Some climate scientists have calculated that we may be responsible for up to 120% of the warming. In other words without human released greenhouse gases and other human effects the climate would have actually cooled very slightly.
The warming started around 20,000 years ago and ended about 8,000 years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum. Since then the trend has been slow cooling.
Your ignorance is showing. Michael Mann's field is not climate models that predict future warming. It's paleoclimatology, the study of past climates. Here is a comparison of model output to actual temperature data up to 2010 from one of the scientists who does do climate modeling. Total warming is still well within the range projected by climate models.
The nuclear winter scenario predicts that the huge fires caused by nuclear explosions (from burning urban areas) would loft massive amounts of dense smoke from the fires, into the upper troposphere / stratosphere. At 10-15 kilometers (6–9 miles) above the Earth's surface, the absorption of sunlight would further heat the smoke, lifting some, or all of it, into the stratosphere, to where the smoke would persist for years, with no rain to wash it out. This aerosol of particles would block out much of the sun's light from reaching the surface, causing surface temperatures to drop drastically.
Setting off a bunch nuclear weapons in the ocean would certainly have an effect but it wouldn't change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere for a significant length of time. Water vapor in the atmosphere is controlled by temperature.
They work backwards as in reaching a conclusion, then doing the work required to reach it.
Have you got any evidence to back that up or is that just an assumption on your part? I guess you think they decided CO2 was the cause of global warming then did the work to try an prove it. But their work is based on the work of Fourier and Arrhenius who in 1896 wrote "if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression." That is still a good first order calculation of the effects of CO2 on temperature. And no, I don't agree with his views on eugenics but that's totally unrelated to his work in atmospheric physics.
He is a true scientific skeptic. He expressed reservations about some of the climate research and apparently he supported McIntyre and McKittrick to some extent. But then when he actually dug into the subject and collected and processed his own data he found the same thing as the other groups that had done that reported so he is no longer skeptical about the temperature record.
It's impossible to increase or reduce water vapor to any significant degree. What controls water vapor levels is temperature and the availability of water to evaporate into the atmosphere. Now if you put covers over the oceans, that would lower water vapor levels but I don't think we'd like the other changes that would cause.
The definition of a greenhouse gas is:... a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. That's exactly what CO2 does. It has nothing to do with heat capacity. As the level of water vapor increases CO2 becomes less of a factor as a greenhouse gas but it never drops to zero. That's why the contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming is given as a range (9-26%). Finally the level of water vapor in the air over a desert like the Sahara may get very low but it never drops to zero.
10 years is meaningless in climate temperature trends. Natural variability of weather can easily override the underlying climate trends in that short a time. It takes 20-30 years for a statistically significant sample to be collected. So if the 2010's don't get any warmer than the 2000's you might have something. At this point though it's just noise.
If you want to see what the actual scientists actively working in the field are saying go read the IPCC AR4 WG1 report. Pay close attention to the time frames and other conditions they put on their projections. I think you'll find their projections are rather conservative.
Heat capacity has nothing to do with why CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It's a greenhouse gas because it absorbs electromagnetic radiation (aka photons) in some bands of the infrared range. And humans could pump all the water vapor they want into the atmosphere or scrub all of it out they want and it wouldn't affect the overall level of water vapor in the atmosphere. Now if you put covers on the oceans, that would have an effect.
How can you say researchers are working backwards when over 100 years ago Svante Arrhenius found that increasing the CO2 level in the atmosphere would cause warming? That was long before any of these models you denigrate.
I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince me of this theory any more.
How about if 10 years from now things continue to progress as climate scientists say they will? You can believe whatever you want to but Mother Earth always casts the deciding vote.
Without knowing how much of that CO2 was organic I don't see how you can conclude that "man is responsible for the increase in CO2" . I guess you're inferring that the earth released zero CO2 and absorbed half of that released by man?
No, I'm inferring that humans add CO2 to the atmosphere which creates an imbalance in the carbon cycle. So the oceans absorb a lot of it to get the partial pressure between them and the atmosphere back to normal. The biosphere and geosphere also absorb a bit. But the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is equivalent to around 43% of the total CO2 released by humans. Once a carbon atom gets into the carbon cycle it doesn't matter what its source is, it's there. Burning fossil fuels is making carbon available to the carbon cycle that wasn't easily available before increasing the total carbon in the cycle and changing the levels in all of the sinks.
Knowing how climate works is not a binary situation. You can't say that because we don't know everything about it that we know nothing useful about climate. We know more about it now than we did in the past and we'll know more about it in the future than we do now. Climate scientists dedicate their lives to understanding climate and it appears to me we understand the basics pretty well and are now filling in the details. Present your evidence that that is not the case or is that just your conjecture?
Altogether greenhouse gases are less than 2% of the atmosphere and yet they raise the surface temperature of the Earth by about 58F. What makes you think a 40% increase in the 2nd most common of those GHG's, responsible for 9-26% of that 58F in greenhouse warming, is not going to have an effect? Scientists account for the heat radiating to space by measuring it with satellites. Clouds and aerosols (dust) are also factors known to scientists and accounted for. I doubt you could name any factor that climate scientists haven't considered.
Then you get into your political objections to the proposed solutions. But that's no longer a scientific argument. I suspect your ideology drives your objections to the science.
Warming hasn't exactly stalled for the last decade. It is true that the slope of the warming trend in the 2000's is less than the 1980's & 1990's but 2010 is tied with 2005 for the warmest years on record (GISS). But a decade is too short a time period to eliminate the effects of natural variability on climate so we'll have to wait at least another decade to see if your supposition has any validity.
That the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is not accounted for by natural causes *Problem 1
How about the observable fact that human burning of fossil fuels has released more than twice as much CO2 as it would take to raise the atmospheric level of it from 280 ppmv in 1830 to 390 ppmv in 2011? So if the atmospheric level of CO2 is from natural causes you have to propose some mechanism that removes all of the human released CO2 and some natural mechanism that releases CO2 to increase the level.
That CO2 is a greenhouse gas and therefore will cause temperature rise in the atmosphere *Problem 2
How about the observable fact that the difference between upwelling longwave radiation at the surface and from orbit shows a clear signature of CO2 absorption of that radiation. That shows that CO2 is capturing IR radiation in the atmosphere. How would that not increase the temperature?
It means there's only a 20% chance that the Russian heat wave would have set the records it did without global climate change. There still would have been a heat wave without GCC, just an 80% chance that it would not have been record breaking as the one in question was.
I said confirmation, not a bunch of anecdotes. Someone should dig into the NSF grants in the area and see how many of them actually mention global warming. A quick perusal of a portion of the list shows very few of the titles mention global warming (NSF award search). Maybe the money goes to scientists who have shown they do good science. The problem you have is that scientists are smart people and if they are deliberately pushing what they know to be bad science they have to know they will be found out sooner or later. I can't believe that many scientists are willing to take that chance with their scientific reputations.
Climate is the envelope that naturally variable chaotic weather operates in. The extremes of weather are constrained by climate. If the climate shifts then the weather shifts right along with it.
You'd have better luck if you at least said "There is no scientific evidence to support anthropogenic Global Warming". The BEST study was just further confirmation that the globe is warming.
Slashdot Mirror
Some climate scientists have calculated that we may be responsible for up to 120% of the warming. In other words without human released greenhouse gases and other human effects the climate would have actually cooled very slightly.
I suggest Skeptical Science and Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming which is available both in book form and online.
The warming started around 20,000 years ago and ended about 8,000 years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum. Since then the trend has been slow cooling.
Your ignorance is showing. Michael Mann's field is not climate models that predict future warming. It's paleoclimatology, the study of past climates. Here is a comparison of model output to actual temperature data up to 2010 from one of the scientists who does do climate modeling. Total warming is still well within the range projected by climate models.
Nuclear winter
The nuclear winter scenario predicts that the huge fires caused by nuclear explosions (from burning urban areas) would loft massive amounts of dense smoke from the fires, into the upper troposphere / stratosphere. At 10-15 kilometers (6–9 miles) above the Earth's surface, the absorption of sunlight would further heat the smoke, lifting some, or all of it, into the stratosphere, to where the smoke would persist for years, with no rain to wash it out. This aerosol of particles would block out much of the sun's light from reaching the surface, causing surface temperatures to drop drastically.
Setting off a bunch nuclear weapons in the ocean would certainly have an effect but it wouldn't change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere for a significant length of time. Water vapor in the atmosphere is controlled by temperature.
They work backwards as in reaching a conclusion, then doing the work required to reach it.
Have you got any evidence to back that up or is that just an assumption on your part? I guess you think they decided CO2 was the cause of global warming then did the work to try an prove it. But their work is based on the work of Fourier and Arrhenius who in 1896 wrote "if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression." That is still a good first order calculation of the effects of CO2 on temperature. And no, I don't agree with his views on eugenics but that's totally unrelated to his work in atmospheric physics.
He is a true scientific skeptic. He expressed reservations about some of the climate research and apparently he supported McIntyre and McKittrick to some extent. But then when he actually dug into the subject and collected and processed his own data he found the same thing as the other groups that had done that reported so he is no longer skeptical about the temperature record.
It's impossible to increase or reduce water vapor to any significant degree. What controls water vapor levels is temperature and the availability of water to evaporate into the atmosphere. Now if you put covers over the oceans, that would lower water vapor levels but I don't think we'd like the other changes that would cause.
The definition of a greenhouse gas is: ... a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. That's exactly what CO2 does. It has nothing to do with heat capacity. As the level of water vapor increases CO2 becomes less of a factor as a greenhouse gas but it never drops to zero. That's why the contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming is given as a range (9-26%). Finally the level of water vapor in the air over a desert like the Sahara may get very low but it never drops to zero.
No, I live in the Pacific Northwest, one of the areas that's likely to fare better than most in global warming.
10 years is meaningless in climate temperature trends. Natural variability of weather can easily override the underlying climate trends in that short a time. It takes 20-30 years for a statistically significant sample to be collected. So if the 2010's don't get any warmer than the 2000's you might have something. At this point though it's just noise.
If you want to see what the actual scientists actively working in the field are saying go read the IPCC AR4 WG1 report. Pay close attention to the time frames and other conditions they put on their projections. I think you'll find their projections are rather conservative.
I think the problem is your perception of what they said, not what they actually said.
Heat capacity has nothing to do with why CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It's a greenhouse gas because it absorbs electromagnetic radiation (aka photons) in some bands of the infrared range. And humans could pump all the water vapor they want into the atmosphere or scrub all of it out they want and it wouldn't affect the overall level of water vapor in the atmosphere. Now if you put covers on the oceans, that would have an effect.
How can you say researchers are working backwards when over 100 years ago Svante Arrhenius found that increasing the CO2 level in the atmosphere would cause warming? That was long before any of these models you denigrate.
I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince me of this theory any more.
How about if 10 years from now things continue to progress as climate scientists say they will? You can believe whatever you want to but Mother Earth always casts the deciding vote.
As stated it is simple physics. Yes it is simplistic when applied to the dynamic atmosphere but it's still one of the major factors to be considered.
You are right that heat transfer in the atmosphere can't be adequately described in a /. post. It would take several major papers or a book to do that.
Without knowing how much of that CO2 was organic I don't see how you can conclude that "man is responsible for the increase in CO2" . I guess you're inferring that the earth released zero CO2 and absorbed half of that released by man?
No, I'm inferring that humans add CO2 to the atmosphere which creates an imbalance in the carbon cycle. So the oceans absorb a lot of it to get the partial pressure between them and the atmosphere back to normal. The biosphere and geosphere also absorb a bit. But the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is equivalent to around 43% of the total CO2 released by humans. Once a carbon atom gets into the carbon cycle it doesn't matter what its source is, it's there. Burning fossil fuels is making carbon available to the carbon cycle that wasn't easily available before increasing the total carbon in the cycle and changing the levels in all of the sinks.
Knowing how climate works is not a binary situation. You can't say that because we don't know everything about it that we know nothing useful about climate. We know more about it now than we did in the past and we'll know more about it in the future than we do now. Climate scientists dedicate their lives to understanding climate and it appears to me we understand the basics pretty well and are now filling in the details. Present your evidence that that is not the case or is that just your conjecture?
Altogether greenhouse gases are less than 2% of the atmosphere and yet they raise the surface temperature of the Earth by about 58F. What makes you think a 40% increase in the 2nd most common of those GHG's, responsible for 9-26% of that 58F in greenhouse warming, is not going to have an effect? Scientists account for the heat radiating to space by measuring it with satellites. Clouds and aerosols (dust) are also factors known to scientists and accounted for. I doubt you could name any factor that climate scientists haven't considered.
Then you get into your political objections to the proposed solutions. But that's no longer a scientific argument. I suspect your ideology drives your objections to the science.
Warming hasn't exactly stalled for the last decade. It is true that the slope of the warming trend in the 2000's is less than the 1980's & 1990's but 2010 is tied with 2005 for the warmest years on record (GISS). But a decade is too short a time period to eliminate the effects of natural variability on climate so we'll have to wait at least another decade to see if your supposition has any validity.
That the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is not accounted for by natural causes *Problem 1
How about the observable fact that human burning of fossil fuels has released more than twice as much CO2 as it would take to raise the atmospheric level of it from 280 ppmv in 1830 to 390 ppmv in 2011? So if the atmospheric level of CO2 is from natural causes you have to propose some mechanism that removes all of the human released CO2 and some natural mechanism that releases CO2 to increase the level.
That CO2 is a greenhouse gas and therefore will cause temperature rise in the atmosphere *Problem 2
How about the observable fact that the difference between upwelling longwave radiation at the surface and from orbit shows a clear signature of CO2 absorption of that radiation. That shows that CO2 is capturing IR radiation in the atmosphere. How would that not increase the temperature?
It means there's only a 20% chance that the Russian heat wave would have set the records it did without global climate change. There still would have been a heat wave without GCC, just an 80% chance that it would not have been record breaking as the one in question was.
I said confirmation, not a bunch of anecdotes. Someone should dig into the NSF grants in the area and see how many of them actually mention global warming. A quick perusal of a portion of the list shows very few of the titles mention global warming (NSF award search). Maybe the money goes to scientists who have shown they do good science. The problem you have is that scientists are smart people and if they are deliberately pushing what they know to be bad science they have to know they will be found out sooner or later. I can't believe that many scientists are willing to take that chance with their scientific reputations.
Climate is the envelope that naturally variable chaotic weather operates in. The extremes of weather are constrained by climate. If the climate shifts then the weather shifts right along with it.
You'd have better luck if you at least said "There is no scientific evidence to support anthropogenic Global Warming". The BEST study was just further confirmation that the globe is warming.
So, do all of your neighbors have anti-ninja rocks too or have they been attacked by ninjas lately?