No. The increase in temperature is nonlinear in the CO2 concentration, because there is saturation at higher concentrations: you're already adsorbing a lot of the spectrum already, so you need much more CO2 to get overlap into other areas of the spectrum that aren't already being adsorbed by CO2.
(Also, I don't think the temperature would really drop a full 30 degrees... I think that would be true if you removed all greenhouse gases, not just CO2.)
Want to prove global warming or disprove it, give me irrefutable proof (and don't start with the "it's warmer than it was"). There is no such thing as "irrefutable proof" in science. Proof beyond reasonable doubt, that's possible. You seem to want proof beyond unreasonable doubt.
And, by the way, it is warmer, on average, than it was 150 years ago.
All we have today on both sides of the global warming case is this proof that's "maybe it'll work" theoretical stuff. Yeah that, and data, and the laws of physics. Pretty paltry, huh.
Okay, for one, this one is obviously skewed. I modeled this in Excel, and wow, it's way less threatening when you actually show a real scale on the Y axis, as opposed to skewing the graph for shock value. You can't tell how "threatening" a CO2 increase is until you know what baseline to compare it to, no matter what scale you plot it on. CO2 levels are now about 35% higher than average pre-industrial values, which while not huge, is nothing to sneer at either.
Besides, the point is not to make it look "threatening", but to zoom in on the region of interest.
Second. this guy is even worse. Where's the calculated effect of terrestrial water vapor, i.e., the stuff near the ground? Water vapor isn't on that chart because it is a feedback, not a forcing. It's wrapped up in a quantity known as "climate sensitivity", which is the key quantity being debated in the literature.
"Anthropogenic?" Uh, sorry, but contributing less than half a percent to that CO2 value annually doesn't make all that carbon "anthropogenic." In fact, virtually all of the ~35% increase in total CO2 levels is anthropogenic.
I really fail to see how having half the highest CO2 concentrations of the past million years is going to do anything, Why not? Do you dispute that CO2 concentrations have changed the climate in the past?
and especially with the relatively minute contribution Homo sapiens, As noted, homo sapiens has not made a "minute" contribution to CO2 levels.
would be warming the world more than having an atmosphere in the first place. Humans aren't warming the world more than having an atmosphere does. They're still warming the world. What's your point?
What is sorely lacking from the global warming debate is actual complete numeric data specifically how much an increase in CO2 will affect the global temperature. I looked at the ICCC report and there are basically a whole bunch of wild assed guesses as to how much it will affect temperature based on simulated models of the climate. The values range all over the place. Just because the values are not certain, or are based on climate models, does not mean they are "wild assed guesses".
The warming of CO2 is actually relatively well established; what is uncertain is how much it is amplified by feedbacks.
We're talking increasing the CO2 concentrations by a few hundredths of a percentage point as a percentage of the mass of the atmosphere over the next century. What matters is the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, as weighted by each gas's warming potential, not the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is a major greenhouse gas (although not the strongest), and it may more than double over the next century.
I saw references to the simulations but could not find the methodology as to how they were conducted. The full Working Group I report (not just the Summary for Policymakers) has references to the literature.
If they were based on the Vostok ice cores they are suspect They're based on both instrumental and ice core data, among other sources. The ice core data is not the long-term Vostok data for ice ages you're referring to, but just over the last few centuries.
I would love to talk with someone about actual data and methodologies used to come to conclusions Ok, what do you want to know?
Earth albedo changes due to asphalt have been studied. I think the end result was that they can only account for something like 1% of the observed warming, but I can't find the reference. As much as you think asphalt covers the Earth, it represents only a tiny fraction of the Earth's land surface (and it's not like it was mostly replacing highly reflective land areas, either), which itself is a minority of the Earth's total surface.
Ugh. I can't tell you how sick I am of this innummerate argument. I thought Slashdotters were supposed to understand math.
So you're saying that less than a 1% increase in production of CO2 is enough to change the climate this much?
Here are some made up numbers to illustrate the point:
Every year, natural sources put 200 units of CO2 into the atmosphere, and natural sinks pull 200 units out of the atmosphere. The net change in atmospheric CO2 concentration is zero. (In reality, it's not zero, but it's a small and random fluctuation compared to the actual upward trend of ~35% since pre-industrial times.)
Along come humans, who put 2 units of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Natural sinks pull 1 units out of the air, leaving 1 to accumulate in the air and raise total CO2 concentrations. After a number of years, those units accumulate to something large.
What is important is not the change in production, but the change in amount left in the air. The change in CO2 concentration is, as I said, about 35%, not 1%.
Even with the fact that tropospheric water vapor has an order of magnitude greater effect on thermal regulation?
Again, this is the wrong number. Water vapor and other greenhouse gases warm the planet by ~30 degrees C, explaining why the Earth is not a frozen iceball (as you yourself note). The increase in CO2 since pre-industrial times has added an extra ~0.5-1 degree of warming to that baseline. That warming is small compared to the 30 degrees provided naturally by other greenhouse gases, but it is responsible for most of the actual observed warming (about 1 degree) which has taken place.
(Also, CO2-induced warming creates more water vapor which itself amplifies the warming trend in a positive feedback.)
In fact, IIRC one of the worst ice ages actually got so cold at the poles that the researchers who discovered it feared that the temperature could actually drop low enough to allow CO2 to precipitate out of the air. At which point, the planet would probably freeze solid, at least at the surface, irreversibly. I don't know if that is right, but let's take that statement at face value.
If a 100% decrease in CO2 concentration is enough to permanently freeze solid the entire planet, is it that hard to imagine that a 35% increase in CO2 (from 280 to 380 ppm) can cause a single degree of global warming?
The Large Hadron Collider likely will not change your everyday life, unless you're really into physics. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to help the human race learn more about the natural world in which we live.
Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
— at the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory
I think the difficulty here is your unnecessarily restrictive consideration of what kinds of programming tasks exist in the world. Sure, you can use graphical methods to flowchart simple scripting actions, or solve systems of differential equations, or other specialized tasks. As a general purpose programming language capable of writing web browsers, operating systems, hydrodynamic models, 3D engines, parsers, or whatnot — comprising the equivalent of thousands to millions of lines of code forget it.
Graphical programming languages have been tried for decades. They have never panned out well. I know you are totally sure that graphical programming is the way to go, and that one day the right graphical language to replace all those failures will vindicate your belief, but consider the possibility that maybe you're wrong. Maybe we're more adapted to specifying algorithms with "language" (text programming) than with graphics.
You'll find 2 camps on models in general. I fit into one of those camps. Hint, that's the camp that doesn't think models produce anything beyond what is put into them. Again you're evading the point. Of course models don't produce anything beyond what is put in them. You have simply failed to establish that what is put into them is so wrong that they cannot make statements of attribution.
Different? Ya think? Gee maybe that's why I specifically mentioned it rather than leaving it lumped in with radiance. Ever hear of the wilson cloud chamber experiments? I am well aware of the claims of Svensmark and company. I am also well aware that a laboratory experiment with cosmic rays does not actually establish a link between cosmic rays and the actual climate, and that in fact no such link has been established.
However, the 30% of co2 appears to refer to total contributions, not to the delta contributions since the industrial revolution. No, actually it does refer to the delta contributions since the industrial revolution. Go re-read the IPCC.
Whatever positive feedbacks exist are swamped by negative feedbacks. That is contradicted by pretty much every climate study in print, so I would love to see the source for that claim. Even Lindzen doesn't think the negative feedbacks outweigh the positive feedbacks — he thinks they may be of equal magnitude, but are probably somewhat less.
Whatever positive feedbacks exist are swamped by negative feedbacks. To acknowledge otherwise is to effectively claim there is no life on earth as there would be no liquid water. It's the nature of feedback. If negative feedback doesn't swamp the positive, then it's simply going to trend over to the limit and just stay there. That's a pretty stupid argument. It basically amounts to "a runaway greenhouse effect hasn't happened, therefore all feedbacks are net negative". It ignores the different regimes of different feedbacks. Some feedbacks only become large on long timescales; some only become large at high/low temperatures. A large amount of warming will likely get killed eventually as new negative feedbacks kick in at high temperatures, but that doesn't mean that all those feedbacks are in effect now. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the feedbacks been positive and significantly large right now. Even long-term paleo constraints on climate sensitivity indicate a strong positive feedback for CO2 (climate sensitivity of at least 1.5-2 degrees).
In terms of physics concepts, it's a stable rather than unstable equilibrium because there are always pertubations that insure unstable equilibriums don't last. In terms of physics concepts, a pure net negative feedback gives a damped excursion from equilibrium. What the climate system does is an accelerated excursion at low deviations due to net positive feedback, which is eventually suppressed at high deviations by growing negative feedback.
Now, throw in reradiation, conduction and convection and you've got something far beyond the laboratory in complexity with no ability to extract the information. I challenge you to produce any experimental evidence that the absorption properties of atmospheric greenhouse gases have been grossly mismodeled.
Perhaps, you'd like a stab at how well the models work at modeling the atmospheric temperature curves and how they've changed due to the addition of co2 absorbing energy in the atmosphere. Perhaps you would. I'm sure Geophysical Research Letters will be pleased to publish your revolutionary findings.
How about Shaviv or perhaps Svensmark. Care to check out Lindzen, I'm sure he has had something to say as well. Yeah, right. Svensmark has a lab experiment, not actual evidence of a real cosmic ray-climate link, and in fact, trends in cosmic rays do not correlate with late 20th century warming. I will have to get back to you on Shaviv, as I have to leave right now. As for Lindzen, I'm not aware of any publications of his on the matter.
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
Did the summary include the decade long massive peat/coal fire in indonesia outputting about as much co2 as mankind?
(13-40% of the CO2 as mankind, actually, according to the 2002 Nature study.)
I have not had time to dig back through all the references, but I suspect that it probably does include that, since it was based on 2006 attribution studies which were performed well after the 2002 Indonesian study.
Models that don't include factors properly or fully are just another form of video games.
That's a nice weaselly statement. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Unless you are prepared to present evidence that the current models are so errnoneous that they are incapable of performing attribution at all, disagreeing with the vast majority of validation studies in print, it's just empty rhetoric.
The long term magnetic field strength is up starting in the latter half of the 20th century by about 40%. This is the value or baseline that the 11 (22) yr sunspot cycle 'sits' on. Note too that there are other cycles of solar activity which are even longer and are known (and named).
Magnetic field strength is not the same thing as solar intensity. Unless you are prepared to present evidence that the climate is significantly influenced by the Sun's magnetic field (as opposed to solar intensity), this is a red herring.
It is thought to have cratered significantly back in the maunder minimum at the last mini ice age or cooling period just before the industrial age - when no sunspots were recorded for about 50 yrs (in a time when daily records of sunspots were being recorded).
Reconstructions of solar intensity for that time do indeed implicate solar variations in climate change (through changes in solar intensity). A repeat of such behavior would indeed slow down future global warming, but as I said before, would not come close to halting it, at least under business as usual scenarios.
A) it indicates cycles of ocean temperature.
Again, duh. Cycles of ocean temperature are known and not ignored.
B) warmer oceans release some co2 even in fairly short times even if it takes much longer time frames to release large amounts of it
Yes, they release some, but not an amount that has been significant compared to direct anthropogenic emissions into the atmosphere. (This may change in the future.)
I also don't know what your point is. Climate models do take into account the temperature-mediated diffusion of CO2 into and out of the oceans.
C) nothing was said about it producing or being caused by climate trends.
Well, then it's irrelevant to this discussion.
Methane is attributed to 20% of ghg effects with under 2ppm and is estimated to have increased by 150% since the 1700s (wikipedia article on methane). Since methane is far more potent than Co2, this effect has been greater than the equivalent of about 63ppm of co2 which would be above and beyond the actual co2 increases. Thats 2/3 again as much as the estimated Co2 increase since the 1700s.
Actually, the total radiative forcing of methane since pre-industrial times is estimated to be only 30% that of CO2 (IPCC SPM again).
ue to overlaps in IR bands with methane and h2o vapor, contributions of co2 amounts to about 10%-12% of the 33 deg C or so of actual ghg contribution to earth's estimated temperature.
The fractional contribution is not what is relevant to global warming. What is relevant is the fractional change. Most of the change in radiative forcing due to GHGs has been due to the change in CO2 concentrations.
Co2 is logrithmic now in concentrations anywhere within values experienced on earth, ever. [...] At 10% contribution to the 33 deg C of all ghgs, that puts us at about 3.3 deg C total contribution of Co2 with around 380 ppm.
What I'm implying is that co2 is being assumed to be the total cause of the warming when it is not, creating a built in fudge factor right off the bat.
Of course that is a ridiculous strawman position. CO2 is not in any way assumed to be the total cause of the warming. This is easy to see right in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, where they show model predictions with natural, anthropogenic, and natural+anthropogenic forcings. Both manmade CO2 and natural effects are needed to explain the observed climate trends.
Considering that co2 is well into its logrithmic range and that it's total contribution amounts to only 3-4 deg C out of the 30-35 deg C total contributions of all GHGs, it's pretty well run it's course because it really doesn't matter that much whether most of the radiated energy within the absorption bands is absorbed in 30 feet or 15 feet.
That makes no sense whatsoever. CO2 has not in any way "run its course", and the amount of CO2 increase over pre-industrial levels is easily capable of producing the observed warming trend, according to the aforementioned logarithmic relation. Furthermore, the total contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect, relative to other GHGs, is irrelevant when considering the amount of warming: what matters to the change in temperature is the change in GHGs, and the change in CO2 has overwhelmed the change in any other greenhouse gas as far as global warming potential is concerned, including methane.
On the other hand, methane levels have increased by 150% rather than the almost 50% of co2 and it is a vastly far more potent GHG when talking levels and is still substantially more potent over the lifespan of the co2 in the atmosphere despite despite the much shorter time spent there (but that doesn't matter when talking of current concentrations).
Methane levels, despite their rate, are still far too low to dominate CO2 in terms of total warming, and are not predicted to overtake CO2 any time in the near future. (In fact, there is some evidence that they have recently stabilized for unknown reasons, although that in no way implies that they will not continue to increase.)
Also, the few tenths of a percent of solar luminance variability has an effect
Yes, it has an effect, but it has been dominated by CO2 since the latter half of the 20th century, and considering our still-accelerating emissions rates, will continue to do so barring some really unusual solar behavior.
and so does the variability of the magnetic field as it indirectly affects cloud cover which is far more potent than co2 and methane combined.
There is no evidence that any variability in the Sun's magnetic field has affected climate.
And, we haven't even gotten to the part about atmospheric mixing (which is the reason why you don't see the atmospheric temperatures rising as predicted) nor the precipitation which is also quite a serious factor.
If those arguments are as weak as your others, perhaps it's best for you if we don't get to them.
If you haven't noticed, el nino and la nina are large scale regional ocean temperature variations first discovered several hundred years ago and hence, are known to be natural occurances - predating the industrial age.
Duh. They are also known to not produce long-scale climate trends.
But since I'm better at arguing your own position than you are, let me help you out and note that there are also longer, multidecadal trends in ocean behavior. (However, like the solar variations, they are not large enough to account for the observed warming.)
This is a variation of ocean temperature, one of which is a warmer ocean over a rather large region, implying a huge natural release of co2.
There has not actually been a huge natural release of CO2 from the oceans. For the ocean to source CO2 would require much, much larger warming over much, much longer time periods.
P.S. "Decreasing CO2 emissions to the stone-age level" is conservative hysteria, the analogue of "global warming will destroy all life on Earth". Mitigation of global warming is not an all or nothing thing. Plenty of economists (e.g., Nordhaus) have found that the economic costs of cutting back on CO2 emissions are less than the economic costs of doing nothing. Totally eliminating all CO2 emissions is not necessary, not economically or politically feasible, and not capable of halting global warming. What is both feasible and desirable is to reduce emissions.
Your good point 7 about aerosol pollution reflecting sunlight thus reducing global temperatures says we should maybe get rid of the environmental controls rather than imposing additional ones. That might seem simple-minded, but a little high altitude haze would be a far lesser penalty on civilization than decreasing CO2 emisions to the stone-age level. That idea has indeed been proposed in various forms. It has a number of problems. Pollution controls were put into place for a reason. Relax them, and then you get the terrible smog problems of the 1960s, the acid rain problem comes back, etc. It's not just a matter of "a little high altitude haze".
To get around that, some have proposed "geoengineering", i.e., carefully designed "pollution". With aerosol geoengineering, you keep pollution restrictions in place, but shoot extra artificial pollutants up at high altitudes. That will avoid most of the low-altitude city smog, but will probably keep problems like acid rain.
Even if you're willing to put up with acid rain, there are other side effects. Aerosols operate by reflecting more sunlight, and as such they cool only in the day, and not so much in the daytime or in equatorial latitudes. You don't get the full benefit of cooling, and you get differential cooling at different times and in different locations which would alter local climate patterns.
Worse, all that carbon dioxide is still in the atmosphere, albeit with its warming masked by the cooling effects of pollutants. With emissions as projected under no cutbacks, the CO2 concentrations by the end of this century will heavily acidify the oceans, and to a lesser extent the soil, with correspondingly serious impacts on fish populations, coral reefs, pH-sensitive crops, etc.
Possibly worse of all, the pollutants in the atmosphere that cause cooling are short-lived, falling back out of the sky (as acid rain) within a few years. This is unlike CO2, which has a residence time on the order of a century. That means that if you're pumping extra pollutants into the air to cancel out global warming, you are totally committed to it for centuries to come. If you stop or slow down the artificial contaminants for even a few years — because you can't afford it, you lack the political will, you find the acid rain is devastating ecosystems, there's a global flu pandemic or world war and you have other things on your mind, or whatever — then the temperature returns to what it would be if you'd never put them in the air in the first place. So if we hypothetically are supposed to get 5 degrees of warming at the end of the century, a failure to keep geoengineering going in, say, 2100 would mean that you would get all 5 degrees of that warming in a couple years, instead of spread out over a whole century: far worse than even the worst of the global warming scenarios.
Anyway, people are talking about this option, but mostly as a way to buy time to spread CO2 cutbacks over longer periods, or as a last-ditch way to avoid passing some tipping point like irreversible Greenland melting.
But maybe if you read just ONE article, you might reconsider. I have read many articles, and those are actual scientific papers, not newspapers.
With respect to the article, note the following points:
1. The climate has been both warmer and cooler in the past, but (a) the current rate of warming is unprecedented, (b) the future warming under business-as-usual emission scenarios is much larger than, say, the Medieval Warm Period. 2. The current warming is largely anthropogenic in nature. It is not 40% solar. See, for instance, the 2006 review article by Foukal et al. in Nature. (Note that no reference to the scientific literature is cited to justify that claim, other than a vague reference to an unnamed 1997 study by unknown individuals.) 40% of the warming in the first half of the 20th century can be attributed to solar effects (see Lean et al., 1995), but solar effects dramatically fail to explain the accelerated warming post-1970. 3. Ice in central Greenland accumulates because central Greenland is well below freezing, even under global warming. The melting — which is extremely substantial and at an unprecedented rate — is at the edges of Greenland, which have been raised farther above freezing. Greenland's total ice mass balance is decreasing, not increasing. 4. The Antarctic ice sheet isn't gaining mass either. (See Velicogna and Wahr, and Rignot and Thomas.) 5. The IPCC has decreased its sea level rise estimates from previous years, but intentionally neglects Greenland and Antarctic ice melting effects (only including thermal expansion sea level rise). 6. The hockey stick graph is still dramatic even when you include the MWP and LIA. 7. Global temperatures fell in 1940-1975 due to the heavy aerosol pollution in the atmosphere which reflects sunlight away from the Earth, which has been substantially cleaned up.
I would state more points, but I have to leave for a trip now. Perhaps you should reflect that the denalists are giving you a rather doctored picture of the actual science.
Well, if you won't read the factual documentation..... That global warming is a myth is carefully documented in the literature. I am quite familiar with the denialist "literature". Moreso, I dare say, than you yourself are. As I said, if you would like to choose one of their "scientific" arguments and put it forth for discussion, I'll debate it with you. But I am not going to go through and refute an arbitrarily long list of points that you yourself are not willing to debate. It's the scattershot tactic creationists use: don't try to defend an argument yourself, since you can't, and instead just list a few dozen flawed arguments and sit back while your opponent does all the work. If they don't give up, toss out a few more: no matter how many retarded arguments I can disprove, denialists can always make up more.
So, go ahead. I challenge you. Pick what you think is the single best denialist argument, and debate it with me.
Photos are doctored, data are ignored or simply made up. Go ahead. Cite examples from the scientific literature written by climate experts, in which photos are doctored or data are fabricated.
Shrinking ice caps are supposedly one of the tell-tales of global warming. Yet the ice caps are shrinking on Mars right now too. No, one of Mars's ice caps is shrinking (the southern), because of regional warming.
It's amusing that you think that shrinking ice caps due to warming on Mars disproves shrinking ice caps due to warming on Earth.
Are there too many SUVs up there? It's amusing that you think that all warming is caused by manmade CO2. Both warming and cooling can take place naturally. On Earth, however, those natural trends are being overwhelmingly dominated by our much larger and faster CO2-based warming.
We could go on and on. Have you seen Gore's movie? Water rising 20 feet in a century? Pure made-up number. Nope. That is the correct amount of water for a melting of Greenland's ice sheet, or the West Antarctic ice sheet, or half of each. The first is unlikely, but well within the realm of possibility, given known dynamical ice instabilities. It won't happen in a century, but Gore never claimed it would, if you go back and watch the movie.
A few years ago the experts were warning about "global cooling." Another denialist myth. There were a few scientists who said that global cooling may occur, if our emissions didn't overwhelm natural trends, and they didn't know whether or not that would occur. There was no prediction that global cooling would occur, and certainly no consensus on the matter.
Yeah, like I'm going to take the time to read/watch all of those and refute every point made. Come back when you want to present a scientific argument against global warming, and we can debate it. Amassing an imaginary army of supposed "refutations" does not actually establish anything, and there is certainly no shortage of refutations of your "refutations" out there.
Many times since mammals rose to dominance, at roughly 100,000 year intervals, give or take 20k. The other interglacials have been roughly as warm as today, but none of them have warming periods as rapid as today, either. Not a degree per century, and certainly not several degrees per century. The rate has an enormous influence on how well species can adapt to a new climate.
This current warming trend has been building for about 18,000 years, and several long periods of temporary cooling trends have occurred since humans started burning things. That's quite wrong; we passed the peak of the last deglaciation about 11,000 years ago and have been cooling slightly since then.
As for "probably 2.2 to 5 degrees", hogwash. The latest models have even more variation, especially on the low end. It is not hogwash, it is square in the middle of the predictions, and the models have more variation at the high end than the low end.
The fact is nobody, especially you, has any idea what temperatures will be in 100 years. This is not in any way a "fact", but merely your unsupported opinion.
Some of the computer models predict cooling, in fact. Really? Which models predict cooling? Under what assumptions?
And the computer models that are predicting the highest temperatures predicted rapid warming from 1979 to now, while the opposite is the case. I wasn't talking about the computer models that are predicting the highest temperatures; those are well above even the 5 degrees I mentioned.
As for your link, I have no idea what it's referring to since it is cited without context. But I would be curious to know how you reconcile it with this study which found that, if anything, the IPCC's projections underestimated the actual climate change.
One thing we do know, for sure, though; warming precedes CO2 peaks, not trails them. This is irrelevant to situations in which warming is being forced by CO2 increases.
Another thing we know for sure; temperatures have been falling since 1979, while global CO2 has been peaking. We don't "know" any such thing; in fact, both statements are false (e.g., here, here, here). Not to mention that your naive attempt at attribution neglects all of the other climate forcings and feedbacks which take place: temperatures are not governed solely by CO2 (see, e.g., the climate between 1945-1970).
Rate +1, Troll.
There is global warming, but it is minor and it is not caused by humans. And your evidence for this confident assertion that contradicts the conclusions of the climatology community, is... ?
The current minor warming we are seeing is a micro-view of longer-period cycles stretching over centuries or even millenia. There is no historical evidence for the existence of any such cycles, so upon what basis are you making this claim?
The atmospheric models that point to humans being the cause are not designed for this, You mean not designed for your pet theory you just made up on the basis of no evidence? Well, I suppose.
and are often used by people ill-equipped to use them even if they were accurate. Really? You think that climatologists are ill-equipped to use climatological models? In what way are they being "misused"? By who? That's pretty close to libel.
The minor warming we are seeing is only about 1 deg C per century, and is caused by solar and earth tilt changes. It isn't solar, as solar variations have been too small to produce 1 C of warming, and also have completely the wrong timing and rate of change to explain the observed warming. It most certainly isn't Earth tilt changes, which operate over much longer timescales than the current warming.
Humans, cows, and trees have almost nothing to do with anything except small local polution. And your evidence for this claim is, what, exactly? Are you denying the very existence of the greenhouse effect? Not even the most extreme climate skeptics are that crazy.
Of course the GW theories and models are highly skewed to the upper end so if warming occurs in excess of what co2 is capable of providing, it's an instant out for the doom and gloom crowd. If you're implying that the GW models have fudge factors in them to accomodate more warming than CO2 can provide, that's false.
And, if there is an increase going, there is reason to think it's not being generated by the increase in co2 as that tends to follow climate changes on the historical record. That's because the temperature increase decreases the ocean's ability to sink CO2 on long time scales. On long time scales, we will see an increase of natural CO2 as well due to our current warming, for the same reason. However, that has nothing to do with the fact that the anthropogenic CO2 we are emitting is causing the current warming.
But, the real kicker is that the rules of the game were changed within the last 5 years because that is when they started naming subtropical storms. Hence, there were never any named subtropical storms prior to that. If you're implying that scientists have claimed that there is an increase in tropical storms merely by adding subtropical storms into the list, that's also false.
Yeah, remember what happened to the polar bears the last couple of times the climate warmed up this much. The entire species died out. Nobody's seen a polar bear in thousands of years as a result. When do you think the climate has been this warm before? The Medieval Warm Period was likely a few tenths of a degree cooler than today's climate, and we are in for probably 2-5 more degrees (C) of warming over the next century alone.
It's not the current temperatures that are so worrying, as the projected future temperatures.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The increase in temperature is nonlinear in the CO2 concentration, because there is saturation at higher concentrations: you're already adsorbing a lot of the spectrum already, so you need much more CO2 to get overlap into other areas of the spectrum that aren't already being adsorbed by CO2.
(Also, I don't think the temperature would really drop a full 30 degrees... I think that would be true if you removed all greenhouse gases, not just CO2.)
And, by the way, it is warmer, on average, than it was 150 years ago. All we have today on both sides of the global warming case is this proof that's "maybe it'll work" theoretical stuff. Yeah that, and data, and the laws of physics. Pretty paltry, huh.
Besides, the point is not to make it look "threatening", but to zoom in on the region of interest. Second. this guy is even worse. Where's the calculated effect of terrestrial water vapor, i.e., the stuff near the ground? Water vapor isn't on that chart because it is a feedback, not a forcing. It's wrapped up in a quantity known as "climate sensitivity", which is the key quantity being debated in the literature. "Anthropogenic?" Uh, sorry, but contributing less than half a percent to that CO2 value annually doesn't make all that carbon "anthropogenic." In fact, virtually all of the ~35% increase in total CO2 levels is anthropogenic. I really fail to see how having half the highest CO2 concentrations of the past million years is going to do anything, Why not? Do you dispute that CO2 concentrations have changed the climate in the past? and especially with the relatively minute contribution Homo sapiens, As noted, homo sapiens has not made a "minute" contribution to CO2 levels. would be warming the world more than having an atmosphere in the first place. Humans aren't warming the world more than having an atmosphere does. They're still warming the world. What's your point?
The warming of CO2 is actually relatively well established; what is uncertain is how much it is amplified by feedbacks. We're talking increasing the CO2 concentrations by a few hundredths of a percentage point as a percentage of the mass of the atmosphere over the next century. What matters is the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, as weighted by each gas's warming potential, not the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is a major greenhouse gas (although not the strongest), and it may more than double over the next century. I saw references to the simulations but could not find the methodology as to how they were conducted. The full Working Group I report (not just the Summary for Policymakers) has references to the literature. If they were based on the Vostok ice cores they are suspect They're based on both instrumental and ice core data, among other sources. The ice core data is not the long-term Vostok data for ice ages you're referring to, but just over the last few centuries. I would love to talk with someone about actual data and methodologies used to come to conclusions Ok, what do you want to know?
Earth albedo changes due to asphalt have been studied. I think the end result was that they can only account for something like 1% of the observed warming, but I can't find the reference. As much as you think asphalt covers the Earth, it represents only a tiny fraction of the Earth's land surface (and it's not like it was mostly replacing highly reflective land areas, either), which itself is a minority of the Earth's total surface.
Myth #27: mitigating global warming will destroy our economy.
(That being said, your point about ineffective efforts at mitigation is well taken.)
So you're saying that less than a 1% increase in production of CO2 is enough to change the climate this much?
Here are some made up numbers to illustrate the point:
Every year, natural sources put 200 units of CO2 into the atmosphere, and natural sinks pull 200 units out of the atmosphere. The net change in atmospheric CO2 concentration is zero. (In reality, it's not zero, but it's a small and random fluctuation compared to the actual upward trend of ~35% since pre-industrial times.)
Along come humans, who put 2 units of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Natural sinks pull 1 units out of the air, leaving 1 to accumulate in the air and raise total CO2 concentrations. After a number of years, those units accumulate to something large.
What is important is not the change in production, but the change in amount left in the air. The change in CO2 concentration is, as I said, about 35%, not 1%.
Even with the fact that tropospheric water vapor has an order of magnitude greater effect on thermal regulation?
Again, this is the wrong number. Water vapor and other greenhouse gases warm the planet by ~30 degrees C, explaining why the Earth is not a frozen iceball (as you yourself note). The increase in CO2 since pre-industrial times has added an extra ~0.5-1 degree of warming to that baseline. That warming is small compared to the 30 degrees provided naturally by other greenhouse gases, but it is responsible for most of the actual observed warming (about 1 degree) which has taken place.
(Also, CO2-induced warming creates more water vapor which itself amplifies the warming trend in a positive feedback.) In fact, IIRC one of the worst ice ages actually got so cold at the poles that the researchers who discovered it feared that the temperature could actually drop low enough to allow CO2 to precipitate out of the air. At which point, the planet would probably freeze solid, at least at the surface, irreversibly. I don't know if that is right, but let's take that statement at face value.
If a 100% decrease in CO2 concentration is enough to permanently freeze solid the entire planet, is it that hard to imagine that a 35% increase in CO2 (from 280 to 380 ppm) can cause a single degree of global warming?
Mods: It's not off-topic. The 'xkcd' hat guy was modeled after the character Aram from Men in Hats. (See the alt text to this comic.)
The Large Hadron Collider likely will not change your everyday life, unless you're really into physics. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to help the human race learn more about the natural world in which we live.
Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are
we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
— at the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory
I think the difficulty here is your unnecessarily restrictive consideration of what kinds of programming tasks exist in the world. Sure, you can use graphical methods to flowchart simple scripting actions, or solve systems of differential equations, or other specialized tasks. As a general purpose programming language capable of writing web browsers, operating systems, hydrodynamic models, 3D engines, parsers, or whatnot — comprising the equivalent of thousands to millions of lines of code forget it.
Graphical programming languages have been tried for decades. They have never panned out well. I know you are totally sure that graphical programming is the way to go, and that one day the right graphical language to replace all those failures will vindicate your belief, but consider the possibility that maybe you're wrong. Maybe we're more adapted to specifying algorithms with "language" (text programming) than with graphics.
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
Where would we be without our blinkenlights?
Did the summary include the decade long massive peat/coal fire in indonesia outputting about as much co2 as mankind?
(13-40% of the CO2 as mankind, actually, according to the 2002 Nature study.)
I have not had time to dig back through all the references, but I suspect that it probably does include that, since it was based on 2006 attribution studies which were performed well after the 2002 Indonesian study.
Models that don't include factors properly or fully are just another form of video games.
That's a nice weaselly statement. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Unless you are prepared to present evidence that the current models are so errnoneous that they are incapable of performing attribution at all, disagreeing with the vast majority of validation studies in print, it's just empty rhetoric.
The long term magnetic field strength is up starting in the latter half of the 20th century by about 40%. This is the value or baseline that the 11 (22) yr sunspot cycle 'sits' on. Note too that there are other cycles of solar activity which are even longer and are known (and named).
Magnetic field strength is not the same thing as solar intensity. Unless you are prepared to present evidence that the climate is significantly influenced by the Sun's magnetic field (as opposed to solar intensity), this is a red herring.
It is thought to have cratered significantly back in the maunder minimum at the last mini ice age or cooling period just before the industrial age - when no sunspots were recorded for about 50 yrs (in a time when daily records of sunspots were being recorded).
Reconstructions of solar intensity for that time do indeed implicate solar variations in climate change (through changes in solar intensity). A repeat of such behavior would indeed slow down future global warming, but as I said before, would not come close to halting it, at least under business as usual scenarios.
A) it indicates cycles of ocean temperature.
Again, duh. Cycles of ocean temperature are known and not ignored.
B) warmer oceans release some co2 even in fairly short times even if it takes much longer time frames to release large amounts of it
Yes, they release some, but not an amount that has been significant compared to direct anthropogenic emissions into the atmosphere. (This may change in the future.)
I also don't know what your point is. Climate models do take into account the temperature-mediated diffusion of CO2 into and out of the oceans.
C) nothing was said about it producing or being caused by climate trends.
Well, then it's irrelevant to this discussion.
Methane is attributed to 20% of ghg effects with under 2ppm and is estimated to have increased by 150% since the 1700s (wikipedia article on methane). Since methane is far more potent than Co2, this effect has been greater than the equivalent of about 63ppm of co2 which would be above and beyond the actual co2 increases. Thats 2/3 again as much as the estimated Co2 increase since the 1700s.
Actually, the total radiative forcing of methane since pre-industrial times is estimated to be only 30% that of CO2 (IPCC SPM again).
ue to overlaps in IR bands with methane and h2o vapor, contributions of co2 amounts to about 10%-12% of the 33 deg C or so of actual ghg contribution to earth's estimated temperature.
The fractional contribution is not what is relevant to global warming. What is relevant is the fractional change. Most of the change in radiative forcing due to GHGs has been due to the change in CO2 concentrations.
Co2 is logrithmic now in concentrations anywhere within values experienced on earth, ever. [...] At 10% contribution to the 33 deg C of all ghgs, that puts us at about 3.3 deg C total contribution of Co2 with around 380 ppm.
I'm still trying to imagine wha
What I'm implying is that co2 is being assumed to be the total cause of the warming when it is not, creating a built in fudge factor right off the bat.
Of course that is a ridiculous strawman position. CO2 is not in any way assumed to be the total cause of the warming. This is easy to see right in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, where they show model predictions with natural, anthropogenic, and natural+anthropogenic forcings. Both manmade CO2 and natural effects are needed to explain the observed climate trends.
Considering that co2 is well into its logrithmic range and that it's total contribution amounts to only 3-4 deg C out of the 30-35 deg C total contributions of all GHGs, it's pretty well run it's course because it really doesn't matter that much whether most of the radiated energy within the absorption bands is absorbed in 30 feet or 15 feet.
That makes no sense whatsoever. CO2 has not in any way "run its course", and the amount of CO2 increase over pre-industrial levels is easily capable of producing the observed warming trend, according to the aforementioned logarithmic relation. Furthermore, the total contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect, relative to other GHGs, is irrelevant when considering the amount of warming: what matters to the change in temperature is the change in GHGs, and the change in CO2 has overwhelmed the change in any other greenhouse gas as far as global warming potential is concerned, including methane.
On the other hand, methane levels have increased by 150% rather than the almost 50% of co2 and it is a vastly far more potent GHG when talking levels and is still substantially more potent over the lifespan of the co2 in the atmosphere despite despite the much shorter time spent there (but that doesn't matter when talking of current concentrations).
Methane levels, despite their rate, are still far too low to dominate CO2 in terms of total warming, and are not predicted to overtake CO2 any time in the near future. (In fact, there is some evidence that they have recently stabilized for unknown reasons, although that in no way implies that they will not continue to increase.)
Also, the few tenths of a percent of solar luminance variability has an effect
Yes, it has an effect, but it has been dominated by CO2 since the latter half of the 20th century, and considering our still-accelerating emissions rates, will continue to do so barring some really unusual solar behavior.
and so does the variability of the magnetic field as it indirectly affects cloud cover which is far more potent than co2 and methane combined.
There is no evidence that any variability in the Sun's magnetic field has affected climate.
And, we haven't even gotten to the part about atmospheric mixing (which is the reason why you don't see the atmospheric temperatures rising as predicted) nor the precipitation which is also quite a serious factor.
If those arguments are as weak as your others, perhaps it's best for you if we don't get to them.
If you haven't noticed, el nino and la nina are large scale regional ocean temperature variations first discovered several hundred years ago and hence, are known to be natural occurances - predating the industrial age.
Duh. They are also known to not produce long-scale climate trends.
But since I'm better at arguing your own position than you are, let me help you out and note that there are also longer, multidecadal trends in ocean behavior. (However, like the solar variations, they are not large enough to account for the observed warming.)
This is a variation of ocean temperature, one of which is a warmer ocean over a rather large region, implying a huge natural release of co2.
There has not actually been a huge natural release of CO2 from the oceans. For the ocean to source CO2 would require much, much larger warming over much, much longer time periods.
P.S. "Decreasing CO2 emissions to the stone-age level" is conservative hysteria, the analogue of "global warming will destroy all life on Earth". Mitigation of global warming is not an all or nothing thing. Plenty of economists (e.g., Nordhaus) have found that the economic costs of cutting back on CO2 emissions are less than the economic costs of doing nothing. Totally eliminating all CO2 emissions is not necessary, not economically or politically feasible, and not capable of halting global warming. What is both feasible and desirable is to reduce emissions.
To get around that, some have proposed "geoengineering", i.e., carefully designed "pollution". With aerosol geoengineering, you keep pollution restrictions in place, but shoot extra artificial pollutants up at high altitudes. That will avoid most of the low-altitude city smog, but will probably keep problems like acid rain.
Even if you're willing to put up with acid rain, there are other side effects. Aerosols operate by reflecting more sunlight, and as such they cool only in the day, and not so much in the daytime or in equatorial latitudes. You don't get the full benefit of cooling, and you get differential cooling at different times and in different locations which would alter local climate patterns.
Worse, all that carbon dioxide is still in the atmosphere, albeit with its warming masked by the cooling effects of pollutants. With emissions as projected under no cutbacks, the CO2 concentrations by the end of this century will heavily acidify the oceans, and to a lesser extent the soil, with correspondingly serious impacts on fish populations, coral reefs, pH-sensitive crops, etc.
Possibly worse of all, the pollutants in the atmosphere that cause cooling are short-lived, falling back out of the sky (as acid rain) within a few years. This is unlike CO2, which has a residence time on the order of a century. That means that if you're pumping extra pollutants into the air to cancel out global warming, you are totally committed to it for centuries to come. If you stop or slow down the artificial contaminants for even a few years — because you can't afford it, you lack the political will, you find the acid rain is devastating ecosystems, there's a global flu pandemic or world war and you have other things on your mind, or whatever — then the temperature returns to what it would be if you'd never put them in the air in the first place. So if we hypothetically are supposed to get 5 degrees of warming at the end of the century, a failure to keep geoengineering going in, say, 2100 would mean that you would get all 5 degrees of that warming in a couple years, instead of spread out over a whole century: far worse than even the worst of the global warming scenarios.
Anyway, people are talking about this option, but mostly as a way to buy time to spread CO2 cutbacks over longer periods, or as a last-ditch way to avoid passing some tipping point like irreversible Greenland melting.
With respect to the article, note the following points:
1. The climate has been both warmer and cooler in the past, but (a) the current rate of warming is unprecedented, (b) the future warming under business-as-usual emission scenarios is much larger than, say, the Medieval Warm Period.
2. The current warming is largely anthropogenic in nature. It is not 40% solar. See, for instance, the 2006 review article by Foukal et al. in Nature. (Note that no reference to the scientific literature is cited to justify that claim, other than a vague reference to an unnamed 1997 study by unknown individuals.) 40% of the warming in the first half of the 20th century can be attributed to solar effects (see Lean et al., 1995), but solar effects dramatically fail to explain the accelerated warming post-1970.
3. Ice in central Greenland accumulates because central Greenland is well below freezing, even under global warming. The melting — which is extremely substantial and at an unprecedented rate — is at the edges of Greenland, which have been raised farther above freezing. Greenland's total ice mass balance is decreasing, not increasing.
4. The Antarctic ice sheet isn't gaining mass either. (See Velicogna and Wahr, and Rignot and Thomas.)
5. The IPCC has decreased its sea level rise estimates from previous years, but intentionally neglects Greenland and Antarctic ice melting effects (only including thermal expansion sea level rise).
6. The hockey stick graph is still dramatic even when you include the MWP and LIA.
7. Global temperatures fell in 1940-1975 due to the heavy aerosol pollution in the atmosphere which reflects sunlight away from the Earth, which has been substantially cleaned up.
I would state more points, but I have to leave for a trip now. Perhaps you should reflect that the denalists are giving you a rather doctored picture of the actual science.
You can read a preprint of the published paper for free. (The published version is here, but full text access requires a Nature subscription.)
So, go ahead. I challenge you. Pick what you think is the single best denialist argument, and debate it with me. Photos are doctored, data are ignored or simply made up. Go ahead. Cite examples from the scientific literature written by climate experts, in which photos are doctored or data are fabricated. Shrinking ice caps are supposedly one of the tell-tales of global warming. Yet the ice caps are shrinking on Mars right now too. No, one of Mars's ice caps is shrinking (the southern), because of regional warming.
It's amusing that you think that shrinking ice caps due to warming on Mars disproves shrinking ice caps due to warming on Earth. Are there too many SUVs up there? It's amusing that you think that all warming is caused by manmade CO2. Both warming and cooling can take place naturally. On Earth, however, those natural trends are being overwhelmingly dominated by our much larger and faster CO2-based warming. We could go on and on. Have you seen Gore's movie? Water rising 20 feet in a century? Pure made-up number. Nope. That is the correct amount of water for a melting of Greenland's ice sheet, or the West Antarctic ice sheet, or half of each. The first is unlikely, but well within the realm of possibility, given known dynamical ice instabilities. It won't happen in a century, but Gore never claimed it would, if you go back and watch the movie. A few years ago the experts were warning about "global cooling." Another denialist myth. There were a few scientists who said that global cooling may occur, if our emissions didn't overwhelm natural trends, and they didn't know whether or not that would occur. There was no prediction that global cooling would occur, and certainly no consensus on the matter.
Yeah, like I'm going to take the time to read/watch all of those and refute every point made. Come back when you want to present a scientific argument against global warming, and we can debate it. Amassing an imaginary army of supposed "refutations" does not actually establish anything, and there is certainly no shortage of refutations of your "refutations" out there.
As for your link, I have no idea what it's referring to since it is cited without context. But I would be curious to know how you reconcile it with this study which found that, if anything, the IPCC's projections underestimated the actual climate change. One thing we do know, for sure, though; warming precedes CO2 peaks, not trails them. This is irrelevant to situations in which warming is being forced by CO2 increases. Another thing we know for sure; temperatures have been falling since 1979, while global CO2 has been peaking. We don't "know" any such thing; in fact, both statements are false (e.g., here, here, here). Not to mention that your naive attempt at attribution neglects all of the other climate forcings and feedbacks which take place: temperatures are not governed solely by CO2 (see, e.g., the climate between 1945-1970).
It's not the current temperatures that are so worrying, as the projected future temperatures.