Here is the paper I referenced again. It compares temperature predictions from the IPCC AR3 (2001) and AR4 (2007) reports to observations up to the end of 2011. It also compares sea level predictions from those reports to observations. It answers a couple of aspects of the question of how observations compare to predictions. If you reject that out of hand because it doesn't rigidly fit your required format that's your problem.
"You can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes you can get what you need." (Jagger/Richards)
I'm not surprised that a meteorology course would concentrate on water. It's the only greenhouse gas whose level changes significantly on the time scales that weather is forecast on. Water vapor is what they call a condensing greenhouse gas. That is at normal Earth temperatures and conditions it can exist in all 3 phases (solid, liquid and gas) and that freely goes from one to the other. If the temperature drops the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere drops, if temperature rises the water vapor increases (if there is water available to evaporate). It's true that water vapor is the source of most of the greenhouse warming but the level of water vapor is strictly reactive to conditions in the atmosphere so it can't drive climate change by itself.
Methane is also a powerful greenhouse gas but the concentration is less than 2 ppm (compared to 400 ppm for CO2) and it is also relatively short lived in the atmosphere having an average lifetime of about 12 years before it oxidizes to water and CO2. So it can't drive climate change very well unless there is a long term sustained source of it.
CO2 has been called the control knob of Earth's temperatures for good reason. It does not condense out of the atmosphere like water vapor and it does not oxidize to other products over a relatively short time like methane. Added CO2 sticks around for a long time (while constantly cycling through the carbon cycle). If you were to remove all of the CO2 from the atmosphere* temperatures would drop causing water vapor to condense out and methane production to drop causing a further drop in temperature which would eventually lead to snowball Earth conditions. Too much or too little CO2 is a problem. Somewhere around 300 ppm is just about right.
*I'm not proposing this and no one is. An atmospheric level between 280 and 350 ppm would probably be about right.
What they discovered in the 1950's was that they couldn't use heat sensors for the missiles that were sensitive in the IR bands that CO2 absorbed. I don't imagine the missiles you worked on used IR sensors in those bands either.
Of course Arrhenius stated that Earth's temperature was proportional to CO2 levels in the atmosphere in 1896 but scientists didn't really start understanding what that meant until the mid to late 1950's. Gilbert Plass published several papers on the effects of CO2 in the 50's. From there it started building. In 1966 (I think) a presentation on the potential of CO2 to cause warming was made to Lyndon Johnson who mentioned it in an address to Congress. By the 1970's global warming from increasing CO2 was the dominant paradigm.
It seems like plants did ok during the height of the last ice age when CO2 levels were 180 ppm and the certainly did ok with a level of 208 ppm. I doubt CO2 is nearly as much a constraint on plant growth globally as water and soil are.
AGW is still not settled (it really isn't, if it was, there wouldn't be debates about it). There is no doubt that the climate is getting warmer, but you can't tell me what percentage is caused by mankind.
There is practically no debate about the basics of AGW in the scientific circles that study climate. The basics include that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that more CO2 in the atmosphere will cause warming and that humans are the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels. All known natural forcings of climate when added together indicate that we should be in a slight cooling trend so it's likely that the percentage caused by human caused increases in greenhouse gases are responsible for more than 100% of the warming.
It's true that the costs of AGW are uncertain ranging from moderate to catastrophic. Risk management principles say that if there's a possibility of higher risk it's worth spending more to try and avoid it.
No, the EPA was there trying to do some work when the spill happened but if they had just been ignoring the problem sooner or later the spill would have happened anyway or at least the mine would have been leaking the toxic soup into the Animas River system for the next 500 years or more.
While that sounds nice, the issue there would be, "then we should build lots and lots of natural gas and coal power plants, since they cost less than solar and wind do.
NG and coal only cost less if they are able to externalize the cost of the pollution they produce including the cost of anthropogenic global warming from the greenhouse gases they emit. If they're going to stand on their own that cost has to be included.
I think you're overly optimistic about our ability to adapt to the changes but I could be wrong. It you're young enough you'll find out in time how right or wrong you are (at 63 I'll probably miss the worst of the effects).
Any democratic nation would lynch its leaders given the devastating economic consequences such policies have; it's not going to happen.
You presume there will be devastating economic consequences. Other economic analysis including a recent report from Citibank that says it will be cheaper to do something than to not. Link (PDF)
There are no "ultimate effects". The climate is changing, like it always has been. Sea levels have been rising more than 400 ft over the last 10000 years; did civilization end? Did humans become extinct? No, of course not. Even if all the ice on the planet melts, they can only rise another 200 ft, and that would still take centuries, if not millennia.
It's more like 130 feet over the last 10,000 years (400 feet over the last 20,000 years). But of course that was before we developed our modern civilization, before we had trillions of dollars in infrastructure built near sea level. Over the last 7,000 years the rise around 6 feet and over the last 4,000 years it's been less than a foot. I agree that melting all the rest of the ice will take millennia but with up to 6 feet of SLR by 2100 it's going to be pretty costly to move all of the affected infrastructure and 2100 won't be the end of it.
The thing about not making changes now is that the effects of anthropogenic global warming are not something we can stop in a short time period. Even if we get extremely serious about it right now it will take 30 or 40 years to implement the necessary changes. Meanwhile the ultimate effects will continue to get worse. For instance the melting of the great ice sheets is way behind the curve of warming and it will take several centuries for them to reach a new equilibrium so the concomitant sea level rise will continue for that whole time period.
What were they supposed to do to not be accused of "ignoring" warnings? Can you describe the decision-making process you wish they'd followed?
It's the same for the rest of us as it is for Exxon -- just less existential. We've been "warned". Yet we go on with our lives. The warnings get louder and more shrill and catastrophic and angry. And we still go on with our lives. Eventually this should stop being a big surprise.
I don't fault Exxon for continuing to supply oil products. They were meeting a demand. What I do fault them for is funding misinformation campaigns about anthropogenic climate change. Much like the tobacco companies they spent money to keep the public in the dark regarding the dangers of their product. It will be interesting to see if Exxon (and others) face lawsuits in the future over their spreading of misinformation.
The strawman part was you saying "if we destroy/kill all...". No one is proposing that.
My own position on abortion is that until a fetus is able to live on it's own outside the womb it's nobody's business but the woman's. It's a matter of personal freedom.
As a conservative myself I'll try to keep your words in mind when I think about the recent news concerning the human slaughter house called Planned Parenthood.
Your condescension and arrogance is especially repugnant considering that the Alabama school board doesn't support, and never has, the murder of human children while that is a fundamental plank in the left's platform. Considering who has done real and permanent damage to this country and to humanity in general I'll take a bunch of hard-right bible-thumpers over the mob of self-righteous mass murderers any day.
The ironic bit of all of this is that if the R's succeed in defunding Planned Parenthood it will actually increase the number of abortions because the government funding of PP goes into women's health services including providing low cost or free birth control to women who otherwise might not have access to it.
Earlier you reference the Wikipedia article on Climate Change. The article lists all of the major known causes of climate change. The reason you know about them is because scientists studied the subject. Scientists are still studying all of those causes of climate change. They are measuring them and examining the effects they have. What they find is that when you add up all of the effects, natural and anthropogenic, the natural causes only would by themselves lead you to expect that the Earth should be cooling. But that's not happening. When you add in the anthropogenic causes you get a much better match with the actual climate and its changes. Since the natural causes alone point to cooling that means the anthropogenic causes are causing more than 100% of the warming.
You can believe what you want but if you reject science without good scientific backing for your rejection don't be surprised if you get challenged about it.
What's your point? Scientists know there are multiple interacting causes of climate change. They even directly address that in the latest IPCC report. What they find is that lately the natural causes of climate change are not enough by themselves to account for the change we are seeing and only when you include human influences do you get a complete picture of what's going on.
Of course the term "climate change" (with the "global" implied) has been in use since at least the 1950's when Gilbert Plass wrote a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change" so it wasn't something coined recently.
It's funny you bring up the anti-vaxxers because they are from both sides of the political spectrum and I've heard statements supporting them from some Republicans as well as Democrats.
Yes, there are liberals who have dogmatic positions on those things. But if you look at it from a Republican/Democrat perspective you don't see a lot of prominent Democratic politicians supporting those dogmas in the same way that prominent Republicans do, particularly those running for President who have to contort themselves in absurd ways to avoid offending the party base on evolution and anthropogenic global warming.
No, it is not much of a cumulative issue, it is more a rate of release issue. If the CO2 we've released since the 1800's and will continue to release over the next 50-100 years were released over a couple of thousand years we'd still have global warming but it would be at a rate that the natural systems we depend on could adapt to much more easily.
The Earth is accumulating about 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of energy every second due to anthropogenic global warming. Since 1998 that amounts to around 2,269,012,000 total Hiroshima bombs. Here's a page that illustrates that.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the paper I referenced again. It compares temperature predictions from the IPCC AR3 (2001) and AR4 (2007) reports to observations up to the end of 2011. It also compares sea level predictions from those reports to observations. It answers a couple of aspects of the question of how observations compare to predictions. If you reject that out of hand because it doesn't rigidly fit your required format that's your problem.
"You can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes you can get what you need." (Jagger/Richards)
It's not my fault if you're too stupid to understand the examples I gave you 6 month ago.
I'm not surprised that a meteorology course would concentrate on water. It's the only greenhouse gas whose level changes significantly on the time scales that weather is forecast on. Water vapor is what they call a condensing greenhouse gas. That is at normal Earth temperatures and conditions it can exist in all 3 phases (solid, liquid and gas) and that freely goes from one to the other. If the temperature drops the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere drops, if temperature rises the water vapor increases (if there is water available to evaporate). It's true that water vapor is the source of most of the greenhouse warming but the level of water vapor is strictly reactive to conditions in the atmosphere so it can't drive climate change by itself.
Methane is also a powerful greenhouse gas but the concentration is less than 2 ppm (compared to 400 ppm for CO2) and it is also relatively short lived in the atmosphere having an average lifetime of about 12 years before it oxidizes to water and CO2. So it can't drive climate change very well unless there is a long term sustained source of it.
CO2 has been called the control knob of Earth's temperatures for good reason. It does not condense out of the atmosphere like water vapor and it does not oxidize to other products over a relatively short time like methane. Added CO2 sticks around for a long time (while constantly cycling through the carbon cycle). If you were to remove all of the CO2 from the atmosphere* temperatures would drop causing water vapor to condense out and methane production to drop causing a further drop in temperature which would eventually lead to snowball Earth conditions. Too much or too little CO2 is a problem. Somewhere around 300 ppm is just about right.
*I'm not proposing this and no one is. An atmospheric level between 280 and 350 ppm would probably be about right.
What they discovered in the 1950's was that they couldn't use heat sensors for the missiles that were sensitive in the IR bands that CO2 absorbed. I don't imagine the missiles you worked on used IR sensors in those bands either.
Of course Arrhenius stated that Earth's temperature was proportional to CO2 levels in the atmosphere in 1896 but scientists didn't really start understanding what that meant until the mid to late 1950's. Gilbert Plass published several papers on the effects of CO2 in the 50's. From there it started building. In 1966 (I think) a presentation on the potential of CO2 to cause warming was made to Lyndon Johnson who mentioned it in an address to Congress. By the 1970's global warming from increasing CO2 was the dominant paradigm.
The real question is will our modern complex civilization collapse to the point where a well furnished wallet doesn't do you any good?
It seems like plants did ok during the height of the last ice age when CO2 levels were 180 ppm and the certainly did ok with a level of 208 ppm. I doubt CO2 is nearly as much a constraint on plant growth globally as water and soil are.
Agreed, all of the debate is on the political side.
AGW is still not settled (it really isn't, if it was, there wouldn't be debates about it). There is no doubt that the climate is getting warmer, but you can't tell me what percentage is caused by mankind.
There is practically no debate about the basics of AGW in the scientific circles that study climate. The basics include that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that more CO2 in the atmosphere will cause warming and that humans are the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels. All known natural forcings of climate when added together indicate that we should be in a slight cooling trend so it's likely that the percentage caused by human caused increases in greenhouse gases are responsible for more than 100% of the warming.
It's true that the costs of AGW are uncertain ranging from moderate to catastrophic. Risk management principles say that if there's a possibility of higher risk it's worth spending more to try and avoid it.
No, the EPA was there trying to do some work when the spill happened but if they had just been ignoring the problem sooner or later the spill would have happened anyway or at least the mine would have been leaking the toxic soup into the Animas River system for the next 500 years or more.
While that sounds nice, the issue there would be, "then we should build lots and lots of natural gas and coal power plants, since they cost less than solar and wind do.
NG and coal only cost less if they are able to externalize the cost of the pollution they produce including the cost of anthropogenic global warming from the greenhouse gases they emit. If they're going to stand on their own that cost has to be included.
I think you're overly optimistic about our ability to adapt to the changes but I could be wrong. It you're young enough you'll find out in time how right or wrong you are (at 63 I'll probably miss the worst of the effects).
Any democratic nation would lynch its leaders given the devastating economic consequences such policies have; it's not going to happen.
You presume there will be devastating economic consequences. Other economic analysis including a recent report from Citibank that says it will be cheaper to do something than to not. Link (PDF)
There are no "ultimate effects". The climate is changing, like it always has been. Sea levels have been rising more than 400 ft over the last 10000 years; did civilization end? Did humans become extinct? No, of course not. Even if all the ice on the planet melts, they can only rise another 200 ft, and that would still take centuries, if not millennia.
It's more like 130 feet over the last 10,000 years (400 feet over the last 20,000 years). But of course that was before we developed our modern civilization, before we had trillions of dollars in infrastructure built near sea level. Over the last 7,000 years the rise around 6 feet and over the last 4,000 years it's been less than a foot. I agree that melting all the rest of the ice will take millennia but with up to 6 feet of SLR by 2100 it's going to be pretty costly to move all of the affected infrastructure and 2100 won't be the end of it.
The thing about not making changes now is that the effects of anthropogenic global warming are not something we can stop in a short time period. Even if we get extremely serious about it right now it will take 30 or 40 years to implement the necessary changes. Meanwhile the ultimate effects will continue to get worse. For instance the melting of the great ice sheets is way behind the curve of warming and it will take several centuries for them to reach a new equilibrium so the concomitant sea level rise will continue for that whole time period.
What were they supposed to do to not be accused of "ignoring" warnings? Can you describe the decision-making process you wish they'd followed?
It's the same for the rest of us as it is for Exxon -- just less existential. We've been "warned". Yet we go on with our lives. The warnings get louder and more shrill and catastrophic and angry. And we still go on with our lives. Eventually this should stop being a big surprise.
I don't fault Exxon for continuing to supply oil products. They were meeting a demand. What I do fault them for is funding misinformation campaigns about anthropogenic climate change. Much like the tobacco companies they spent money to keep the public in the dark regarding the dangers of their product. It will be interesting to see if Exxon (and others) face lawsuits in the future over their spreading of misinformation.
The strawman part was you saying "if we destroy/kill all ...". No one is proposing that.
My own position on abortion is that until a fetus is able to live on it's own outside the womb it's nobody's business but the woman's. It's a matter of personal freedom.
No, your questions were all strawmen since the only place anyone is proposing any of those things is in your imagination.
As a conservative myself I'll try to keep your words in mind when I think about the recent news concerning the human slaughter house called Planned Parenthood.
Your condescension and arrogance is especially repugnant considering that the Alabama school board doesn't support, and never has, the murder of human children while that is a fundamental plank in the left's platform. Considering who has done real and permanent damage to this country and to humanity in general I'll take a bunch of hard-right bible-thumpers over the mob of self-righteous mass murderers any day.
The ironic bit of all of this is that if the R's succeed in defunding Planned Parenthood it will actually increase the number of abortions because the government funding of PP goes into women's health services including providing low cost or free birth control to women who otherwise might not have access to it.
Earlier you reference the Wikipedia article on Climate Change. The article lists all of the major known causes of climate change. The reason you know about them is because scientists studied the subject. Scientists are still studying all of those causes of climate change. They are measuring them and examining the effects they have. What they find is that when you add up all of the effects, natural and anthropogenic, the natural causes only would by themselves lead you to expect that the Earth should be cooling. But that's not happening. When you add in the anthropogenic causes you get a much better match with the actual climate and its changes. Since the natural causes alone point to cooling that means the anthropogenic causes are causing more than 100% of the warming.
You can believe what you want but if you reject science without good scientific backing for your rejection don't be surprised if you get challenged about it.
Why don't you READ about the actual causes, of which there are multiple causes/factor instead of spouting off nonsense to drive your agenda?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What's your point? Scientists know there are multiple interacting causes of climate change. They even directly address that in the latest IPCC report. What they find is that lately the natural causes of climate change are not enough by themselves to account for the change we are seeing and only when you include human influences do you get a complete picture of what's going on.
Of course the term "climate change" (with the "global" implied) has been in use since at least the 1950's when Gilbert Plass wrote a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change" so it wasn't something coined recently.
It's funny you bring up the anti-vaxxers because they are from both sides of the political spectrum and I've heard statements supporting them from some Republicans as well as Democrats.
Did Hell freeze over?
Wouldn't that disprove Global Warming?
No, that would just be natural variability.
Yes, there are liberals who have dogmatic positions on those things. But if you look at it from a Republican/Democrat perspective you don't see a lot of prominent Democratic politicians supporting those dogmas in the same way that prominent Republicans do, particularly those running for President who have to contort themselves in absurd ways to avoid offending the party base on evolution and anthropogenic global warming.
No, it is not much of a cumulative issue, it is more a rate of release issue. If the CO2 we've released since the 1800's and will continue to release over the next 50-100 years were released over a couple of thousand years we'd still have global warming but it would be at a rate that the natural systems we depend on could adapt to much more easily.
The Earth is accumulating about 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of energy every second due to anthropogenic global warming. Since 1998 that amounts to around 2,269,012,000 total Hiroshima bombs. Here's a page that illustrates that.