It's already too late to "make these changes not take place." If we magically stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow it would still be a century before the excess we have already put up there will finally be cycled out into carbonate rocks, peat, and such.
It will take a thousand years or more before the excess CO2 gets cycled out in carbonate rocks, etc.
Yes, some people when confronted with something that doesn't fit their ideology dig in further. But eventually if they have any connection with reality at all they will have to admit the scientists are right. There will always be a few who can't connect with reality though.
The causative factor is obviously the infrared absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide and how that changes with concentration.
You say CO2 is a trace gas but if I put you in a room with a concentration of 250 ppm of hydrogen cyanide you'd be dead in a matter of minutes. Trace concentrations can matter, it's all a matter of context.
All told greenhouse gases make up less than 5000 ppm of the atmosphere and yet they're responsible for about 59 degrees F of temperature on the surface.
I don't say that CO2 is disproportionally relevant, just as relevant as it is. The most common gases in the atmosphere are in order are nitrogen, oxygen argon, water vapor and carbon dioxide. The first three are not greenhouse gases and have little effect on temperature. Water vapor concentrations are strictly limited by temperatures and therefore it can not drive temperature changes but is a feedback to temperature changes. There is nothing we can do to directly affect the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere (except locally irrigation may raise the concentration over small areas). That makes CO2 the most important greenhouse gas that we have any control over.
The fact that the same basic atmospheric model works for both Venus and Earth but also Mars and Titan is an indication that it's getting things mostly right.
My assumption that warming will continue is based on the absorption characteristics of CO2 and the fact that CO2 concentrations continue to rise. Nothing more than that.
Grapes have been grown in England basically as long has humans have practiced agriculture there. I never heard of oranges growing there but I suppose it's possible.
Warmth and CO2 levels are only two of many factors in agricultural productivity. More important is water and nutrition (fertilizer). Temperatures that get too high can reduce productivity significantly. Here is a study of corn and soy bean yields as related to temperature and precipitation. It found for corn that 1 degree warmer temperature in July caused a 2.28 bushel per acre drop in yields while 1 degree cooler caused an increase of 2.28 bushel per acre (see the section on "Corn Yield Response to July Temperatures".)
I live in Oregon and am quite familiar with the Great Basin desert. The only southwest state I haven't visited so far is New Mexico. As far as transporting water to the southwest, where is it going to come from? Most of the Colorado river water is currently used for agriculture in Arizona and California already and the Colorado basin has been in drought for most years since around 2000. Look at the water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. You can take water from the Snake/Columbia system over my dead body.
I expect between 2 and 6 feet of SLR by 2100 and it will probably be between 200 and 300 years before it's risen by 20 feet. The 70-80 foot rise probably takes 600-1000 years at least.
I explained to you way back in this thread why high CO2 concentrations and ice ages were not incompatible 600+ million years ago. That has practically noting to do with what's going on now.
I'm skeptical that it was any warmer during the medieval or roman warm periods than it is now. I haven't seen any good evidence for that. Even if it were as the warming continues that won't be true for much longer.
Our civilization is built around the climate as it has existed for the past 8,000 years or so. Climate change will have an effect on that. I'm particularly worried about our agricultural systems that are feeding 7+ billion people. Any major disruption of those will have profound effects.
As far as sea level I think we already have at least 20 feet of rise built in. There is a lot of lag in the response of the great ice sheets to warming but respond they will and there isn't anything we can do about it. The last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea levels were 70-80 feet higher than they are now. Maybe it's just a matter of how many centuries it takes to get there.
In measuring those imbalances they're measuring the filtering that greenhouse gases do to the infrared spectrum. The fact that some of the absorption spectrums overlap means there is some uncertainty in what gas causes what effect but those uncertainties are quantifiable. Cloud cover and ice albedo are also subject of research and they haven't found evidence for them being major factors.
To me it just looks like you're desperately searching for anything but CO2.
Also I cited measurements of the Earth's energy imbalance by observing the difference between surface and TOA infrared radiation. That's from the last 20 or 30 years.
I think even 4 degrees C of global temperature rise will be disastrous. That's not runaway warming. It's not so much the warming but the rate it's happening. If the warming that has happened and will happen over the next 100 years were spread out over 2 or 3,000 years it wouldn't be that much of a problem. Everything would have time to adjust.
Anthropogenic CO2 will not cause runaway global warming. The Earth isn't going to turn into Venus, at least not on any time scale that matters to us.
As far as research done during the period of CO2 increase, basically all of the research has been done during that period. CO2 started increasing in the early 1800's (maybe even the late 1700's) but it didn't really start to become significant until the 1900's.
Another level of the greenhouse gas story is you can measure the spectrum of infrared radiation at the surface and compare it to the spectrum at the top of the atmosphere. You can observe how it changes over time. From this you can determine the energy balance between surface emissions and TOA. If there is an imbalance temperatures on Earth will change until a new balance is achieved. Observations in the satellite era have found an imbalance.
I laughed at what you though my opinion was.
Models are not science. At the climate model level they are tools that science uses to understand the interactions of a complex system. You think that if you can prove models are useless then you can show global warming is a sham. You need to go at it at a much lower level.
Of course it's a truism that everything in science is a model at one level or another. The first order modeling for the effect of CO2 is to do what John Tyndall did in the 1850's. Shine various frequencies of light through it at varying concentrations and measure the effect. From that you can derive a formula for the effect of CO2 on the range of infrared light.
Models are not the primary evidence for global warming. My statement from the previous comment is:
As I mentioned a few posts ago the Earth is warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and changing the concentration of them will change the temperature. That's about as simply as it can be stated. Anything beyond that is details.
That's the primary evidence. Models are merely tools to explore the interrelation/interaction between the various factors in climate.
Well, you're the one who brought politics into the discussion back in this comment. I was merely responding.
As I mentioned a few posts ago the Earth is warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and changing the concentration of them will change the temperature. That's about as simply as it can be stated. Anything beyond that is details.
I don't give a flying fuck for the goddamn politics. It's the science I care about and politics have little to do with that. In the end all the politics in the world can't change the objective reality that science helps us understand. If you think scientists are subverting their work for the sake of politics you must think they don't give a damn for their science and their reputations. As I said time will tell as the future unfolds and any scientists misrepresenting the science will be discovered. They're mostly too smart to think they can get away with the kind of deception you think they are practicing.
Not at all. It became controversal when politicians took over the whole thing and made it political.
Yes, politicians who don't like the implications of global warming and what we need to do to address it. For some it conflicts with their world view and for others it has the potential to cost some of their supporters a lot of money.
I don't give a flying fuck for the goddamn politics. It's the science I care about and politics have little to do with that. In the end all the politics in the world can't change the objective reality that science helps us understand. If you think scientists are subverting their work for the sake of politics you must think they don't give a damn for their science and their reputations. As I said time will tell as the future unfolds and any scientists misrepresenting the science will be discovered. They're mostly too smart to think they can get away with the kind of deception you think they are practicing.
The science of global warming became controversial because some people didn't like the implications of it and what we need to do to address the problem. We could argue all night but time will tell which of us is more correct. I like my chances.
Oh, I read all of what you wrote. Your notion that science is a religion is absurd. Science is empirically tested against objective reality. In the long run it can't be perverted because sooner or later that objective reality will overtake any errors or purposeful misrepresentation. Any Us and Them involves those who accept objective reality as it comes and those who aren't willing to for one reason or another. I'm firmly on the side of accepting reality.
In regards to CO2 being opaque to given spectrums of electro magnetic radiation... I don't think anyone disputes that. Even the most hardcore denialist couldn't really do that I would expect.
Ok, do you also understand that the Earth is considerably warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Without those greenhouse gases the average temperature on the surface of the Earth would be ~0 degrees F instead of the ~58 degrees F it currently is. Wouldn't you think a change in the concentration of those greenhouse gases cause a change in temperature?
As to the scientist that inspired Gore, we're talking about the scientist that actually started the modern obsession with AGW.
So why don't you just tell me his name instead of making me guess? As far as the "modern obsession" goes I might start with Gilbert Plass who published a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change" in 1958. Did you know that President Lyndon Johnson got a report on the warming potential of the increase in carbon dioxide? The Charney Report was published in 1979. Through the 1980's James Hansen was publishing on the subject. His testimony before Congress in 1988 was pretty alarming.
If your model cannot fail a test... then it is not being tested. How is this an alien concept?
Models are tested all the time against the real world both in the projections they make and in hindcasting. Did you read the links I cited? To quote from the first one:
How are models evaluated? The amount of data that is available for model evaluation is vast, but falls into a few clear categories. First, there is the climatological average (maybe for each month or season) of key observed fields like temperature, rainfall, winds and clouds. This is the zeroth order comparison to see whether the model is getting the basics reasonably correct. Next comes the variability in these basic fields – does the model have a realistic North Atlantic Oscillation, or ENSO, or MJO. These are harder to match (and indeed many models do not yet have realistic El Niños). More subtle are comparisons of relationships in the model and in the real world. This is useful for short data records (such as those retrieves by satellite) where there is a lot of weather noise one wouldn’t expect the model to capture. In those cases, looking at the relationship between temperatures and humidity, or cloudiness and aerosols can give insight into whether the model processes are realistic or not.
Then there are the tests of climate changes themselves: how does a model respond to the addition of aerosols in the stratosphere such as was seen in the Mt Pinatubo ‘natural experiment’? How does it respond over the whole of the 20th Century, or at the Maunder Minimum, or the mid-Holocene or the Last Glacial Maximum? In each case, there is usually sufficient data available to evaluate how well the model is doing.
I trust that the scientists know how to test their models and that their judgement about how well they're doing is sound. I suspect that your judgement of how they should be tested is wrong.
As to the IPCC, a significant amount of their research was traced back to WWF power point presentations. I believe one of the funnier examples was a claim about the Himalayas that came from a climbing magazine. You're not fooling anyone with this nonsense.
None of the WG1 report can be traced to the WWF. It's all peer reviewed scientific papers. Worrying about the Himalaya's error in the WG2 report is getting silly. It's one small error in a 3,000 page report, the error has been admitted by the IPCC and steps have been taken to prevent it from happening again.
Nobody with any sense denies that such people (those who completely ignore science) exist. The problem is that a lot of people, almost all of which should know better, wants to lump everyone who questions the dogma of climate change in with that minority.
When you start throwing words like "dogma" around it's obvious where you stand. It's perfectly valid to question the science of climate change but it has to be done in a scientific manner. When people start throwing around arguments about who's making the claims (Al Gore anyone?) how much it's going to cost or how people are trying to control us it's not longer a scientific argument that has anything to do with the science. When people bring up old arguments that have long since been debunked it's just wasting scientist's time. There has been the occasional argument from the anti side that caused scientists to reexamine their science (Anthony Watts Surfacestations.org being a notable example) but what mostly happens is it strengthens the science making it even more solid.
So while you might think it sounds like dogma it's mostly scientists and others getting tired of having to repeat themselves over and over and over again to people who won't listen to them.
Call me a denier all you want. I'm not denying the "Science" part of this (CO2). I am denying the predictive hyperbole from the likes of Al Gore, who keeps making ridiculous claims, while having a huge Carbon Footprint (carbon offsets not withstanding).
If you're letting your dislike of people like Al Gore color your attitude toward the science then you're not being properly scientifically skeptical. On top of that if you don't seek out what Gore actually said instead of just believing what others say he said you're just letting yourself be duped. I don't pay much attention to Gore but when I've looking into the claims about what he said from the denier side they're most often taken out of context ignoring the qualifying statements he's made.
You know what, we're getting caught up in what models can or cannot do but in the end it doesn't matter. Climate models are just tools to investigate our understanding of the interaction of the different components of the climate system. As I said they will always be imperfect but they are useful. So I guess I'm changing the subject but so be it.
The diagnosis of anthropogenic global warming comes from the basic science of the radiative characteristics of greenhouse gases. That is fundamental falsifiable science that you can't get around. The effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can be measured by taking radiative energy reading starting from the surface to the top of the atmosphere and observing how that changes at different elevations. The effects of the different greenhouse gases are relatively easy to extract from that data.
The scientist who Gore cited whoever that is is late to the parade after Fourier, Tyndall in the 1850's, Arrhenius in the 1890's, Gilbert Plass in the 1950's and James Hanson in the 1970's & 1980's. His change of heart doesn't really change anything else.
Regarding UN reports, the IPCC Working Group I reports were all completely written by scientists involved in the research. Even the Summary for Policy Makers is written by scientists although it gets vetted by politicians. Still nothing gets through it without the approval of the authors of the WG1 full report. The Working Group II and especially the Working Group III reports do have some non-scientists helping to write them but the WG1 report is the critical one to our scientific understanding of climate change.
The politicization of the issue is almost entirely due to people who don't like the implications and proposed solutions. As Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Can you cite a reference for the Japanese studies? I'd be interested in see what it actually had to say rather than just taking your word for it.
So far as I can see the output of models has generally been pretty good and nothing that has happened has shown the models are just flat wrong. Of course they will be better in the future as we learn more and can apply more computing power to them but they're the best thing we have now so we might as well use them. It seems to me that your expectations for what models are capable of may be a little off. Here is some suggested reading to help you understand them better:
As I understand it Alan Gross was just a freebie thrown in. We traded 3 Cuban spies for the spy we had in Cuba that helped us catch them in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, like skepticalscience.com is a reliable source... hah hah hah hah hah hah...
You can denigrate SkepticalScience all you want but unlike WUWT their articles contain links to actual scientific papers as references in most cases.
It's already too late to "make these changes not take place." If we magically stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow it would still be a century before the excess we have already put up there will finally be cycled out into carbonate rocks, peat, and such.
It will take a thousand years or more before the excess CO2 gets cycled out in carbonate rocks, etc.
Yes, some people when confronted with something that doesn't fit their ideology dig in further. But eventually if they have any connection with reality at all they will have to admit the scientists are right. There will always be a few who can't connect with reality though.
What the hell is a "break-pad"? Oh, you must mean a brake-pad.
As to heat reducing crop yields, you're not controlling for water in those statistics so it could all be water.
Huh? Didn't you notice that the yield response to temperature graph had precipitation on the x axis?
The causative factor is obviously the infrared absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide and how that changes with concentration.
You say CO2 is a trace gas but if I put you in a room with a concentration of 250 ppm of hydrogen cyanide you'd be dead in a matter of minutes. Trace concentrations can matter, it's all a matter of context.
All told greenhouse gases make up less than 5000 ppm of the atmosphere and yet they're responsible for about 59 degrees F of temperature on the surface.
I don't say that CO2 is disproportionally relevant, just as relevant as it is. The most common gases in the atmosphere are in order are nitrogen, oxygen argon, water vapor and carbon dioxide. The first three are not greenhouse gases and have little effect on temperature. Water vapor concentrations are strictly limited by temperatures and therefore it can not drive temperature changes but is a feedback to temperature changes. There is nothing we can do to directly affect the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere (except locally irrigation may raise the concentration over small areas). That makes CO2 the most important greenhouse gas that we have any control over.
The fact that the same basic atmospheric model works for both Venus and Earth but also Mars and Titan is an indication that it's getting things mostly right.
My assumption that warming will continue is based on the absorption characteristics of CO2 and the fact that CO2 concentrations continue to rise. Nothing more than that.
Grapes have been grown in England basically as long has humans have practiced agriculture there. I never heard of oranges growing there but I suppose it's possible.
Warmth and CO2 levels are only two of many factors in agricultural productivity. More important is water and nutrition (fertilizer). Temperatures that get too high can reduce productivity significantly. Here is a study of corn and soy bean yields as related to temperature and precipitation. It found for corn that 1 degree warmer temperature in July caused a 2.28 bushel per acre drop in yields while 1 degree cooler caused an increase of 2.28 bushel per acre (see the section on "Corn Yield Response to July Temperatures".)
I live in Oregon and am quite familiar with the Great Basin desert. The only southwest state I haven't visited so far is New Mexico. As far as transporting water to the southwest, where is it going to come from? Most of the Colorado river water is currently used for agriculture in Arizona and California already and the Colorado basin has been in drought for most years since around 2000. Look at the water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. You can take water from the Snake/Columbia system over my dead body.
I expect between 2 and 6 feet of SLR by 2100 and it will probably be between 200 and 300 years before it's risen by 20 feet. The 70-80 foot rise probably takes 600-1000 years at least.
I explained to you way back in this thread why high CO2 concentrations and ice ages were not incompatible 600+ million years ago. That has practically noting to do with what's going on now.
I'm skeptical that it was any warmer during the medieval or roman warm periods than it is now. I haven't seen any good evidence for that. Even if it were as the warming continues that won't be true for much longer.
Our civilization is built around the climate as it has existed for the past 8,000 years or so. Climate change will have an effect on that. I'm particularly worried about our agricultural systems that are feeding 7+ billion people. Any major disruption of those will have profound effects.
As far as sea level I think we already have at least 20 feet of rise built in. There is a lot of lag in the response of the great ice sheets to warming but respond they will and there isn't anything we can do about it. The last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea levels were 70-80 feet higher than they are now. Maybe it's just a matter of how many centuries it takes to get there.
In measuring those imbalances they're measuring the filtering that greenhouse gases do to the infrared spectrum. The fact that some of the absorption spectrums overlap means there is some uncertainty in what gas causes what effect but those uncertainties are quantifiable. Cloud cover and ice albedo are also subject of research and they haven't found evidence for them being major factors.
To me it just looks like you're desperately searching for anything but CO2.
Here Richard Alley explains that carbon dioxide is the biggest control knob for Earth's climate going back as far as we can tell.
Also I cited measurements of the Earth's energy imbalance by observing the difference between surface and TOA infrared radiation. That's from the last 20 or 30 years.
I think even 4 degrees C of global temperature rise will be disastrous. That's not runaway warming. It's not so much the warming but the rate it's happening. If the warming that has happened and will happen over the next 100 years were spread out over 2 or 3,000 years it wouldn't be that much of a problem. Everything would have time to adjust.
Anthropogenic CO2 will not cause runaway global warming. The Earth isn't going to turn into Venus, at least not on any time scale that matters to us.
As far as research done during the period of CO2 increase, basically all of the research has been done during that period. CO2 started increasing in the early 1800's (maybe even the late 1700's) but it didn't really start to become significant until the 1900's.
Another level of the greenhouse gas story is you can measure the spectrum of infrared radiation at the surface and compare it to the spectrum at the top of the atmosphere. You can observe how it changes over time. From this you can determine the energy balance between surface emissions and TOA. If there is an imbalance temperatures on Earth will change until a new balance is achieved. Observations in the satellite era have found an imbalance.
I laughed at what you though my opinion was.
Models are not science. At the climate model level they are tools that science uses to understand the interactions of a complex system. You think that if you can prove models are useless then you can show global warming is a sham. You need to go at it at a much lower level.
Of course it's a truism that everything in science is a model at one level or another. The first order modeling for the effect of CO2 is to do what John Tyndall did in the 1850's. Shine various frequencies of light through it at varying concentrations and measure the effect. From that you can derive a formula for the effect of CO2 on the range of infrared light.
Models are not the primary evidence for global warming. My statement from the previous comment is:
As I mentioned a few posts ago the Earth is warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and changing the concentration of them will change the temperature. That's about as simply as it can be stated. Anything beyond that is details.
That's the primary evidence. Models are merely tools to explore the interrelation/interaction between the various factors in climate.
Well, you're the one who brought politics into the discussion back in this comment. I was merely responding.
As I mentioned a few posts ago the Earth is warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and changing the concentration of them will change the temperature. That's about as simply as it can be stated. Anything beyond that is details.
I don't give a flying fuck for the goddamn politics. It's the science I care about and politics have little to do with that. In the end all the politics in the world can't change the objective reality that science helps us understand. If you think scientists are subverting their work for the sake of politics you must think they don't give a damn for their science and their reputations. As I said time will tell as the future unfolds and any scientists misrepresenting the science will be discovered. They're mostly too smart to think they can get away with the kind of deception you think they are practicing.
Not at all. It became controversal when politicians took over the whole thing and made it political.
Yes, politicians who don't like the implications of global warming and what we need to do to address it. For some it conflicts with their world view and for others it has the potential to cost some of their supporters a lot of money.
I don't give a flying fuck for the goddamn politics. It's the science I care about and politics have little to do with that. In the end all the politics in the world can't change the objective reality that science helps us understand. If you think scientists are subverting their work for the sake of politics you must think they don't give a damn for their science and their reputations. As I said time will tell as the future unfolds and any scientists misrepresenting the science will be discovered. They're mostly too smart to think they can get away with the kind of deception you think they are practicing.
The science of global warming became controversial because some people didn't like the implications of it and what we need to do to address the problem. We could argue all night but time will tell which of us is more correct. I like my chances.
Oh, I read all of what you wrote. Your notion that science is a religion is absurd. Science is empirically tested against objective reality. In the long run it can't be perverted because sooner or later that objective reality will overtake any errors or purposeful misrepresentation. Any Us and Them involves those who accept objective reality as it comes and those who aren't willing to for one reason or another. I'm firmly on the side of accepting reality.
In regards to CO2 being opaque to given spectrums of electro magnetic radiation... I don't think anyone disputes that. Even the most hardcore denialist couldn't really do that I would expect.
Ok, do you also understand that the Earth is considerably warmer than it would otherwise be because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Without those greenhouse gases the average temperature on the surface of the Earth would be ~0 degrees F instead of the ~58 degrees F it currently is. Wouldn't you think a change in the concentration of those greenhouse gases cause a change in temperature?
As to the scientist that inspired Gore, we're talking about the scientist that actually started the modern obsession with AGW.
So why don't you just tell me his name instead of making me guess? As far as the "modern obsession" goes I might start with Gilbert Plass who published a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change" in 1958. Did you know that President Lyndon Johnson got a report on the warming potential of the increase in carbon dioxide? The Charney Report was published in 1979. Through the 1980's James Hansen was publishing on the subject. His testimony before Congress in 1988 was pretty alarming.
If your model cannot fail a test... then it is not being tested. How is this an alien concept?
Models are tested all the time against the real world both in the projections they make and in hindcasting. Did you read the links I cited? To quote from the first one:
How are models evaluated?
The amount of data that is available for model evaluation is vast, but falls into a few clear categories. First, there is the climatological average (maybe for each month or season) of key observed fields like temperature, rainfall, winds and clouds. This is the zeroth order comparison to see whether the model is getting the basics reasonably correct. Next comes the variability in these basic fields – does the model have a realistic North Atlantic Oscillation, or ENSO, or MJO. These are harder to match (and indeed many models do not yet have realistic El Niños). More subtle are comparisons of relationships in the model and in the real world. This is useful for short data records (such as those retrieves by satellite) where there is a lot of weather noise one wouldn’t expect the model to capture. In those cases, looking at the relationship between temperatures and humidity, or cloudiness and aerosols can give insight into whether the model processes are realistic or not.
Then there are the tests of climate changes themselves: how does a model respond to the addition of aerosols in the stratosphere such as was seen in the Mt Pinatubo ‘natural experiment’? How does it respond over the whole of the 20th Century, or at the Maunder Minimum, or the mid-Holocene or the Last Glacial Maximum? In each case, there is usually sufficient data available to evaluate how well the model is doing.
I trust that the scientists know how to test their models and that their judgement about how well they're doing is sound. I suspect that your judgement of how they should be tested is wrong.
As to the IPCC, a significant amount of their research was traced back to WWF power point presentations. I believe one of the funnier examples was a claim about the Himalayas that came from a climbing magazine. You're not fooling anyone with this nonsense.
None of the WG1 report can be traced to the WWF. It's all peer reviewed scientific papers. Worrying about the Himalaya's error in the WG2 report is getting silly. It's one small error in a 3,000 page report, the error has been admitted by the IPCC and steps have been taken to prevent it from happening again.
Nobody with any sense denies that such people (those who completely ignore science) exist. The problem is that a lot of people, almost all of which should know better, wants to lump everyone who questions the dogma of climate change in with that minority.
When you start throwing words like "dogma" around it's obvious where you stand. It's perfectly valid to question the science of climate change but it has to be done in a scientific manner. When people start throwing around arguments about who's making the claims (Al Gore anyone?) how much it's going to cost or how people are trying to control us it's not longer a scientific argument that has anything to do with the science. When people bring up old arguments that have long since been debunked it's just wasting scientist's time. There has been the occasional argument from the anti side that caused scientists to reexamine their science (Anthony Watts Surfacestations.org being a notable example) but what mostly happens is it strengthens the science making it even more solid.
So while you might think it sounds like dogma it's mostly scientists and others getting tired of having to repeat themselves over and over and over again to people who won't listen to them.
Call me a denier all you want. I'm not denying the "Science" part of this (CO2). I am denying the predictive hyperbole from the likes of Al Gore, who keeps making ridiculous claims, while having a huge Carbon Footprint (carbon offsets not withstanding).
If you're letting your dislike of people like Al Gore color your attitude toward the science then you're not being properly scientifically skeptical. On top of that if you don't seek out what Gore actually said instead of just believing what others say he said you're just letting yourself be duped. I don't pay much attention to Gore but when I've looking into the claims about what he said from the denier side they're most often taken out of context ignoring the qualifying statements he's made.
Please note, as in the article, call them climate science deniers, not climate deniers. I think the distinction is important.
You know what, we're getting caught up in what models can or cannot do but in the end it doesn't matter. Climate models are just tools to investigate our understanding of the interaction of the different components of the climate system. As I said they will always be imperfect but they are useful. So I guess I'm changing the subject but so be it.
The diagnosis of anthropogenic global warming comes from the basic science of the radiative characteristics of greenhouse gases. That is fundamental falsifiable science that you can't get around. The effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can be measured by taking radiative energy reading starting from the surface to the top of the atmosphere and observing how that changes at different elevations. The effects of the different greenhouse gases are relatively easy to extract from that data.
The scientist who Gore cited whoever that is is late to the parade after Fourier, Tyndall in the 1850's, Arrhenius in the 1890's, Gilbert Plass in the 1950's and James Hanson in the 1970's & 1980's. His change of heart doesn't really change anything else.
Regarding UN reports, the IPCC Working Group I reports were all completely written by scientists involved in the research. Even the Summary for Policy Makers is written by scientists although it gets vetted by politicians. Still nothing gets through it without the approval of the authors of the WG1 full report. The Working Group II and especially the Working Group III reports do have some non-scientists helping to write them but the WG1 report is the critical one to our scientific understanding of climate change.
The politicization of the issue is almost entirely due to people who don't like the implications and proposed solutions. As Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Can you cite a reference for the Japanese studies? I'd be interested in see what it actually had to say rather than just taking your word for it.
So far as I can see the output of models has generally been pretty good and nothing that has happened has shown the models are just flat wrong. Of course they will be better in the future as we learn more and can apply more computing power to them but they're the best thing we have now so we might as well use them. It seems to me that your expectations for what models are capable of may be a little off. Here is some suggested reading to help you understand them better:
FAQ on Climate Models
FAQ on Climate Models: Part II
Why trust climate models, it's a matter of simple science
As I understand it Alan Gross was just a freebie thrown in. We traded 3 Cuban spies for the spy we had in Cuba that helped us catch them in the first place.
What was exceptional about this drought was the temperature. It had record warmth that dried out the soil more than in the past.