Show the opposite. Show three top climate change models that can predict global mean temperatures any time in the past and temperatures after they were created.
Actually hindcasting like that is one thing they do to test climate models and they do a reasonably good job of it.
Unfortunately the qualified scientists often have agendas to push, so you can't be sure how thorough and unbiased their statements are.
The beauty of science is that if some scientist is wrong they can be shown to be wrong by other scientists. That's what happens when you base your results on reality. Science it one of the most competitive fields of human endeavor where nearly every scientist wants to one-up the other scientists.
What happens is that sea level rises relatively slowly and a few people are forced to move or adapt in some other way. But then along comes a hurricane or tsunami and the surge reaches places it's never come close to reaching before and the people living there are caught unawares and many of them die.
As I said above if you want more nuclear power to be built then you should be lobbying your congresscritters to impose a tax to subsidize it. In the private sector it's much to risky to invest in it under the current conditions. The only nuclear plants under construction in the US right now went from a budgeted cost of about $7 billion to around $26 billion currently.
Global warming is a slow motion catastrophe. It's kind of like smoking tobacco. One cigarette isn't likely to give you cancer and even 1000 of them probably won't but if you keep smoking enough of them for long enough your chances of getting cancer keep rising.
You should be lobbying your congresscritters to impose a tax to support building nuclear power plants because that's the only way it's going to happen. The private sector is not willing to invest in nuclear power without government guarantees that they're not going to lose their shirts. The Vogtle plants in Georgia were projected to cost $7 billion and be on line by 2018. Now the bill is expected to be about $26 billion and they'll come on line at best in about 2022.
The biosphere of today is adapted to a rather low carbon atmosphere compared to back when all that carbon was being buried underground. It's been at least 2.5 million years and more likely 15-20 million years since carbon in the atmosphere has been even as high as it is now, a little over 400 ppm. At the rate the carbon content in the atmosphere is increasing a lot of life on Earth will have difficulty adapting to the change. The human race will probably survive because we're adaptable and inventive but that doesn't mean it will be easy. It could cause the collapse of the modern civilization we've created.
There is no such thing as a model being proven. The models make predictions with margins of errors, which are then compared to the actual measurements.
Since you're trying to pose as a smartass, here's a question for you: name the top 3 of the "120 reputable" models, "top" defined, for example, as having the largest impact factor. Show us the predictions, the margins of error and compare it with actual measurements.
Otherwise, you're just sprouting bullshit.
Here's a comparison of climate model projections including the uncertainty ranges to observations. The models are actually doing pretty well.
Who gets to decided what the best temperature is? Or what the best rate of warming/cooling is?
Wrong question. The world will go on regardless of the temperature. The right question is how much is it going to cost us (monetarily and non-monetarily) to adapt to a temperature regime well outside of the one we've built our global civilization on? I'm afraid you probably won't like the answer.
Blackbody radiation absorption for CO2 is at less than 11%. Absorption in the lower atmosphere is saturated so can only be absorbed in the troposphere, where CO2 is much less common, and yet no measurements have found a "hot spot" that high up.
No, the absorption of infrared is not saturated in the lower atmosphere. Here are a couple of posts about that:
But that aside I'm going to ask the same question I continue to ask - what is the correct temperature and who gets to decide?
It's a meaningless question. There is no "correct temperature". The real question is what temperatures are compatible with maintaining a complex global civilization? We've built this civilization on a certain temperature regime and changing temperatures are going to cause costly adaptation to the new regime. It's not clear yet just how costly that adaptation will be but chances are it's going to be a lot more than you seem to think.
CO2 cannot be responsible for the presented temperature increase because 1 molecule out of 2500 can't increase ambient temperature by that much,
Not that crap again. When a CO2 (or other GHG molecule) absorbs an infrared photon that added energy is quickly transferred to other non-GHG molecules in the atmosphere 99+% of the time. Eventually another infrared photon is emitted in a random direction so approximately half of them head back to the surface further warming it. Here's a quote I saved that explains it in more detail:
It is first necessary to understand that molecules are made up of atoms (with mass) are held together by bonds, much like two balls linked by springs, and therefore have ways of vibrating at specific frequencies.
The bonds between two atoms in a molecule are particularly strong, and can only vibrate at very high frequencies (emphasize frequencies over energies) well above the frequency of infrared or the solar radiation spectrum.
However, molecules with 3 or more atoms can vibrate by changing the angles between the three atoms, and they can vibrate at additional (lower) frequencies. Molecules like CO2 and H2O have vibrational frequencies within the infrared range. In these vibrations, the strong bonds between Carbon and Oxygen may still have very high vibrational frequencies, but the two Oxygen atoms can vibrate toward or away from each other at this lower frequency.
Molecules with more than 3 atoms can vibrate in even more ways (which means more and more frequencies). Examples are CH4, CFCs, etc.
When upward radiation close to the right frequency hits a CO2 molecule, it can excite the vibrational mode at that frequency. The outward radiation is reduced by the amount of energy that goes into the vibration. We see the reduced amount of outward radiation in the spectra observed by downward looking satellites.
[The observant student then might ask why the energy that goes into the vibration does not just get sent back out to space by emitting a photon – after all, if the same molecule gets hit over and over with photons won’t the vibrational energy increase and increase? There are two answers: the simple part is that yes, the energy can be re-emitted, but the direction of the emitted photons does not have to have the same upward angle. In fact, the extra energy will as likely go down as up. On average, only half of the incoming energy continues on an upward path, half heads back toward Earth to participate in the answer to question 3.
The second answer comes from equipartion of energy. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules. This kinetic energy is made up of not only the vibrational energy, but also the rotational energy and the classical kinetic energy of moving molecules.
When one molecule with high vibrational energy bumps into another molecule (even one without a vibrational mode) some of that vibration can go into kicking the other molecule into faster motion or higher rotation. So energy gets lost from the vibrational mode and transferred into the general temperature of the surrounding gas. The CO2 molecule has a unique way to absorb energy at a particular frequency, but that energy gets transferred very quickly to its neighboring molecules, most of which have no way to emit radiation at that frequency.
And in this case I can tell you why it is not that easy. Change costs money and shifts prosperity. Big changes do this on a large scale.
Indeed it does. But the question is will the change caused by global warming/climate change cost you even more than doing something about it. Many people seem to think it won't but if what the climate scientists say is correct (and they get more things correct about it than wrong) the answer is no. And the longer we wait to address the problem the more expensive it becomes.
So the people who say we don't need to do something about anthropogenic global warming are gambling that they are correct and based on what scientists have been saying lately chances are they're going to come up snake eyes with the gamble. Good luck. You're probably going to need it.
Not something you ever needed to worry about in your lifetime regardless of what happened. Maybe taking CO2 levels from 270 ppm up to around 320 ppm would be a good thing. But the CO2 level is over 400 ppm now and that's going to cause changes that will cost a lot of money to adapt to over the next 50 to 100 years. It would be cheaper to prevent the changes in the first place.
Do you honestly believe we wouldn't be studying climate and that climate scientists would be out of a job if anthropogenic global warming wasn't a thing? Understanding how the climate system works is important to our modern complex civilization regardless of the reasons behind it. Besides the proposed 'solutions' are not for the most part being proposed by climate scientists. For the most part all they are doing is calling for emissions of CO2 to be reduced and eventually eliminated. How we get there is the realm of politicians.
Also saying it requires 'wealth destruction' and 'a massive reduction in the quality of life' is a straw man. There are ways to get there that perhaps require some changes to the way we live but don't necessarily require a massive reduction in those things.
The global warming scientists and politicians are not to be trusted.
In general scientists are among the most trustworthy of human beings. That's because they spend so much time and effort keeping each other honest. In order to believe that climate scientists are not being honest about their findings you would have to believe thousands of them have been involved in a decades long conspiracy that no one's been able to crack. Given the amount of opposition to them it's just not believable to me that if there were a substantial problem with their work it would not have surfaced by now.
So... acknowledgment that we're still coming out of the last ice age (you know, warming), but (and in the very next breath, mind you) blaming (in its entirety) this warming solely on human activity. How fucking stupid do they think we are?...
Actually we finished coming out of the last glacial period (ice age) around 8,000 years ago and had slowly started dropping toward the next one as the temperature has been on a slight downward trend since then. But the massive increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily due to human emissions has reversed that trend.
I knew global warming had to be in there somewhere. By the way, it is "climate change" not "global warming". You need to keep updated with the latest propaganda. Meanwhile, your local drinking water is polluted, but go ahead and worry about the Earth wobbling.
Global warming is one cause of climate change. Both terms are useful in the proper context.
According to Pai the states don't have the power to implement their own rules so it wasn't part of Pai's plan to allow local rule making. The only plan Trump has is anything that makes him look good and gives him more power. I don't think it matters much to him what side of the political spectrum it comes from.
Ajit Pai was determined to roll back net neutrality regardless of any outside influence (including comments from actual citizens). It was a done deal once he got appointed FCC commission chair.
I agree it's very low at cold temperatures but it's not zero* until you get down to below -30 deg C. The third graph on that page is the only one that has enough detail to show it. At -15 deg C (5 deg F) the air holds about 0.1 lbs of water per 1000 cubic feet of air. At -10 deg C (14 deg F) the air holds 0.14 lbs of water per 1000 cubic feet of air. So obviously it does change the amount of water vapor in a measurable amount. At freezing the air holds about 0.3 lbs of water per 1000 cubic feet, about double what it holds at -10 deg C.
*Actually it's probably still measurable below that even.
They didn't say that Hurricane Florence was caused by climate change, just that it may be wetter and moving more slowly because of the effects of climate change.
As my last sentence implies every weather event is affected by climate change, not caused by it.
Slashdot Mirror
Show the opposite. Show three top climate change models that can predict global mean temperatures any time in the past and temperatures after they were created.
Actually hindcasting like that is one thing they do to test climate models and they do a reasonably good job of it.
Primer: climate models
Look under the heading "How climate models are tested?".
Unfortunately the qualified scientists often have agendas to push, so you can't be sure how thorough and unbiased their statements are.
The beauty of science is that if some scientist is wrong they can be shown to be wrong by other scientists. That's what happens when you base your results on reality. Science it one of the most competitive fields of human endeavor where nearly every scientist wants to one-up the other scientists.
Calling climate science deniers "skeptics" is a contradiction of terms.
What happens is that sea level rises relatively slowly and a few people are forced to move or adapt in some other way. But then along comes a hurricane or tsunami and the surge reaches places it's never come close to reaching before and the people living there are caught unawares and many of them die.
As I said above if you want more nuclear power to be built then you should be lobbying your congresscritters to impose a tax to subsidize it. In the private sector it's much to risky to invest in it under the current conditions. The only nuclear plants under construction in the US right now went from a budgeted cost of about $7 billion to around $26 billion currently.
Of course the consensus is moving. As more information is discovered it eventually becomes incorporated into the general scientific consensus.
Global warming is a slow motion catastrophe. It's kind of like smoking tobacco. One cigarette isn't likely to give you cancer and even 1000 of them probably won't but if you keep smoking enough of them for long enough your chances of getting cancer keep rising.
You should be lobbying your congresscritters to impose a tax to support building nuclear power plants because that's the only way it's going to happen. The private sector is not willing to invest in nuclear power without government guarantees that they're not going to lose their shirts. The Vogtle plants in Georgia were projected to cost $7 billion and be on line by 2018. Now the bill is expected to be about $26 billion and they'll come on line at best in about 2022.
The biosphere of today is adapted to a rather low carbon atmosphere compared to back when all that carbon was being buried underground. It's been at least 2.5 million years and more likely 15-20 million years since carbon in the atmosphere has been even as high as it is now, a little over 400 ppm. At the rate the carbon content in the atmosphere is increasing a lot of life on Earth will have difficulty adapting to the change. The human race will probably survive because we're adaptable and inventive but that doesn't mean it will be easy. It could cause the collapse of the modern civilization we've created.
There is no such thing as a model being proven. The models make predictions with margins of errors, which are then compared to the actual measurements.
Since you're trying to pose as a smartass, here's a question for you: name the top 3 of the "120 reputable" models, "top" defined, for example, as having the largest impact factor. Show us the predictions, the margins of error and compare it with actual measurements.
Otherwise, you're just sprouting bullshit.
Here's a comparison of climate model projections including the uncertainty ranges to observations. The models are actually doing pretty well.
Climate model projections compared to observations
Who gets to decided what the best temperature is? Or what the best rate of warming/cooling is?
Wrong question. The world will go on regardless of the temperature. The right question is how much is it going to cost us (monetarily and non-monetarily) to adapt to a temperature regime well outside of the one we've built our global civilization on? I'm afraid you probably won't like the answer.
Oops, here is part ii.
A saturated gassy argument-part ii
Blackbody radiation absorption for CO2 is at less than 11%. Absorption in the lower atmosphere is saturated so can only be absorbed in the troposphere, where CO2 is much less common, and yet no measurements have found a "hot spot" that high up.
No, the absorption of infrared is not saturated in the lower atmosphere. Here are a couple of posts about that:
A saturated gassy argument
But that aside I'm going to ask the same question I continue to ask - what is the correct temperature and who gets to decide?
It's a meaningless question. There is no "correct temperature". The real question is what temperatures are compatible with maintaining a complex global civilization? We've built this civilization on a certain temperature regime and changing temperatures are going to cause costly adaptation to the new regime. It's not clear yet just how costly that adaptation will be but chances are it's going to be a lot more than you seem to think.
CO2 cannot be responsible for the presented temperature increase because 1 molecule out of 2500 can't increase ambient temperature by that much,
Not that crap again. When a CO2 (or other GHG molecule) absorbs an infrared photon that added energy is quickly transferred to other non-GHG molecules in the atmosphere 99+% of the time. Eventually another infrared photon is emitted in a random direction so approximately half of them head back to the surface further warming it. Here's a quote I saved that explains it in more detail:
It is first necessary to understand that molecules are made up of atoms (with mass) are held together by bonds, much like two balls linked by springs, and therefore have ways of vibrating at specific frequencies.
The bonds between two atoms in a molecule are particularly strong, and can only vibrate at very high frequencies (emphasize frequencies over energies) well above the frequency of infrared or the solar radiation spectrum.
However, molecules with 3 or more atoms can vibrate by changing the angles between the three atoms, and they can vibrate at additional (lower) frequencies. Molecules like CO2 and H2O have vibrational frequencies within the infrared range. In these vibrations, the strong bonds between Carbon and Oxygen may still have very high vibrational frequencies, but the two Oxygen atoms can vibrate toward or away from each other at this lower frequency.
Molecules with more than 3 atoms can vibrate in even more ways (which means more and more frequencies). Examples are CH4, CFCs, etc.
When upward radiation close to the right frequency hits a CO2 molecule, it can excite the vibrational mode at that frequency. The outward radiation is reduced by the amount of energy that goes into the vibration. We see the reduced amount of outward radiation in the spectra observed by downward looking satellites.
[The observant student then might ask why the energy that goes into the vibration does not just get sent back out to space by emitting a photon – after all, if the same molecule gets hit over and over with photons won’t the vibrational energy increase and increase? There are two answers: the simple part is that yes, the energy can be re-emitted, but the direction of the emitted photons does not have to have the same upward angle. In fact, the extra energy will as likely go down as up. On average, only half of the incoming energy continues on an upward path, half heads back toward Earth to participate in the answer to question 3.
The second answer comes from equipartion of energy. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules. This kinetic energy is made up of not only the vibrational energy, but also the rotational energy and the classical kinetic energy of moving molecules.
When one molecule with high vibrational energy bumps into another molecule (even one without a vibrational mode) some of that vibration can go into kicking the other molecule into faster motion or higher rotation. So energy gets lost from the vibrational mode and transferred into the general temperature of the surrounding gas. The CO2 molecule has a unique way to absorb energy at a particular frequency, but that energy gets transferred very quickly to its neighboring molecules, most of which have no way to emit radiation at that frequency.
First, I view
And in this case I can tell you why it is not that easy. Change costs money and shifts prosperity. Big changes do this on a large scale.
Indeed it does. But the question is will the change caused by global warming/climate change cost you even more than doing something about it. Many people seem to think it won't but if what the climate scientists say is correct (and they get more things correct about it than wrong) the answer is no. And the longer we wait to address the problem the more expensive it becomes.
So the people who say we don't need to do something about anthropogenic global warming are gambling that they are correct and based on what scientists have been saying lately chances are they're going to come up snake eyes with the gamble. Good luck. You're probably going to need it.
Not something you ever needed to worry about in your lifetime regardless of what happened. Maybe taking CO2 levels from 270 ppm up to around 320 ppm would be a good thing. But the CO2 level is over 400 ppm now and that's going to cause changes that will cost a lot of money to adapt to over the next 50 to 100 years. It would be cheaper to prevent the changes in the first place.
Do you honestly believe we wouldn't be studying climate and that climate scientists would be out of a job if anthropogenic global warming wasn't a thing? Understanding how the climate system works is important to our modern complex civilization regardless of the reasons behind it. Besides the proposed 'solutions' are not for the most part being proposed by climate scientists. For the most part all they are doing is calling for emissions of CO2 to be reduced and eventually eliminated. How we get there is the realm of politicians.
Also saying it requires 'wealth destruction' and 'a massive reduction in the quality of life' is a straw man. There are ways to get there that perhaps require some changes to the way we live but don't necessarily require a massive reduction in those things.
The global warming scientists and politicians are not to be trusted.
In general scientists are among the most trustworthy of human beings. That's because they spend so much time and effort keeping each other honest. In order to believe that climate scientists are not being honest about their findings you would have to believe thousands of them have been involved in a decades long conspiracy that no one's been able to crack. Given the amount of opposition to them it's just not believable to me that if there were a substantial problem with their work it would not have surfaced by now.
Politicians on the other hand ...
So... acknowledgment that we're still coming out of the last ice age (you know, warming), but (and in the very next breath, mind you) blaming (in its entirety) this warming solely on human activity. How fucking stupid do they think we are? ...
Actually we finished coming out of the last glacial period (ice age) around 8,000 years ago and had slowly started dropping toward the next one as the temperature has been on a slight downward trend since then. But the massive increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily due to human emissions has reversed that trend.
I knew global warming had to be in there somewhere. By the way, it is "climate change" not "global warming". You need to keep updated with the latest propaganda. Meanwhile, your local drinking water is polluted, but go ahead and worry about the Earth wobbling.
Global warming is one cause of climate change. Both terms are useful in the proper context.
According to Pai the states don't have the power to implement their own rules so it wasn't part of Pai's plan to allow local rule making. The only plan Trump has is anything that makes him look good and gives him more power. I don't think it matters much to him what side of the political spectrum it comes from.
Ajit Pai was determined to roll back net neutrality regardless of any outside influence (including comments from actual citizens). It was a done deal once he got appointed FCC commission chair.
I agree it's very low at cold temperatures but it's not zero* until you get down to below -30 deg C. The third graph on that page is the only one that has enough detail to show it. At -15 deg C (5 deg F) the air holds about 0.1 lbs of water per 1000 cubic feet of air. At -10 deg C (14 deg F) the air holds 0.14 lbs of water per 1000 cubic feet of air. So obviously it does change the amount of water vapor in a measurable amount. At freezing the air holds about 0.3 lbs of water per 1000 cubic feet, about double what it holds at -10 deg C.
*Actually it's probably still measurable below that even.
They didn't say that Hurricane Florence was caused by climate change, just that it may be wetter and moving more slowly because of the effects of climate change.
As my last sentence implies every weather event is affected by climate change, not caused by it.
Ok, here are a couple of non-Wikipedia sources on Arctic amplification:
Arctic amplification dominated by temperature feedbacks in contemporary climate models
Processes and impacts of Arctic amplification: A research synthesis