the next glacial period is due, and most geological studies I've read actually put it at closer to 50,000 years from now.
But even if the next ice age were imminent, and you actually cared about preventing it, you'd argue for saving our fossil fuels and doling them out slowly to stabilize against the gradual cooling, when we need them, rather than using them all up now and overshooting, when we don't.
The projected increase in CO2 emissions doesn't come mostly from population growth, which will probably stabilize later this century. The projected emissions growth mostly comes from developing countries approaching the level of per-capita fossil energy use of the currently developed nations.
Most economists believe eliminating carbon emissions today would be disastrous, well beyond the scale of that climate scientists have predicted.
Most economists who publish on climate economics find that reducing carbon emissions passes a cost-benefit test, although the amount of recommended reductions are not always what the WSJ would count as "aggressive".
We shouldn't be accepting the results essentially heuristic computer models as rock solid predictions for the future
Who's doing that? The error bars on the climate model predictions are 50% or larger, not zero ("rock solid").
Their argument? Look at temperatures! Even if the temperature is warmer: that doesn't prove/disprove anything. The argument is causation.
"Look at the temperatures" isn't the actual scientific argument. The actual argument is causal and has to do with the atomic spectroscopy and radiative transfer physics of the greenhouse effect, along with the associated laboratory and observational studies that support that physics.
I'm not even going to pretend to say that I've thought out the science behind this, but I never hear anyone address: maybe things are warmer because there's more hot stuff?
World energy consumption is about 15 x 10^12 watts. Spread over the surface of the Earth (5 x 10^14 square meters), this is about 0.03 watts per square meter. Energy balance arguments show that you need roughly 4 watts per square meter to raise the temperature of the planet by 1 degree Celsius. (Divide this by about 3 or so if you include climate feedback effects that may amplify warming.) Let's say that "more hot stuff" raises the temperature of the planet by about 0.01 degrees Celsius. That's about two orders of magnitude smaller than the greenhouse effect of CO2.
Actually, 4-6 C higher is pretty much what mainstream climate science predicts for the eventual amount of warming.