Because the raw unaltered field data is unavailable,...
Have you looked here. They certainly haven't thrown out the original raw data. That's the base starting point for any adjustments they make.
You may not trust climate scientists but have you ever considered the size of the conspiracy that would be required to perpetrate such a fraud? At least thousands of scientists over the whole world for at least the past 30 or 40 years? If they're that good at it you might as well give up.
I don't disagree that Mann has a prickly personality but the trial has nothing to do with his science. It's about Steyn accusing Mann of "molesting" the data in an obvious comparison to Jerry Sandusky who was also at Penn State. Discovery in the trial won't find any evidence of scientific malfeasance just as all of the other investigations of Mann and the Climategate emails found essentially nothing.
The paywalls on scientific papers is unfortunate but if nothing else you can go to the libraries of most research universities and read them. Even if they're behind paywalls.
So I consider surface station data both temporally and spatially sparse, subjected to manipulations that are less than forthright and in ways that are mathematically dubious.
I don't get that you would think the adjustments to surface temperatures are less than forthright. They are well documented in the relevant papers about the adjustments.
This page at Berkeley Earth describes their data set and some of the adjustments.
As far as the sparseness of some regions of the globe goes we don't care so much what the actual temperature is globally as much as we care about how it's changing over time. If the global temperature is derived in a consistent manner then it's probably a reasonable representation of temperature change.
Satellites because of their orbital inclination don't cover the polar regions at all and have to deal with issues of observation angle for near polar readings. Also they have to make adjustments for clouds and high elevations messing up their readings.
I don't disbelieve the satellite readings, I just don't see any good reason to trust them over the surface measurements, particularly over the time period since the satellites went up (1979) when the surface systems have also been improved to higher standards.
Don't worry. 2015 is going to blow last years record out of the water and if the strong El Nino years of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998 are any indication 2016 will be even warmer. In 2020 the climate science denier's meme will probably be "no warming since 2016".
People who believe that satellite data is the gold standard for temperatures don't understand all the manipulations and adjustments required to produce a temperature from the microwave emissions of O2 molecules in the atmosphere. They require far more adjustments then surface temperature measurements with thermometers. Even one of the principle scientists for RSS, Carl Mears says he trusts the surface temperature records more than the satellite records.
A similar, but stronger case can be made using surface temperature datasets, which I consider to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!). Link
The model that claims that 39,000 stations provides precise enough measurement of the temperature of 5000 trillion tonnes of air, such that we can derive a "global temperature" and detect 100 year trends.
Mostly we're only measuring the bottom 2 or 3 meters of the atmosphere but that's beside the point. Thousands of scientists and statisticians think it's an adequate measure and that's good enough for me. If you think otherwise it's up to you to provide actual scientific evidence.
I didn't say "now", either. I am describing a past future prediction. Going to no ice is obviously not going to happen when the ice is growing.
Your original statement was "It only happens to contradict previous global warming predictions that all the ice would be gone and we'd have massive floods of coastal areas." To me that implies you meant by now. No "past future prediction" that I'm aware of said that. Ice on the Earth's surface is a complex thing composed of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice. It's not particularly surprising that in some places the ice is increasing now. Meanwhile the net amount of ice on the planet is still declining.
So if this dose not come to pass in 2050, are you willing to accept that this prediction is wrong and the underlying theory has been falisfied?
If I live to 2050 I'll be 98 years old. I'll just be happy to make it that far. I'd be willing to accept that particular prediction was wrong but I'd be looking for the reasons it was wrong such as a major volcanic eruption. As far as the whole of climate theory being wrong it's far to complex a subject for any one thing to falsify it.
No one predicted that "global warming" (now "climate change") would result in more ice.
It's been "climate change" since at least the 1950's. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1956 titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". As I said before the total amount of ice across the whole planet is still declining despite the fact that it is increasing in some areas.
I'm not arguing about the low level physics. The proposed mechanism is backfilled speculation about a complex system that is still not fully understood.
So are you saying since we don't fully understand it we should treat it as if we understand nothing?
Not remotely relevant. The accuracy of the global temperature calculation depends on the assumptions of the model. Garbage in, garbage out.
The assumptions of what model specifically? If you're talking about climate models they have nothing to do with the average global temperature.
It only happens to contradict previous global warming predictions that all the ice would be gone and we'd have massive floods of coastal areas.
Now I know you really don't know a thing about global warming except what you read in climate science denier blogs. No one in the scientific community ever predicted that the ice would be gone by now. There was some speculation that if summer Arctic sea ice melt continued at the same rate as in 2006/2007 that it could start melting out by the end of summer sometime in the late 20teens but of course the ice would continue to reform in the winter for a long time to come. Most researchers believe that's likely to happen sometime between 2030 and 2050. As far as the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica it would take centuries or millenia for them to melt. Anything else is thermodynamically impossible at temperatures compatible with human life.
Already the amount of sea level rise (about 10 inches in the past 150 years) has increased the incidence of nuisance flooding in places like Norfolk, Virginia and Miami Beach, Florida.
Bullshit rationalization to save the theory after the predictions failed. If you turn up the heat in your oven, a corner will become freezing cold, right?
If the temperature rises from -10 to -5 it's warmer but still cold enough to snow but -5 degree air can hold more water vapor than -10 degree air. That's an incontrovertible scientific observation. At normal Earth temperatures the amount of water vapor air can hold goes up by about 7% for every 1 degree centigrade increase in temperature.
The "global temperature" can't be observed, and is only derived by complex calculations. When the local temperature record is wrong, you can observe and correct it. When the "global temperature" calculation is wrong, how do you find out?
By the law of large numbers it's unlikely that the global temperature calculation is wrong. BEST which I mentioned earlier uses temperatures from over 39,000 stations amounting to over a billion observations over the years. You complain that one station is responsible for 10,000 square miles but to be taken seriously you need to show that those stations are not a reasonable representation of the surrounding areas. Researchers who have spent decades looking at the issues have decided they are.
The changes do not point in one direction. That is sensationalistic reporting aimed at creating a narrative instead of a balanced perspective.
I did of course say "nearly all of". The study referred to by the dailycaller article is one study that is an outlier compared to the studies that came before it. Even if it turns out to be correct it doesn't contradict global warming. In the extreme cold of Antarctica warming actually increases the chances of more snowfall because warmer air holds more moisture than colder air. I believe the same thing is happening in Greenland with positive accumulation in the center while around the edges the ice is crumbling into the sea.
The question I'm asking is if "global" temperature is the right thing to measure?
Why wouldn't it be? I don't disagree that it's not a particularly useful number on a local or regional level but as a general indicator of the changing climate on the Earth it works. Obviously if you in instantly integrate the temperature of every square centimeter across the whole surface of the Earth you would get a different number but as long as they use a consistent methodology to derive the global temperature it should be a good indicator of how temperatures are changing over time.
Of course global temperature is just a general indicator of global warming. The effects show up in a myriad of ways. Melting glaciers and ice sheets, rising sea levels, changes in growing seasons and the ranges of plants and animals, etc. Nearly all of the changes point in one direction.
As far a net energy, calculations find that the Earth is accumulating energy at a rate of around 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs per second.
Calling it "net energy" doesn't feel right to me but whatever.
Those 100's of stations you are talking about are all on land which is only about 58 million miles^2 of the Earth's surface meaning each station is responsible for maybe 10,000 miles^2. There are also the sea surface measurements to take in to account. I've never been to clear about how they gather and collate sea surface measurements.
The question you have to ask is "Are the number of stations used adequate to derive a global temperature?" Evidence suggests it is. In particular I'd like to point out the Berkeley Earth project. They use all available data including over 39,000 unique stations yet their results aren't significantly different than NOAA, NASA and HADCRUT. So I have a hard time dinging NOAA for using a limited number of stations as long as it's statistically justified.
Of course 2015 is going to blow all the previous temperature records out of the water and if it's anything like the last 2 big El Ninos in 1982/1983 and 1997/1998 it's likely that 2016 will be even higher than 2015. In 2017 the year 2015 or 2016 will be the start of a new "pause".
I didn't say it was simple either. But even complex systems can be described simply. For example, you could say that the global average temperature reflects the net amount of heat the earth traps from the sun.
To say that it reflects the net amount of heat the Earth traps from the Sun wouldn't be correct in my view. It's more about the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation. The incoming radiation is mostly in the visible range while the outgoing radiation is mostly in the infrared range (ignoring radiation that is just reflected thus having no effect). The atmosphere is mostly transparent to visible range radiation but the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc) are opaque in certain ranges to infrared radition. That in effect slows down the outgoing radiation causing the Earth's surface to heat up enough so that the outgoing radiation level matches the incoming radiation. When the level of a greenhouse gas changes that disrupts the balance causing a change in temperature at the surface.
No one was collecting "global average temperature" in 1880. Didn't have the tools or coverage.
No one is collecting global average temperature today. It's a derived number by taking the temperatures from hundreds of separate weather stations. While the coverage was less in the 1880's it was still adequate to derive a global average temperature, just with slightly higher error ranges than current ones.
The 1880's temperatures were measured with thermometers just like they are now. The major difference now is that the thermometers are mostly electronic rather than liquid in glass. Current instruments may be more precise than older instruments but the level of precision of the older instruments is more than adequate for the job.
If it's so well known, you can explain it simply; if you don't know how to explain it, then just say so.
I didn't say it was simple. It involved gridded area weighted averages over the whole surface of the Earth.
They aren't. They extrapolated past temperatures based on ice cores and tree rings, and the current measurement methods are constantly being revised with new technologies.
The global average temperatures since 1880 have nothing to do with ice cores, tree rings or other proxies. They're based on thermometer measurements only.
Thank you for the explanation. I was asking if they were reversed because it is counter intuitive, I had always thought that the land ice in Antarctica was so much more ice than contained in the arctic.
I am with dywolf here, this deserves a upmod.
Yes, the Antarctic ice sheet is around 26.5 million km^3 while the Greenland ice sheet is only 2.85 million km^3. But Greenland stretches from about 59N to 83N but Antarctica is mostly from 66S to 90S. Also Antarctica has ocean currents and winds that circle the continent that tend to cut it off more from the rest of the climate as compared to Greenland. So Greenland is currently losing more ice mass than Antarctica but there is nearly 10 times as much ice to lose in Antarctica.
An example of the threshold at which the human body is no longer able to cool itself and begins to overheat is a humidity level of 50% and a high heat of 46C (115F), as this would indicate a wet-bulb temperature of 35C (95F).
Maybe you could do a little work and look at the scientific papers published about how they compute the average global temperature. It doesn't matter that much if the global average temperature is not exactly right in the absolute sense. As long as they use the same methods from one iteration to the next it's a reasonable indication of the trends in temperature which is what we care about most anyway.
For example, do you have any reading on anything like the math behind how much CO2 we have released...
A crude calculation can be made from the amount of fossil fuel we use. We have fairly good statistics on global fossil fuel use. A chemical formula can tell you how much CO2 is released by any particular type of fossil fuel. For instance consider coal. The average coal is somewhere around 70% carbon. So if you burn a ton of coal that's around 1400 lbs. of carbon. The chemical formula is C + O2 ==> CO2. The atomic weight of carbon is 12 and of oxygen is 16. So you end up with a CO2 molecule that has an atomic weigh of 44. 44/12 = 3.667 so you end up with that much more CO2 than the carbon you started with. 3.667 * 1400 = 5133 lbs or 2.567 tons. Therefore burning a ton of coal produces around 2.5 tons of CO2. The same kind of calculation can be done for gasoline, diesel, natural gas, etc.
And I keep reading articles like this one where it shows that NOAA has stealth-edited the temperature data,...
Nothing stealth about it. You just have to read the original papers about it. They're not that hard to find. For example "THE U.S. HISTORICAL CLIMATOLOGY NETWORK MONTHLY TEMPERATURE DATA, VERSION 2" which gives an overview of adjustments that were made. You can find references at the end if you want to dig deeper.
It does seem a bit strange that the late 1800's are most definitely the ideal global temperature we should achieve for peace and love and whatever. Who's to say a slightly warmer planet won't have as many benefits as downsides?
BUT, we do know full well that crops will grow, oceans will harbor life, and weather phenomenon will be mostly survivable at those temperatures, so why mess with a good thing? I'm hardly on the doom and gloom side, but this just doesn't seem like something you mess with willy nilly because 'fuck it, why not.'
The issue isn't so much that the temperature is changing but the rate of the change. If the temperature change we're likely to see up to 2100 were instead spread out over 2,000 years it wouldn't be that much of a problem. Everything would have a chance of adapting at more normal rates. The current rate makes adaption difficult for many organisms.
Slashdot Mirror
Next to the title there's a link (thehill.com)
Individual scientists may have their biases but when you get more than a few of them together the biases tend to cancel out.
Because the raw unaltered field data is unavailable, ...
Have you looked here. They certainly haven't thrown out the original raw data. That's the base starting point for any adjustments they make.
You may not trust climate scientists but have you ever considered the size of the conspiracy that would be required to perpetrate such a fraud? At least thousands of scientists over the whole world for at least the past 30 or 40 years? If they're that good at it you might as well give up.
I don't disagree that Mann has a prickly personality but the trial has nothing to do with his science. It's about Steyn accusing Mann of "molesting" the data in an obvious comparison to Jerry Sandusky who was also at Penn State. Discovery in the trial won't find any evidence of scientific malfeasance just as all of the other investigations of Mann and the Climategate emails found essentially nothing.
The paywalls on scientific papers is unfortunate but if nothing else you can go to the libraries of most research universities and read them. Even if they're behind paywalls.
So I consider surface station data both temporally and spatially sparse, subjected to manipulations that are less than forthright and in ways that are mathematically dubious.
I don't get that you would think the adjustments to surface temperatures are less than forthright. They are well documented in the relevant papers about the adjustments.
Here is a NOAA page on their temperature data.
This page at Berkeley Earth describes their data set and some of the adjustments.
As far as the sparseness of some regions of the globe goes we don't care so much what the actual temperature is globally as much as we care about how it's changing over time. If the global temperature is derived in a consistent manner then it's probably a reasonable representation of temperature change.
Satellites because of their orbital inclination don't cover the polar regions at all and have to deal with issues of observation angle for near polar readings. Also they have to make adjustments for clouds and high elevations messing up their readings.
I don't disbelieve the satellite readings, I just don't see any good reason to trust them over the surface measurements, particularly over the time period since the satellites went up (1979) when the surface systems have also been improved to higher standards.
Don't worry. 2015 is going to blow last years record out of the water and if the strong El Nino years of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998 are any indication 2016 will be even warmer. In 2020 the climate science denier's meme will probably be "no warming since 2016".
People who believe that satellite data is the gold standard for temperatures don't understand all the manipulations and adjustments required to produce a temperature from the microwave emissions of O2 molecules in the atmosphere. They require far more adjustments then surface temperature measurements with thermometers. Even one of the principle scientists for RSS, Carl Mears says he trusts the surface temperature records more than the satellite records.
A similar, but stronger case can be made using surface temperature datasets, which I consider to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!). Link
The model that claims that 39,000 stations provides precise enough measurement of the temperature of 5000 trillion tonnes of air, such that we can derive a "global temperature" and detect 100 year trends.
Mostly we're only measuring the bottom 2 or 3 meters of the atmosphere but that's beside the point. Thousands of scientists and statisticians think it's an adequate measure and that's good enough for me. If you think otherwise it's up to you to provide actual scientific evidence.
I didn't say "now", either. I am describing a past future prediction. Going to no ice is obviously not going to happen when the ice is growing.
Your original statement was "It only happens to contradict previous global warming predictions that all the ice would be gone and we'd have massive floods of coastal areas." To me that implies you meant by now. No "past future prediction" that I'm aware of said that. Ice on the Earth's surface is a complex thing composed of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice. It's not particularly surprising that in some places the ice is increasing now. Meanwhile the net amount of ice on the planet is still declining.
So if this dose not come to pass in 2050, are you willing to accept that this prediction is wrong and the underlying theory has been falisfied?
If I live to 2050 I'll be 98 years old. I'll just be happy to make it that far. I'd be willing to accept that particular prediction was wrong but I'd be looking for the reasons it was wrong such as a major volcanic eruption. As far as the whole of climate theory being wrong it's far to complex a subject for any one thing to falsify it.
No one predicted that "global warming" (now "climate change") would result in more ice.
It's been "climate change" since at least the 1950's. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1956 titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". As I said before the total amount of ice across the whole planet is still declining despite the fact that it is increasing in some areas.
I'm not arguing about the low level physics. The proposed mechanism is backfilled speculation about a complex system that is still not fully understood.
So are you saying since we don't fully understand it we should treat it as if we understand nothing?
Not remotely relevant. The accuracy of the global temperature calculation depends on the assumptions of the model. Garbage in, garbage out.
The assumptions of what model specifically? If you're talking about climate models they have nothing to do with the average global temperature.
It only happens to contradict previous global warming predictions that all the ice would be gone and we'd have massive floods of coastal areas.
Now I know you really don't know a thing about global warming except what you read in climate science denier blogs. No one in the scientific community ever predicted that the ice would be gone by now. There was some speculation that if summer Arctic sea ice melt continued at the same rate as in 2006/2007 that it could start melting out by the end of summer sometime in the late 20teens but of course the ice would continue to reform in the winter for a long time to come. Most researchers believe that's likely to happen sometime between 2030 and 2050. As far as the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica it would take centuries or millenia for them to melt. Anything else is thermodynamically impossible at temperatures compatible with human life.
Already the amount of sea level rise (about 10 inches in the past 150 years) has increased the incidence of nuisance flooding in places like Norfolk, Virginia and Miami Beach, Florida.
Bullshit rationalization to save the theory after the predictions failed. If you turn up the heat in your oven, a corner will become freezing cold, right?
If the temperature rises from -10 to -5 it's warmer but still cold enough to snow but -5 degree air can hold more water vapor than -10 degree air. That's an incontrovertible scientific observation. At normal Earth temperatures the amount of water vapor air can hold goes up by about 7% for every 1 degree centigrade increase in temperature.
The "global temperature" can't be observed, and is only derived by complex calculations. When the local temperature record is wrong, you can observe and correct it. When the "global temperature" calculation is wrong, how do you find out?
By the law of large numbers it's unlikely that the global temperature calculation is wrong. BEST which I mentioned earlier uses temperatures from over 39,000 stations amounting to over a billion observations over the years. You complain that one station is responsible for 10,000 square miles but to be taken seriously you need to show that those stations are not a reasonable representation of the surrounding areas. Researchers who have spent decades looking at the issues have decided they are.
The changes do not point in one direction. That is sensationalistic reporting aimed at creating a narrative instead of a balanced perspective.
I did of course say "nearly all of". The study referred to by the dailycaller article is one study that is an outlier compared to the studies that came before it. Even if it turns out to be correct it doesn't contradict global warming. In the extreme cold of Antarctica warming actually increases the chances of more snowfall because warmer air holds more moisture than colder air. I believe the same thing is happening in Greenland with positive accumulation in the center while around the edges the ice is crumbling into the sea.
The question I'm asking is if "global" temperature is the right thing to measure?
Why wouldn't it be? I don't disagree that it's not a particularly useful number on a local or regional level but as a general indicator of the changing climate on the Earth it works. Obviously if you in instantly integrate the temperature of every square centimeter across the whole surface of the Earth you would get a different number but as long as they use a consistent methodology to derive the global temperature it should be a good indicator of how temperatures are changing over time.
Of course global temperature is just a general indicator of global warming. The effects show up in a myriad of ways. Melting glaciers and ice sheets, rising sea levels, changes in growing seasons and the ranges of plants and animals, etc. Nearly all of the changes point in one direction.
As far a net energy, calculations find that the Earth is accumulating energy at a rate of around 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs per second.
[pedant] The term you are looking for is "moot". [/pedant]
Scientific research projects rarely fail because even negative results can be useful scientific information.
Calling it "net energy" doesn't feel right to me but whatever.
Those 100's of stations you are talking about are all on land which is only about 58 million miles^2 of the Earth's surface meaning each station is responsible for maybe 10,000 miles^2. There are also the sea surface measurements to take in to account. I've never been to clear about how they gather and collate sea surface measurements.
The question you have to ask is "Are the number of stations used adequate to derive a global temperature?" Evidence suggests it is. In particular I'd like to point out the Berkeley Earth project. They use all available data including over 39,000 unique stations yet their results aren't significantly different than NOAA, NASA and HADCRUT. So I have a hard time dinging NOAA for using a limited number of stations as long as it's statistically justified.
Of course 2015 is going to blow all the previous temperature records out of the water and if it's anything like the last 2 big El Ninos in 1982/1983 and 1997/1998 it's likely that 2016 will be even higher than 2015. In 2017 the year 2015 or 2016 will be the start of a new "pause".
And ice is definitely melting.
I didn't say it was simple either. But even complex systems can be described simply. For example, you could say that the global average temperature reflects the net amount of heat the earth traps from the sun.
To say that it reflects the net amount of heat the Earth traps from the Sun wouldn't be correct in my view. It's more about the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation. The incoming radiation is mostly in the visible range while the outgoing radiation is mostly in the infrared range (ignoring radiation that is just reflected thus having no effect). The atmosphere is mostly transparent to visible range radiation but the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc) are opaque in certain ranges to infrared radition. That in effect slows down the outgoing radiation causing the Earth's surface to heat up enough so that the outgoing radiation level matches the incoming radiation. When the level of a greenhouse gas changes that disrupts the balance causing a change in temperature at the surface.
No one was collecting "global average temperature" in 1880. Didn't have the tools or coverage.
No one is collecting global average temperature today. It's a derived number by taking the temperatures from hundreds of separate weather stations. While the coverage was less in the 1880's it was still adequate to derive a global average temperature, just with slightly higher error ranges than current ones.
The 1880's temperatures were measured with thermometers just like they are now. The major difference now is that the thermometers are mostly electronic rather than liquid in glass. Current instruments may be more precise than older instruments but the level of precision of the older instruments is more than adequate for the job.
Perhaps you'd like to place a wager on that?
If it's so well known, you can explain it simply; if you don't know how to explain it, then just say so.
I didn't say it was simple. It involved gridded area weighted averages over the whole surface of the Earth.
They aren't. They extrapolated past temperatures based on ice cores and tree rings, and the current measurement methods are constantly being revised with new technologies.
The global average temperatures since 1880 have nothing to do with ice cores, tree rings or other proxies. They're based on thermometer measurements only.
Thank you for the explanation. I was asking if they were reversed because it is counter intuitive, I had always thought that the land ice in Antarctica was so much more ice than contained in the arctic.
I am with dywolf here, this deserves a upmod.
Yes, the Antarctic ice sheet is around 26.5 million km^3 while the Greenland ice sheet is only 2.85 million km^3. But Greenland stretches from about 59N to 83N but Antarctica is mostly from 66S to 90S. Also Antarctica has ocean currents and winds that circle the continent that tend to cut it off more from the rest of the climate as compared to Greenland. So Greenland is currently losing more ice mass than Antarctica but there is nearly 10 times as much ice to lose in Antarctica.
It's a simple fact that humans can't survive if the wet bulb temperature is 35C (95F) or greater. If the combination of temperature and humidity reaches that state it's impossible for your body to cool by sweating. Spend more than a few minutes outside in those conditions and you will start to become hyperthermic, long enough and you die. The Wiki article gives and example:
An example of the threshold at which the human body is no longer able to cool itself and begins to overheat is a humidity level of 50% and a high heat of 46C (115F), as this would indicate a wet-bulb temperature of 35C (95F).
Maybe you could do a little work and look at the scientific papers published about how they compute the average global temperature. It doesn't matter that much if the global average temperature is not exactly right in the absolute sense. As long as they use the same methods from one iteration to the next it's a reasonable indication of the trends in temperature which is what we care about most anyway.
You can deny all you want but physics doesn't care.
For example, do you have any reading on anything like the math behind how much CO2 we have released ...
A crude calculation can be made from the amount of fossil fuel we use. We have fairly good statistics on global fossil fuel use. A chemical formula can tell you how much CO2 is released by any particular type of fossil fuel. For instance consider coal. The average coal is somewhere around 70% carbon. So if you burn a ton of coal that's around 1400 lbs. of carbon. The chemical formula is C + O2 ==> CO2. The atomic weight of carbon is 12 and of oxygen is 16. So you end up with a CO2 molecule that has an atomic weigh of 44. 44/12 = 3.667 so you end up with that much more CO2 than the carbon you started with. 3.667 * 1400 = 5133 lbs or 2.567 tons. Therefore burning a ton of coal produces around 2.5 tons of CO2. The same kind of calculation can be done for gasoline, diesel, natural gas, etc.
How do we know for sure that the increased CO2 levels are entirely caused by humans ...
That's pretty easy. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere from year to year is only about 45% of the total amount of human caused emissions.
And I keep reading articles like this one where it shows that NOAA has stealth-edited the temperature data, ...
Nothing stealth about it. You just have to read the original papers about it. They're not that hard to find. For example "THE U.S. HISTORICAL CLIMATOLOGY NETWORK MONTHLY TEMPERATURE DATA, VERSION 2" which gives an overview of adjustments that were made. You can find references at the end if you want to dig deeper.
It does seem a bit strange that the late 1800's are most definitely the ideal global temperature we should achieve for peace and love and whatever. Who's to say a slightly warmer planet won't have as many benefits as downsides?
BUT, we do know full well that crops will grow, oceans will harbor life, and weather phenomenon will be mostly survivable at those temperatures, so why mess with a good thing? I'm hardly on the doom and gloom side, but this just doesn't seem like something you mess with willy nilly because 'fuck it, why not.'
The issue isn't so much that the temperature is changing but the rate of the change. If the temperature change we're likely to see up to 2100 were instead spread out over 2,000 years it wouldn't be that much of a problem. Everything would have a chance of adapting at more normal rates. The current rate makes adaption difficult for many organisms.