Just one small problem with your hypothesis, warmer air is *not* "capable of diluting more CO2", Nitrogen/Oxygen and CO2 can exist in *any* ratio.
Besides that, the "heat" produced directly by human activity is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total heat input to the planet by the Sun, in the grand scheme of things it is negligeable.
What is, however, not negligeable is the fact that since we've started burning fossil fuels on a larger scale, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has gone from 285ppm to roughly 400ppm, and we know from isotope fraction analysis that this increase is caused almost entirely from carbon from fossil fuel sources.
The chain is thus: Humans burn more fossil fuels --> CO2 concentrations rise ---> the environment warms up.
You wouldn't even collect an *ig*Nobel prize with a hypothesis so far removed from any of the scientific data...
I still wonder about those graphs that show CO2 lagging temperature by 800 years during past global warming events.
You still wonder about something that has been *explained* umpteen times, I can image not being interested enough to look stuff up, but please don't involve yourself in a debate if your knowledge is 20 years out of date... (I'm sorry to come over all agressive, but I've this exact argument trotted out for over a decade.)
Long-term climate change (tens to hundreds of thousands of years) is influenced by changes in the orbit of the moon (google Milankovitch if you want).
Slight change in orbit --> causes slight warming --> causes CO2 release --> causes more warming ---> switches between ice-ages & intermediate periods.
The delta-T between the "change in orbit" and the "CO2 release" was about 800 years, which accounts for the lag.
The current change is *different* becuase the CO2 release is not caused by changes in orbit, but by man burning millions of years of stored carbon in a few centuries.
So we're skipping the first bit that ook 800 years, and going almost instantaneously to the "more warming" bit... which is why we are now seeing faster warming of the planet than was ever seen in the climatological records, going back hundreds of thousands of years (and probably much, much longer, but the farther back we go, the harder it becomes to measure how fast temperature changes actually happened).
Weeds grow better with increased CO2 concentration than food-plants. Not all plants are food, Humans don't like weeds.
Food-plants grown under increased CO2 show decreased nutritional value per weight, so even if you get more growth, the end result is less nutritious...
In the real world of plant-growing, CO2 is rarely the limiting factor, usually water, nitrogen or soil-minerals are the limiting factor. Increased CO2 leads to increased temperature, often leading to increased drought during the growing season, so plants grow *less* despite increased CO2 concentrations.
See: reality is more complicated than you pretend it to be...
While plenty of people may dispute the deity of Jesus Christ, there's no shortage of historical documentation that he existed, and had a major influence on society at the time
Citation needed?
Because actually, there isn't... Around that time there were plenty of Jewish sects and messiah-type figures running around in that part of the world, so the figure Jesus is undoubtedly based on one or more of them, but there is actually virtually no "evidence" of the existence of one Jesus of Nasareth for which the sources cannot be traced back to the "Christian" religious sect of the first few centuries AD - and no documentary evidence at all that can be dated to earlier than 50-100 years *after* his death.
That doesn't mean he didn't exist, but only that there is little concrete evidence of it - but after all, that's what faith is for, right, believing in shit without evidence?
It doesn't really contradict anything - the current estimate for 66% was ~2-4.5 per doubling, this study claims 1.3-2.6 per doubling - which means that it is completely possible for the "correct" value to be valid in both estimates (even beside the fact that scientists usually use at least 2 sigma as uncertainty, which makes the ranges even more compatible...
The only thing it contradicts is the idiots who keep saying that global warming isn't happening.
Prove that astrophysics is right. I get the whole "spectrometer plus redshift plus observed luminosity leads to a fair distant measure" bit, but leaping from that to "I can measure the way galaxies rotate based on less than 100 years of data, even though they take way longer than that to do so" is something that fails the "my salary depends on me belieing this BS" meter.
We don't even need 100 years of data to measure galaxy rotation, because we don't do it by seeing the stars move in the galaxy in question. All you really need is a galaxy that is more or less edge-on and two measurements of the same spectral line, one to the left of the galactic core and one to the right. the difference in redshift between those two measurements gives us a very, very good idea of the rotation of the galaxy because said difference is determined by the average motion of the stars towards or away from us at that position in the galaxy.
While it's good to be skeptical about things, it's bad to not understand at least the basics of what you're skeptical about, especially if you intend to calling BS about it in a public forum...
"Common Descent" does not mean "anything derived by any means from DNA" - the definition does not even involve DNA...
And if to you "descent" means "unmodified reproductive descent", then you are simply using a definition that is different and more narrow than that used by the rest of the world, and discussion becomes useless.
"Common Descent" means that there is an unbroken line of "descent" (without the nonsensical "unmodified reproductive" qualifiers) between all living creatures and some original ancestor. Nothing more, nothing less.
The theory of common descent is really quite simple:
All currently living organisms on Earth are descended from a single original organism (where "descend" essentially means they had a "parent" living organism from which they split off).
Since even gene spliced organisms have a "parent" living organism from which they split off, gene-splicing does not make this false.
And when the day comes when we can create a "living organism" from scratch, we simply need to add the qualifier "that were not created from scratch by man" to the theory for it to remain a perfectly valid theory...
If you're talking about the atomic-explosion drive, that was a *real* idea, called "Project Orion", and I would argue that at least bean-driven flatulence could be considered a worse propulsion idea...
Basically, you heard wrong. Yes, we are going into an ice age, but not for at least 10,000-20,000 years.
And while some plants grow faster/better at higher CO2 levels, the plants that profit most are actually called "weeds", even those crops that grow faster apparently end up bigger but with fewer nutrients (so more, but less nutricious).
And in most situations, CO2 is not the limiting factor in crop growth, things like water and fertilizer tend to be what determines how fast and how big plants grow.
No, no-one in the 100 year history of climate research or the 150 years of geology research has done this...
Sorry if that comes across as arrogant, but this has been done, and is included in the science underpinning the current state of knowledge of Climate Change.
Many sources for this exist, fundamental questions like these were answered decades ago.
From Wikipedia (which itself references the scientific sources): "It is estimated that volcanoes release about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. This is about a factor of 1000 smaller than the sum of the other natural sources and about factor of about 100 smaller than the sources from human activity."
And how would you propose to compare "solar heating" to "emissions"? They are two entirely different things.
Your question feels like two favorite "denialist" talking points, the "volcano's emit more than humanity ever could" lie and the "It's the sun's activity causing the warming" lie - the first is shown through decades old research to be factually incorrect and the second is very strongly suggested to be incorrect by the two observations that (a) the sun's activity has been essentially stable for the last half-century, except for the known and quantified 11-year cycle and that (b) the stratosphere has cooled, which is an effect predicted and expected with increased greenhouse effect and essentially the opposite of what we would expect if additional "solar heating" was occuring.
The amount of ignorance in your (short) post is astounding:
(1) the IPCC does not *do research*, the take the research done and presented in peer-reviewed journals, and make a report based on that. Peer review is very important, which is why it is the basis of the IPCC reports. That some non-peer reviewed entries got into one of the reports of the IPCC is unfortunate and should not have happened, but the way you try to present the situation just shows an astounding ignorance of what the IPCC is and what it reports. (2) There have not been "many names who quit IPCC" - there have been a few, when you bring together thousands of people to work on reports over a period of twenty years, it would be supremely astonishing if this did not occasionaly happen. And those that did quit, did not quit because of "this very issue" because "this very issue" just does not exist.
So, basically, you are arguing from a position that even a tiny tiny bit of on-line research would show to be wrong...
But as is so often said, please don't let facts get in the way of a good rant...
2. The hard empirical fact is that atmospheric CO2 has risen from ~280 ppm to over 370ppm. But there is no link between rising CO2 and temperature rise except in the reverse sense: temperature rises and then 800-1000 years later, CO2 rises in delayed response.
*sigh* - this is what is wrong with the whole "debate" - This statement is essentially a lie based on a truth, and it takes about half a page of explanation to explain why this is, but it takes only a few seconds to repeat the lie somewhere else.
I'll attempt to use less than a page: (1) Yes, during the climate changes caused by Milankovitch cycles, CO2-levels trail the start of temperature rise by 800 years, the reason being that CO2 is not the cause of these climate changes, the shape of the earth's orbit is the cause. However, there is a feedback loop which kicks in as temperatures rise, which causes the ocean to exhale CO2. This CO2 then causes further warming, increasing the total warming considerably beyond what would be expected if the only effect where the orbit changes themselves.
So the "trailing" of CO2 in these cases in no way disproves CO2 as a possible causal agent in climate change...
(2) On the other hand, there have been warming events in the past that cannot be explained by Milankovitch-cycles, and there the CO2-rise (possibly due to volcanic activity on a massive scale) appears to be the causal agent, and does not trail the temperature change.
So basically, if something else triggers the climate change, CO2 trails because it is a long-term feedback, if CO2 triggers the climate change, it does not trail.
Since no scientist claims that only CO2 can cause climate change, there is no problem except that "deniers" use the (1) situation to falsely claim that the (2) situation is false.
Way to miss the point, mpe. I'm not saying the situation with the icecaps is identical to the situation with earthquakes, I'm saying the situation is similar.
The greenhouse effect was predicted on scientific basis in the 1820's (see Fourier), continental drift only became an accepted theory half a century ago and is the main mechanism required for understanding the causes of earthquakes, so claiming that the scientific study of earthquakes predates that of climate change is simply wrong.
And Methane may be a more powerful greenhouse gas, it's also present only in far far lower concentrations and has a very much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere. Given these factors, our current Methane production is a smaller problem than our CO2 production, so it makes perfect sense to concentrate on CO2 production (without ignoring other factors, it's possible for humanity to work on several issues in parallel, isn't it?)
And did you "forget" that of the two cases of suggested conspiracy, in the first case the paper discussed was such a travesty against real science half the board of editors of the "peer reviewed publication" resigned in protest, with plenty of evidence that this did not happen after any pressure from the CRU people and that in the second case, the "conspiracy" actually failed to blacklist the publications, since they were actually included in the report being discussed?
So even if there was a conspiracy, it must have been a pretty weak one, failing at getting the desired results?
In science, everything is "data", "hypothesis" or "theory", and models are the mechanism scientists use to link "data" and "theory" - this is as true for Climate Science as it is for Physics or Chemistry.
The problem with the icecaps is, at least in part, one of chaos - it can be compared to knowing with 99% certainty that an earthquake will occur near San Francisco in the next few hundred years, but not being able to tell you at what date & time it will occur.
The problem is that in the climate debate, some people then pretend that, because we cannot predict the exact date & time of the earthquake, we know nothing about earthquakes and we are wrong in predicting that the earthquake will occur.
The Earth's climate is indeed a complex, nonlinear system, but it is not entirely without constraints, many of those constraints have been figured out, often from the basic physics. You may not "think" that people are clever enough to understand it, but there are some *very* clever people working on this.
This is also why no serious climate scientist is claiming that in 2100 the average temperature will have gone up 2.7548C, what they are claiming is that, given a few assumptions on the evolution of the rise in CO2, the most likely result in 2100 will be a rise in average temperature of between 2C and 4.5C
Further, the uncertainty is much bigger on the high end than on the low end. We are virtually certain that, unless significant reductions in CO2-output are realised, the rise will be no smaller than 2C, and the most likely figure looks to be 2.5C-3.5C.
The science has come far enough that the biggest uncertainty left isn't in the science, but in the human factor, which is the most important bit that we cannot integrate into physical models.
And to give even more food for thought: the temperatures during an ice age are estimated to have been, on average, about 5C lower than today. So while 2C may seem like a small amount, realise that a 5C drop in average temperature caused the ice-caps to cover most of Canada & Western Europe, and sea levels to drop by almost 100 meters.
All right, I'll gladly acknowledge that data sometimes surprises.
It's just that some of your "examples" come straight from the "deniers handbook" and are simply incorrect as examples. I keep seeing them repeated a gazillion times, long after they've been thoroughly debunked, is it surprising that that leads to prickly responses?
Repeating incorrect statements is bad science, responding to them by "blasting them to smithereens" may be bad attitude, but certainly cannot be considered "bad science"?
In recent years, we have actually been surprised regularly, unfortunately this was rarely in the direction of slowing global warming. Did you know that scientists even as recently as 5 years ago, scientists were expecting a gradually increasing melting of the Greenland icecap, but what we are actually seeing now is that this melting is increasing far far more rapidly? Glaciers running out to sea at 3 km/year in 1995 have now accelerated to 12km/year.
Did you also know that the sea-ice conditions seen in 2007 were expected to occur no sooner than 2020 according to projections from only a few years earlier, and that, despite claims of "recovery" in 2008 & 2009 by deniers, the reality is that in both these years, the sea-ice conditions were quite close to the record-breaking year 2007, and multi-year ice, which was the "bedrock" of the northern polar cap, has all but disappeared.
So yes, surprises do happen, unfortunately, the surprises do not point towards less global warming than expected.
I can't respond to all your "claims", since you don't reference even one of those "million" people, but:
- We have direct temperature measurements going back about 150-200 years, to go further back, we use a huge number of "temperature proxies", not just tree rings, but sedimentation data, ice-core data, pollen data, etc, etc - Geologic time has very little to do with this, we *know* climate has varied in the past, for many reasons and over many timescales, but that in no way "proves" that we are not the cause of the current changes - does the fact that it has rained naturally in the past make it completely impossible for somebody pissing from his roof to piss on your head?
- I don't fully understand what you mean by the "gulf stream" quip, nobody claims we know everything, but I'm pretty sure the scientists know way way more about it than you.
- Measuring the amount of ice in the arctic is not easy, but we have been doing it quite accurately for at least 30 years (turns out the US Military was doing the measuring, but didn't share the data with scientists for a long time) - and we know enough to say that in those 30 years, and particularly in the last few years, the ice has been decreasing in ways that we are quite sure have not ever occured in historical times.
- The most recent data is *not* saying global warming has temporarily halted, that's a canard the "deniers" are spreading (the idea is that repeating a lie often enough makes it appear true). Just this point alone shows you are getting your information from very very biased sources.
And on the idiotic reference to manifold/string theories : if one of those theories had been making predictions for 150-odd years, predictions which turn out to fit the data very very well, and the other side was just shouting "blah blah I can't hear you" all the time, then they would be very much right in telling them to 'shut up'.
When you can come up with a decent, evidence-supported argument, nobody will tell you to shut op, when you come with vague FUD and thoroughly debunked idiocies, shutting up probably should probably be considered the smart option.
Maybe you don't realise, but the price of "gas" is factored in in pretty much everything else you buy... That video game, how do you reckon it's transported to the store? That dinner, how do you think its ingredients are harvested, and possible, with what it is cooked?
Price of oil/gas rises --> price of all manufactured goods & services rises --> cost of living rises... This effect is far, far bigger than the "very small part of your recurring bills" that is you directly buying gas...
Ah, there the answer is pretty simple: Climate is the running average over 30 years. Questioning climate models is probably only reasonable if an inverse trend continues for several decades. In fact, Climate Models *predict* that we should quite regularly expect a 10-year decline in temperature to happen, only it will happen less often than the 10-year temperature increases, and over 30 years and more, the trend is predicted to be upwards.
Which is one of the reasons why the people screaming "negative trends" after the past 10 years of relative stability (note: there has *not* even been a negative trend, average temperatures have plateaud a bit, but at a level that is quite a lot above the long term average for the preceding 30 years).
That "stability" could go on for years more without it actually meaning the predictions are wrong (and before anyone says "how convenient" - I'm sorry you don't like the way science, modelling and statistics work, but that's *your* problem, not reality's)...
The IPCC does *not* fund most climate research, what you are saying is false...
It's like saying the International Astronomical Union "funds" astronomy research... it doesn't, it's an assembly of scientists working around a subject.
The IPCC is an International Panel of Climate Researchers, they take the results of climate research and turn it into general reports on the state of the science.
The funding into Climate Research is provided by countries and other organisations such as the EU.
The IPCC is the result of that research funding, not the cause...
And from your rather idiotic outburst, it's also quite clear that you do not believe reality should influence your political convictions and launch into a tirade which has *nothing* to do with my simple statement that what you claimed is untrue.
So, basically, since the claim that the "IPPC is the primary sponsor of all AGW research" is a *lie*, can we just ignore everything else you say about this subject?
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Just one small problem with your hypothesis, warmer air is *not* "capable of diluting more CO2", Nitrogen/Oxygen and CO2 can exist in *any* ratio.
Besides that, the "heat" produced directly by human activity is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total heat input to the planet by the Sun, in the grand scheme of things it is negligeable.
What is, however, not negligeable is the fact that since we've started burning fossil fuels on a larger scale, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has gone from 285ppm to roughly 400ppm, and we know from isotope fraction analysis that this increase is caused almost entirely from carbon from fossil fuel sources.
The chain is thus: Humans burn more fossil fuels --> CO2 concentrations rise ---> the environment warms up.
You wouldn't even collect an *ig*Nobel prize with a hypothesis so far removed from any of the scientific data...
I still wonder about those graphs that show CO2 lagging temperature by 800 years during past global warming events.
You still wonder about something that has been *explained* umpteen times, I can image not being interested enough to look stuff up, but please don't involve yourself in a debate if your knowledge is 20 years out of date... (I'm sorry to come over all agressive, but I've this exact argument trotted out for over a decade.)
Long-term climate change (tens to hundreds of thousands of years) is influenced by changes in the orbit of the moon (google Milankovitch if you want).
Slight change in orbit --> causes slight warming --> causes CO2 release --> causes more warming ---> switches between ice-ages & intermediate periods.
The delta-T between the "change in orbit" and the "CO2 release" was about 800 years, which accounts for the lag.
The current change is *different* becuase the CO2 release is not caused by changes in orbit, but by man burning millions of years of stored carbon in a few centuries.
So we're skipping the first bit that ook 800 years, and going almost instantaneously to the "more warming" bit... which is why we are now seeing faster warming of the planet than was ever seen in the climatological records, going back hundreds of thousands of years (and probably much, much longer, but the farther back we go, the harder it becomes to measure how fast temperature changes actually happened).
Weeds grow better with increased CO2 concentration than food-plants. Not all plants are food, Humans don't like weeds.
Food-plants grown under increased CO2 show decreased nutritional value per weight, so even if you get more growth, the end result is less nutritious...
In the real world of plant-growing, CO2 is rarely the limiting factor, usually water, nitrogen or soil-minerals are the limiting factor. Increased CO2 leads to increased temperature, often leading to increased drought during the growing season, so plants grow *less* despite increased CO2 concentrations.
See: reality is more complicated than you pretend it to be...
While plenty of people may dispute the deity of Jesus Christ, there's no shortage of historical documentation that he existed, and had a major influence on society at the time
Citation needed?
Because actually, there isn't... Around that time there were plenty of Jewish sects and messiah-type figures running around in that part of the world, so the figure Jesus is undoubtedly based on one or more of them, but there is actually virtually no "evidence" of the existence of one Jesus of Nasareth for which the sources cannot be traced back to the "Christian" religious sect of the first few centuries AD - and no documentary evidence at all that can be dated to earlier than 50-100 years *after* his death.
That doesn't mean he didn't exist, but only that there is little concrete evidence of it - but after all, that's what faith is for, right, believing in shit without evidence?
It doesn't really contradict anything - the current estimate for 66% was ~2-4.5 per doubling, this study claims 1.3-2.6 per doubling - which means that it is completely possible for the "correct" value to be valid in both estimates (even beside the fact that scientists usually use at least 2 sigma as uncertainty, which makes the ranges even more compatible...
The only thing it contradicts is the idiots who keep saying that global warming isn't happening.
Prove that astrophysics is right. I get the whole "spectrometer plus redshift plus observed luminosity leads to a fair distant measure" bit, but leaping from that to "I can measure the way galaxies rotate based on less than 100 years of data, even though they take way longer than that to do so" is something that fails the "my salary depends on me belieing this BS" meter.
We don't even need 100 years of data to measure galaxy rotation, because we don't do it by seeing the stars move in the galaxy in question. All you really need is a galaxy that is more or less edge-on and two measurements of the same spectral line, one to the left of the galactic core and one to the right. the difference in redshift between those two measurements gives us a very, very good idea of the rotation of the galaxy because said difference is determined by the average motion of the stars towards or away from us at that position in the galaxy.
While it's good to be skeptical about things, it's bad to not understand at least the basics of what you're skeptical about, especially if you intend to calling BS about it in a public forum...
"Common Descent" does not mean "anything derived by any means from DNA" - the definition does not even involve DNA...
And if to you "descent" means "unmodified reproductive descent", then you are simply using a definition that is different and more narrow than that used by the rest of the world, and discussion becomes useless.
"Common Descent" means that there is an unbroken line of "descent" (without the nonsensical "unmodified reproductive" qualifiers) between all living creatures and some original ancestor. Nothing more, nothing less.
The theory of common descent is really quite simple:
All currently living organisms on Earth are descended from a single original organism (where "descend" essentially means they had a "parent" living organism from which they split off).
Since even gene spliced organisms have a "parent" living organism from which they split off, gene-splicing does not make this false.
And when the day comes when we can create a "living organism" from scratch, we simply need to add the qualifier "that were not created from scratch by man" to the theory for it to remain a perfectly valid theory...
That would depend on the colour of the feathers, wouldn't it?.
If you're talking about the atomic-explosion drive, that was a *real* idea, called "Project Orion", and I would argue that at least bean-driven flatulence could be considered a worse propulsion idea...
Basically, you heard wrong. Yes, we are going into an ice age, but not for at least 10,000-20,000 years.
And while some plants grow faster/better at higher CO2 levels, the plants that profit most are actually called "weeds", even those crops that grow faster apparently end up bigger but with fewer nutrients (so more, but less nutricious).
And in most situations, CO2 is not the limiting factor in crop growth, things like water and fertilizer tend to be what determines how fast and how big plants grow.
No, no-one in the 100 year history of climate research or the 150 years of geology research has done this...
Sorry if that comes across as arrogant, but this has been done, and is included in the science underpinning the current state of knowledge of Climate Change.
Many sources for this exist, fundamental questions like these were answered decades ago.
From Wikipedia (which itself references the scientific sources): "It is estimated that volcanoes release about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. This is about a factor of 1000 smaller than the sum of the other natural sources and about factor of about 100 smaller than the sources from human activity."
And how would you propose to compare "solar heating" to "emissions"? They are two entirely different things.
Your question feels like two favorite "denialist" talking points, the "volcano's emit more than humanity ever could" lie and the "It's the sun's activity causing the warming" lie - the first is shown through decades old research to be factually incorrect and the second is very strongly suggested to be incorrect by the two observations that (a) the sun's activity has been essentially stable for the last half-century, except for the known and quantified 11-year cycle and that (b) the stratosphere has cooled, which is an effect predicted and expected with increased greenhouse effect and essentially the opposite of what we would expect if additional "solar heating" was occuring.
The publications were published, the "heretical papers" were published. So your claim fails at the first hurdle.
The amount of ignorance in your (short) post is astounding:
(1) the IPCC does not *do research*, the take the research done and presented in peer-reviewed journals, and make a report based on that. Peer review is very important, which is why it is the basis of the IPCC reports. That some non-peer reviewed entries got into one of the reports of the IPCC is unfortunate and should not have happened, but the way you try to present the situation just shows an astounding ignorance of what the IPCC is and what it reports.
(2) There have not been "many names who quit IPCC" - there have been a few, when you bring together thousands of people to work on reports over a period of twenty years, it would be supremely astonishing if this did not occasionaly happen. And those that did quit, did not quit because of "this very issue" because "this very issue" just does not exist.
So, basically, you are arguing from a position that even a tiny tiny bit of on-line research would show to be wrong...
But as is so often said, please don't let facts get in the way of a good rant...
2. The hard empirical fact is that atmospheric CO2 has risen from ~280 ppm to over 370ppm. But there is no link between rising CO2 and temperature rise except in the reverse sense: temperature rises and then 800-1000 years later, CO2 rises in delayed response.
*sigh* - this is what is wrong with the whole "debate" - This statement is essentially a lie based on a truth, and it takes about half a page of explanation to explain why this is, but it takes only a few seconds to repeat the lie somewhere else.
I'll attempt to use less than a page:
(1) Yes, during the climate changes caused by Milankovitch cycles, CO2-levels trail the start of temperature rise by 800 years, the reason being that CO2 is not the cause of these climate changes, the shape of the earth's orbit is the cause. However, there is a feedback loop which kicks in as temperatures rise, which causes the ocean to exhale CO2. This CO2 then causes further warming, increasing the total warming considerably beyond what would be expected if the only effect where the orbit changes themselves.
So the "trailing" of CO2 in these cases in no way disproves CO2 as a possible causal agent in climate change...
(2) On the other hand, there have been warming events in the past that cannot be explained by Milankovitch-cycles, and there the CO2-rise (possibly due to volcanic activity on a massive scale) appears to be the causal agent, and does not trail the temperature change.
So basically, if something else triggers the climate change, CO2 trails because it is a long-term feedback, if CO2 triggers the climate change, it does not trail.
Since no scientist claims that only CO2 can cause climate change, there is no problem except that "deniers" use the (1) situation to falsely claim that the (2) situation is false.
Way to miss the point, mpe. I'm not saying the situation with the icecaps is identical to the situation with earthquakes, I'm saying the situation is similar.
The greenhouse effect was predicted on scientific basis in the 1820's (see Fourier), continental drift only became an accepted theory half a century ago and is the main mechanism required for understanding the causes of earthquakes, so claiming that the scientific study of earthquakes predates that of climate change is simply wrong.
And Methane may be a more powerful greenhouse gas, it's also present only in far far lower concentrations and has a very much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere. Given these factors, our current Methane production is a smaller problem than our CO2 production, so it makes perfect sense to concentrate on CO2 production (without ignoring other factors, it's possible for humanity to work on several issues in parallel, isn't it?)
And did you "forget" that of the two cases of suggested conspiracy, in the first case the paper discussed was such a travesty against real science half the board of editors of the "peer reviewed publication" resigned in protest, with plenty of evidence that this did not happen after any pressure from the CRU people and that in the second case, the "conspiracy" actually failed to blacklist the publications, since they were actually included in the report being discussed?
So even if there was a conspiracy, it must have been a pretty weak one, failing at getting the desired results?
Or is that too inconvenient a truth for you?
In science, everything is "data", "hypothesis" or "theory", and models are the mechanism scientists use to link "data" and "theory" - this is as true for Climate Science as it is for Physics or Chemistry.
The problem with the icecaps is, at least in part, one of chaos - it can be compared to knowing with 99% certainty that an earthquake will occur near San Francisco in the next few hundred years, but not being able to tell you at what date & time it will occur.
The problem is that in the climate debate, some people then pretend that, because we cannot predict the exact date & time of the earthquake, we know nothing about earthquakes and we are wrong in predicting that the earthquake will occur.
The Earth's climate is indeed a complex, nonlinear system, but it is not entirely without constraints, many of those constraints have been figured out, often from the basic physics. You may not "think" that people are clever enough to understand it, but there are some *very* clever people working on this.
This is also why no serious climate scientist is claiming that in 2100 the average temperature will have gone up 2.7548C, what they are claiming is that, given a few assumptions on the evolution of the rise in CO2, the most likely result in 2100 will be a rise in average temperature of between 2C and 4.5C
Further, the uncertainty is much bigger on the high end than on the low end. We are virtually certain that, unless significant reductions in CO2-output are realised, the rise will be no smaller than 2C, and the most likely figure looks to be 2.5C-3.5C.
The science has come far enough that the biggest uncertainty left isn't in the science, but in the human factor, which is the most important bit that we cannot integrate into physical models.
And to give even more food for thought: the temperatures during an ice age are estimated to have been, on average, about 5C lower than today. So while 2C may seem like a small amount, realise that a 5C drop in average temperature caused the ice-caps to cover most of Canada & Western Europe, and sea levels to drop by almost 100 meters.
All right, I'll gladly acknowledge that data sometimes surprises.
It's just that some of your "examples" come straight from the "deniers handbook" and are simply incorrect as examples. I keep seeing them repeated a gazillion times, long after they've been thoroughly debunked, is it surprising that that leads to prickly responses?
Repeating incorrect statements is bad science, responding to them by "blasting them to smithereens" may be bad attitude, but certainly cannot be considered "bad science"?
In recent years, we have actually been surprised regularly, unfortunately this was rarely in the direction of slowing global warming. Did you know that scientists even as recently as 5 years ago, scientists were expecting a gradually increasing melting of the Greenland icecap, but what we are actually seeing now is that this melting is increasing far far more rapidly? Glaciers running out to sea at 3 km/year in 1995 have now accelerated to 12km/year.
Did you also know that the sea-ice conditions seen in 2007 were expected to occur no sooner than 2020 according to projections from only a few years earlier, and that, despite claims of "recovery" in 2008 & 2009 by deniers, the reality is that in both these years, the sea-ice conditions were quite close to the record-breaking year 2007, and multi-year ice, which was the "bedrock" of the northern polar cap, has all but disappeared.
So yes, surprises do happen, unfortunately, the surprises do not point towards less global warming than expected.
I can't respond to all your "claims", since you don't reference even one of those "million" people, but:
- We have direct temperature measurements going back about 150-200 years, to go further back, we use a huge number of "temperature proxies", not just tree rings, but sedimentation data, ice-core data, pollen data, etc, etc - Geologic time has very little to do with this, we *know* climate has varied in the past, for many reasons and over many timescales, but that in no way "proves" that we are not the cause of the current changes - does the fact that it has rained naturally in the past make it completely impossible for somebody pissing from his roof to piss on your head?
- I don't fully understand what you mean by the "gulf stream" quip, nobody claims we know everything, but I'm pretty sure the scientists know way way more about it than you.
- Measuring the amount of ice in the arctic is not easy, but we have been doing it quite accurately for at least 30 years (turns out the US Military was doing the measuring, but didn't share the data with scientists for a long time) - and we know enough to say that in those 30 years, and particularly in the last few years, the ice has been decreasing in ways that we are quite sure have not ever occured in historical times.
- The most recent data is *not* saying global warming has temporarily halted, that's a canard the "deniers" are spreading (the idea is that repeating a lie often enough makes it appear true). Just this point alone shows you are getting your information from very very biased sources.
And on the idiotic reference to manifold/string theories : if one of those theories had been making predictions for 150-odd years, predictions which turn out to fit the data very very well, and the other side was just shouting "blah blah I can't hear you" all the time, then they would be very much right in telling them to 'shut up'.
When you can come up with a decent, evidence-supported argument, nobody will tell you to shut op, when you come with vague FUD and thoroughly debunked idiocies, shutting up probably should probably be considered the smart option.
Maybe you don't realise, but the price of "gas" is factored in in pretty much everything else you buy... That video game, how do you reckon it's transported to the store? That dinner, how do you think its ingredients are harvested, and possible, with what it is cooked?
Price of oil/gas rises --> price of all manufactured goods & services rises --> cost of living rises... This effect is far, far bigger than the "very small part of your recurring bills" that is you directly buying gas...
Ah, there the answer is pretty simple: Climate is the running average over 30 years. Questioning climate models is probably only reasonable if an inverse trend continues for several decades. In fact, Climate Models *predict* that we should quite regularly expect a 10-year decline in temperature to happen, only it will happen less often than the 10-year temperature increases, and over 30 years and more, the trend is predicted to be upwards.
Which is one of the reasons why the people screaming "negative trends" after the past 10 years of relative stability (note: there has *not* even been a negative trend, average temperatures have plateaud a bit, but at a level that is quite a lot above the long term average for the preceding 30 years).
That "stability" could go on for years more without it actually meaning the predictions are wrong (and before anyone says "how convenient" - I'm sorry you don't like the way science, modelling and statistics work, but that's *your* problem, not reality's)...
The IPCC does *not* fund most climate research, what you are saying is false...
It's like saying the International Astronomical Union "funds" astronomy research... it doesn't, it's an assembly of scientists working around a subject.
The IPCC is an International Panel of Climate Researchers, they take the results of climate research and turn it into general reports on the state of the science.
The funding into Climate Research is provided by countries and other organisations such as the EU.
The IPCC is the result of that research funding, not the cause...
And from your rather idiotic outburst, it's also quite clear that you do not believe reality should influence your political convictions and launch into a tirade which has *nothing* to do with my simple statement that what you claimed is untrue.
So, basically, since the claim that the "IPPC is the primary sponsor of all AGW research" is a *lie*, can we just ignore everything else you say about this subject?
I just bought a second hand portable that can do all that, and I bought it for 150...