UN 95% certain that climate change is caused by humans

[Night Strike]

Isn't it amazing how all of those peer-reviewed journals are reviewed by people who are dead-set on pushing man-made global warming and government control so that they can reject as many dissenting articles as possible, thereby pushing those dissenting articles into "unapproved" publications that they can denounce as not respectable?

[Symmetry]

Isn't it amazing how all of those peer-reviewed journals are reviewed by people who are dead-set on pushing man-made global warming and government control so that they can reject as many dissenting articles as possible, thereby pushing those dissenting articles into "unapproved" publications that they can denounce as not respectable?

Or as sane people call those people- "rational scientists". Peer review is kind of important in science and academics in general.

[Metsfanmax]

Isn't it amazing how all of those peer-reviewed journals are reviewed by people who are dead-set on pushing man-made global warming and government control so that they can reject as many dissenting articles as possible, thereby pushing those dissenting articles into "unapproved" publications that they can denounce as not respectable?

They don't reject articles that are inherently "dissenting" -- they reject articles with poor science. If they all rejected anything with dissent, how could Powell's earlier review have found 24 (out of 13,000) that disagree with the consensus? I challenge you to take a look through the articles that are published. You'll find many instances of dissent and disagreement when it comes to particular instances of physics or chemistry of the atmosphere and the Sun. If you think that there's a single uniform message pervading through the climate science literature, you clearly haven't read any of it.

I want to emphasize again the importance of Plait's astronomy example. A bunch of astronomers found that there's literally an anti-gravity force out there in the universe, and within a decade of publishing virtually everyone believed it. That's what happens when your data is right. And that's how science works. If there was definitive evidence against the hypothesis, it would be running rampant through the scientific community, because most scientists have huge egos and would love to be the ones that disproved the consensus. They'd win a Nobel. What incentive does any legitimate climate scientist have to 'keep quiet' when all they have to do is publish the evidence and they'd become instantly famous?

[Neoteny]

Let's be honest: the alternative of being an industry and media shill is much more lucrative, and politically effective, than publishing jargon in a journal almost nobody reads, and you get a free pass on demonstrating your science is sound. Wave your meteorology degree around and make sarcastic comments about the weather and just watch the money roll in from the ignorant hicks.

[_sabotage_]

How many of those journals have a climate change bias? The BBC decided in the 90s to publish only the global warming perspective. Universities have nothing to gain by being anti-global warming and many have openly stated their stance. My mother (my adoptive mother/biological aunt) has held many professorships at many universities and tenure is often granted by how many peer-reviewed studies she wrote while at a university and the total.

Let me go back a second and examine who will be in a position to write these peer-reviewed articles.

First year Sustainability: 300-400
2nd year: 150-200
3rd year 90-120
4th year: 60-80
Post Grad: 25 = 8 government, 8 industry, 9 education.

And what will these few experts know? Not much about the evidence behind man-made climate change, because although they spent 50% of their time discussing it and linking it to various other fields of research, they didn't spend much time proving it. We saw a graph covering hundreds of thousands of years with co2 and temperature correlating. We spent a minute on it and then went on to talk about the habitability of wetlands and their fragility. So they don't actually know much about the main question, so what do they know? They know that we can't maintain a high population, we can't save energy in any form and soon the Asians are going to cause a major crisis, we can't cut down on pollution, and some sub climate change themes. And when they are trying to get tenure, they'll choose one of the above topics as they are now experts on them and we will get another peer-reviewed article about climate change that merely skirts the issue and keeps the money flowing.

What about the other 375 students? In the first year, deniers and those interested in a more practical approach dropped the course. In the second, those who were taking it for a background to enter architecture, urban planning, etc moved to those programs, and some dropped out. The 80 grads took positions not really doing anything but adding cost to government and industry with some minor savings in return. They will have enough broad vague knowledge to insist that some eco things are added to comply with guidelines or get them into the better tier on the carbon market, but not really understand how to cut carbon or even believe it is possible.

When I was making the decision to come back to Canada after being in Asia since 1995, I had a job offer in India from one of the largest commodities merchants in the world. He has factories, warehouses, office buildings, staff housing on 6 continents and I had known him well since 1997. Instead, I chose clean air for my son and a break from business for myself as I had just sold my company.

After my time and money spent on Dal, what had I learned to add value to his business? Perhaps encourage a segment of fairtrade purchasing and maybe decrease his energy use by a few points. Help to the community and environment would be minimal. Based on what I have studied independently, I could provide him with improved facilities, nearly eliminate operating cost, reduce waste, improve the health of his employees, improve the living conditions of the employees, get him many green certifications all while saving him money. I could create green communities around his factories by building the new ones based on practical, simple and cheap existing methods. The methods which Dal routinely dismissed or spent more time knocking down the strawman they painted out of a real solution. Other businesses will follow suit, not because of co2 causing global warming, because it is better for the company cost wise. And that is what I am going to do.

But if the people of India have the ability to live a first world lifestyle at 20% of US per capita energy, feed themselves organically (permaculture has already taken off there) and eliminate emissions nearly entirely as their thorium program has them on track to do, then how much of that will enjoy peer-reviewed articles in journals dedicated to fostering a world based on an inability to feed and provide adequate energy without polluting ourselves to death? Probably as much time as they spent introducing them at the set off Dal lectures, none.

I'm not getting down on Dal; the teachers have all lost their pensions, they are going to sell of school grounds to raise funds, they have privatized all associated businesses, they have raised tuition and have begged the government for additional funding after all the funding they are getting, increased foreign enrollment and then are sending students into a marketplace that says, hey didn't you hear, the middle class is dying? maybe you should go to trade school...
I am not getting down on the professors who teach sustainability either. It must be scary knowing that there are several technologies which are easy to implement and whose widespread use would turn climate change professors into the New Kids on the Block of the science world.

I'm down on the guys who have been dumping millions of kgs of beryllium and aluminum across the skies of India for more than a decade. This is openly admitted and is the top's solution to combat climate change. It inadvertently makes organics impossible, requiring a special defence mechanism which is genetically engineered into plants by Monsanto. OK, so we know it devastates our landscape along the fashion of Idiocracy, what else has the experiment taught us? Not much since the guys who conducted it have kept the results to themselves, with the heads of our major governing organizations saying, the results have a wide range of negative effects, of which we do not have to study since it is the only available solution and needs to be widely and quickly implemented on a full-scale. Is there any truth to this outline suggested by the head of the scientific governing body in the US?

Perhaps, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have not committed suicide due to trial geoengineering raining nano particles onto their crops forcing them onto Monsanto seeds. Maybe the decade long trial had nothing to do with it. Maybe the stated goal of climate scientist, to bring down the world's population, isn't being actively achieved. Perhaps I should go read some peer-reviewed articles published in some mainstream journals and find out. But perhaps he is telling the truth and these programs are in place and those are the negative wide-scale side effects that don't require study.

[Metsfanmax]

How many of those journals have a climate change bias? The BBC decided in the 90s to publish only the global warming perspective. Universities have nothing to gain by being anti-global warming and many have openly stated their stance. My mother (my adoptive mother/biological aunt) has held many professorships at many universities and tenure is often granted by how many peer-reviewed studies she wrote while at a university and the total.

I will, again, repeat it: if you have the evidence that disproves anthropogenic global warming, you would be instantly famous. Anybody with that evidence would have a very strong motivation for publishing said evidence.

[Lootifer]

How many of those journals have a climate change bias? The BBC decided in the 90s to publish only the global warming perspective. Universities have nothing to gain by being anti-global warming and many have openly stated their stance. My mother (my adoptive mother/biological aunt) has held many professorships at many universities and tenure is often granted by how many peer-reviewed studies she wrote while at a university and the total.

I will, again, repeat it: if you have the evidence that disproves anthropogenic global warming, you would be instantly famous. Anybody with that evidence would have a very strong motivation for publishing said evidence.

And any scientist that values a long and successful career will also instantly peer-review it and accept it.

If the evidence is there someone will find it. Sure they may have to fight against the mainstream and put up with criticism, but if the science is solid it will get accepted.

There is no conspiracy here. The academic population is diverse enough (even considering liberal bias - a liberal bias doesnt instantly mean you refuse to accept solid arguments) to ensure that even crazy town ideas get traction if they make an acceptable argument (global warming is a hoax becuase all academics are liberals is, unfortately, not an acceptable argument).

[_sabotage_]

I do have glaring evidence that climate change is not man-made:

Precedent: all climate change until today has been natural. All the graphs of temp over time are reflecting natural climate change but are being used to support man-made climate change;
Misuse of evidence: the evidence which these temp and CO2 over time graphs are all showing the same thing, that temp and CO2 correlate but one crowd (yours) neglects to quantify this correlation, that temp precedes CO2 and merely insist that there is correlation- global warming - let's poison the planet.
Neglect: the melting of other planets ice caps which happened during the same period as ours.

The evidence exists and is pretty clear cut. Of course your homies ignore it as the astrologists of Galileo's time ignored the fact that all planetary bodies are round and every other planet was circling the sun when they proposed a geocentric universe.

Not only do you ignore it as well in joining camps, you ignore the real destruction that is being conducted in the name of the thing you lead credence and vouch support for. You are part of whats called the bandwagon who knows not where it goes and who is at the wheel. Indeed, you probably will merrily point to the farmers in India and say, look global warming caused it! And you would be right, not real global warming in the environment, but political and academic global warming that brought about unnecessary cures for fabricated problems.

[Lootifer]

I do have glaring evidence that climate change is not man-made:

Precedent: all climate change until today has been natural. All the graphs of temp over time are reflecting natural climate change but are being used to support man-made climate change;
Misuse of evidence: the evidence which these temp and CO2 over time graphs are all showing the same thing, that temp and CO2 correlate but one crowd (yours) neglects to quantify this correlation, that temp precedes CO2 and merely insist that there is correlation- global warming - let's poison the planet.
Neglect: the melting of other planets ice caps which happened during the same period as ours.

The evidence exists and is pretty clear cut. Of course your homies ignore it as the astrologists of Galileo's time ignored the fact that all planetary bodies are round and every other planet was circling the sun when they proposed a geocentric universe.

Not only do you ignore it as well in joining camps, you ignore the real destruction that is being conducted in the name of the thing you lead credence and vouch support for. You are part of whats called the bandwagon who knows not where it goes and who is at the wheel. Indeed, you probably will merrily point to the farmers in India and say, look global warming caused it! And you would be right, not real global warming in the environment, but political and academic global warming that brought about unnecessary cures for fabricated problems.

Right so by your contention we should have seen a spike in temperature in, say, 950 AD?



Further image:

Spoiler

Relevant information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok,_Antarctica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_P ... Antarctica

Or is all this ice core science incorrect/a conspiracy too?

[Metsfanmax]

I do have glaring evidence that climate change is not man-made:

Precedent: all climate change until today has been natural. All the graphs of temp over time are reflecting natural climate change but are being used to support man-made climate change;
Misuse of evidence: the evidence which these temp and CO2 over time graphs are all showing the same thing, that temp and CO2 correlate but one crowd (yours) neglects to quantify this correlation, that temp precedes CO2 and merely insist that there is correlation- global warming - let's poison the planet.
Neglect: the melting of other planets ice caps which happened during the same period as ours.

The evidence exists and is pretty clear cut. Of course your homies ignore it as the astrologists of Galileo's time ignored the fact that all planetary bodies are round and every other planet was circling the sun when they proposed a geocentric universe.

Here's how I am going to prove that we are not ignoring it: by responding to it. Temperature increases generally precede carbon dioxide increases in the ice core record, by a few hundred years. The initial temperature increase could have been caused by, say, variable amounts of solar radiation incident on the Earth due to periodic changes in its orbit; then, this would cause release of carbon dioxide from the oceans as they warmed, which would begin a feedback loop that sharply warmed the planet. In both the 'natural' and 'man-made' scenarios, then, carbon dioxide increases are the dominant cause of the global warming.

This was predicted decades ago. So it's not that people are ignoring your argument; it's just wrong.

[thegreekdog]

Let's be honest: the alternative of being an industry and media shill is much more lucrative, and politically effective, than publishing jargon in a journal almost nobody reads, and you get a free pass on demonstrating your science is sound. Wave your meteorology degree around and make sarcastic comments about the weather and just watch the money roll in from the ignorant hicks.

This is one of the things that turned me off to climate change deniers (and ultimately one of the things that turned me off to conservative talk radio). There is a very giant potential monetary incentive to come up with a viable alternative to man-made climate change. Since those people aren't out there, such an alternative must not exist.

[_sabotage_]

Mets,

It must be hard to be a Mets fan, with so little to celebrate.

1. Variable amounts of solar incidence: a few pages back, you told PS that solar incidence is a constant and therefore not a factor in climate change, but now it's a variable. Math is a rather rigid bedfellow though. The point you failed to address, the melting caps on other planets, also suggests that variable solar incidence is the factor in global warming. So which is it? Is it variable and has its variability been the factor and not CO2 or is it constant and your above car has no engine? If it's constant the beginning of your theory fails, you lack the trigger to start your "feedback loop" and if it is variable, the end fails, it is variable solar incidence which is the cause to global warming.

2. A few hundred years. It's interesting how the 5% are so ridiculed and therefore worth ignoring, but when a single study comes out with a figure of 300 years for this "feedback loop" to be triggered, the "mainstream", "well-published" reports all showing roughly 800-1000 years are then forgotten for the exception. So you've changed stance quite a bit from the sun as a constant to it has strong increases in solar incidence over hundreds to a thousand years which trigger a massively complex growth, melting, currents, etc transformation that then spirals off on its own because it has done it's job and let carbon take over.

To summarize, in your theory, solar incidence is a constant which varies according to the needs of your theory. When it does vary, it has varied only enough to trigger the evil feedback loop but is in no ways completely responsible, that is all carbon dioxide. Caps melting on other planets/moons at the same time as ours has no relation to solar incidence at this time, as we are worried about CO2 and not solar incidence.

Lootifer,

I enjoyed the graphs. Let's begin with the second. It would seem, from your cohorts explanation that a stronger than average solar incidence over an unspecified period of time began a feedback loop with carbon causing a rise in temperature within several centuries. But the graph's steep inclines suggest a rapid increase followed by a slow dissipation, similar to accelerating in a car and then easing back to the speed limit. But the acceleration is down with energy and not a magical feedback loop. Again, if we look to the graph, we would see that we should be in for a long cold 80,000 years or so as the feedback loop mysteriously dies down, or is the solar incidence the trigger here too? But a more realistic way of looking at it is that the sun does trigger the cycle, just as the energy from your fuel triggers the acceleration and that it is not the carbon feedback loop which mysteriously falters, but the variable sun varying in a rather periodic frequency.

As for the tippy bit at the end which has y'all in a hubbub. It proves that carbon dioxide levels are high. But it's like Job with Alzheimers getting cold porridge and saying its the worst day of his life. Where is the data from before then? From like yesterday in geological time? And here you come into a whole series of problems. If there is no data from prior to then, ie no ice older than that age, then it means yesterday was hot and wet and that we don't know shit. Regardless if temperature followed CO2 but if they correlate at all then at a period when there were no ice caps, 800,000 years ago, carbon must have been at a higher level than now when there are ice caps. Since humans are at least 2 million years old, we survived through times of much higher carbon dioxide levels than we are facing. But back to geologically time, I would expect the oldest ice caps to still have traces of the dwindling down of this last non capped era. Your graph does start at a high point so it could be taken to reflect this, ice being formed after a period of high solar incidence and trapping the increased carbon dioxide.

And upwards bound temperature would peak several hundred years before the natural carbon cycle, which on your graph is about year 0, I would then expect it to level off and then begin to decline over 80,000 years or so. But then again, although much useful information can be gained from them, it's like asking a doctor to look at three heart beats and diagnose an unknown patient. What we do know is that carbon dioxide levels do increase several hundred years after the planet warms but that its presence doesn't then become a perpetual motion machine in the atmosphere because those temperatures rapidly decline, meaning not only would the solar incidence have to oscillate but oscillate at extremes that would defy our ability to exist through it. If CO2 were anywhere near as important as solar incidence then necessary variation in solar radiation would be so great to create the shift in momentum to kick start the feedback loop and again be so extreme to shut it off that certainly everything would die. But whatever, don't let that stop you.

The truth is the earth's atmosphere does act like a blanket which soaks up the sun's heat, but don't let it fool you, it isn't as insulating as advertised. And nanoparticles may reflect 1% of solar incidence for a day, but they build up on the land in lethal doses. To reflect even a month's incidence, you will have to let your community be poisoned for 8 years. Is that something worth killing organics, our bees, and ourselves for?

[Metsfanmax]

1. Variable amounts of solar incidence: a few pages back, you told PS that solar incidence is a constant and therefore not a factor in climate change, but now it's a variable.

I did not say that incident solar radiation is constant. It's actually not. I said that the (relatively small) variability of this solar radiation, on timescales of years to decades, has been shown not to have a serious climate forcing effect.

Math is a rather rigid bedfellow though. The point you failed to address, the melting caps on other planets, also suggests that variable solar incidence is the factor in global warming.

I failed to address it because you provided no evidence of such a claim (nor would it make any sense, because other planets move on completely different orbits from the Earth).

So which is it? Is it variable and has its variability been the factor and not CO2 or is it constant and your above car has no engine? If it's constant the beginning of your theory fails, you lack the trigger to start your "feedback loop" and if it is variable, the end fails, it is variable solar incidence which is the cause to global warming.

The variability in question, that likely had a significant role in the interglacial periods, relates to the motion of the Earth, not variability of the Sun. The Earth undergoes a periodicity reaching into the tens of thousands of years as a result of the precession of the Earth's rotation axis (the same reason why Polaris hasn't always been the North Star), as well as a slight rotation of its orbit. This is a significantly larger effect than the year-to-year variability of the Sun's output now. So you do see variability of incident solar irradiance having an effect on climate over long time scales because the variability is larger.

These are all known as Milankovitch cycles, if you'd like to read more.

If you are going to criticize my earlier posts, please actually go back and read them carefully first. More broadly, I addressed your earlier point that scientists are "ignoring" this. No, they're not ignoring it; they've addressed the concern and moved on. If you think that you can play semantical word games in an effort to disprove decades of climate science, be my guest, but I'm not going to participate. If thousands of climate scientists were engaged in a conspiracy to hide and falsify evidence, they wouldn't do it in such a way that someone with only a high school chemistry course under their belt could figure it out.

[Lootifer]

Lootifer,

I enjoyed the graphs. Let's begin with the second. It would seem, from your cohorts explanation that a stronger than average solar incidence over an unspecified period of time began a feedback loop with carbon causing a rise in temperature within several centuries. But the graph's steep inclines suggest a rapid increase followed by a slow dissipation, similar to accelerating in a car and then easing back to the speed limit. But the acceleration is down with energy and not a magical feedback loop. Again, if we look to the graph, we would see that we should be in for a long cold 80,000 years or so as the feedback loop mysteriously dies down, or is the solar incidence the trigger here too? But a more realistic way of looking at it is that the sun does trigger the cycle, just as the energy from your fuel triggers the acceleration and that it is not the carbon feedback loop which mysteriously falters, but the variable sun varying in a rather periodic frequency.

As for the tippy bit at the end which has y'all in a hubbub. It proves that carbon dioxide levels are high. But it's like Job with Alzheimers getting cold porridge and saying its the worst day of his life. Where is the data from before then? From like yesterday in geological time? And here you come into a whole series of problems. If there is no data from prior to then, ie no ice older than that age, then it means yesterday was hot and wet and that we don't know shit. Regardless if temperature followed CO2 but if they correlate at all then at a period when there were no ice caps, 800,000 years ago, carbon must have been at a higher level than now when there are ice caps. Since humans are at least 2 million years old, we survived through times of much higher carbon dioxide levels than we are facing. But back to geologically time, I would expect the oldest ice caps to still have traces of the dwindling down of this last non capped era. Your graph does start at a high point so it could be taken to reflect this, ice being formed after a period of high solar incidence and trapping the increased carbon dioxide.

And upwards bound temperature would peak several hundred years before the natural carbon cycle, which on your graph is about year 0, I would then expect it to level off and then begin to decline over 80,000 years or so. But then again, although much useful information can be gained from them, it's like asking a doctor to look at three heart beats and diagnose an unknown patient. What we do know is that carbon dioxide levels do increase several hundred years after the planet warms but that its presence doesn't then become a perpetual motion machine in the atmosphere because those temperatures rapidly decline, meaning not only would the solar incidence have to oscillate but oscillate at extremes that would defy our ability to exist through it. If CO2 were anywhere near as important as solar incidence then necessary variation in solar radiation would be so great to create the shift in momentum to kick start the feedback loop and again be so extreme to shut it off that certainly everything would die. But whatever, don't let that stop you.

The truth is the earth's atmosphere does act like a blanket which soaks up the sun's heat, but don't let it fool you, it isn't as insulating as advertised. And nanoparticles may reflect 1% of solar incidence for a day, but they build up on the land in lethal doses. To reflect even a month's incidence, you will have to let your community be poisoned for 8 years. Is that something worth killing organics, our bees, and ourselves for?

Ah I get your argument now. So you are contending that CO2 is rather meaningless, and very much an effect rather than a cause.

Also when did the ice caps melt completely?

Im sorry if you have already posted the material, but do you have some reading material I can sink my teeth into? Preferably from a neutral source, but I understand those are very hard to come by in this area.

[Lootifer]

@ Mets: Do the climate researchers account for the Milankovitch cycles?

[Metsfanmax]

@ Mets: Do the climate researchers account for the Milankovitch cycles?

They're more or less the leading explanation for much of the long-timescale variation in glaciation on recent geological timescales (i.e. we probably have Ice Ages because of them). Probably a full explanation has to take tectonic activity and the effects of CO2 into account, but these orbital changes do have very large effects.

[Neoteny]

BTW sabotage,

I personally don't have any issue with a lot of what you are saying: pollution, sustainability at the individual, national, and international levels, responsibility and accountability are all things that we do not focus enough on. Keep fighting that fight, man.

But, seriously, the facts that carbon is a greenhouse gas, and that we are very seriously disrupting the carbon cycle are very basic ones, and easily demonstrated. Like, really easy. While short-sighted scientists are a problem, the larger problem is a shortsighted public, which produces short-sighted politicians and short-sighted business-owners. Scientists have to take some of the blame for that, but implementing sustainability measures will not be a priority (since there will likely be an up front cost, and apparently people only think with their wallets [praise our god, Capitalism] these days), until we can demonstrate the need. I'd rather do that with established facts, since I feel it's pretty effective, but I don't think you'll find many people disagreeing that we need to focus on many of these issues.

[_sabotage_]

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law

The earth's atmosphere has a emissivity of 0.83, providing a 33k increase in the earth's temperature. Of this .83 e, 0.66 is created by water vapor in the sky. All other gases combine to give the remaining .17 e. Of all the other gases, CO2 represents about 0.04% of other atmospheric gases. It is less conductive than nitrogen and oxygen, about the same as argon. So let's see what that means, all atmospheric gases make up .017 of e, CO2 is 33% less conductive than N or O and composes 0.04% of the atmosphere, therefore: 0.04% x 1.33= 0.053% of .17 e= .00009 e or roughly a 0.003 k difference. Of course that is the total carbon present and if what climate scientists are saying, ie that a 25% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere will generate a massive climate change, it must not be related to emissivity of carbon since it would only create a 0.00075k temperature difference.

And then you get into entropy. And this 0.04% of the atmosphere which does have a low conductivity is crashed together against vastly more abundant particles who are ready to snatch up any energy they can and they have the inherent properties to do so. But let's set aside a thermodynamic law and say that CO2's specific density and conductivity could form a sealed layer that somehow let's solar incidence in but not out. We then create heat pumps and are forced back to the laws of thermodynamics. Nature has a great way of creating entropy, it mixes things together. There are implosions occurring below us, in the water around us and especially in the unbound particles of the atmosphere. Just as water vapor is responsible for .66 of our .83 e value, it is the force behind our most impressive displays of thermodynamic gradients naturally forming vortex systems which happen to be the most efficient mixers known to man. The heat pumps create useful energy that then re balances the system.

Ah you say, ah. Perhaps some added layering of CO2 at slightly adjusted temperatures creates increased storms, global warming, run for the hills! Unfortunately where water composed 80% of the atmospheric emissivity and CO2 represented 0.0001%, it will be even more responsible for the strength of our storms or force generated by layered temperature gradients. Coal power plants don't burn coal and run generators, they burn coal to heat water and turn the generators with the steam. For a simple reason, it can.

Water evaporation per year is 505,000km3 or 505 trillion metric tonnes of water vapor enters and exits our atmosphere annually. As compared to 18.4 billion metric tonnes of CO2. And here is where a long chain of predictions start to falter. CO2 contains about half the energy of water. I don't see how the strongest furnace available to man constantly heating the largest and best known heat sink can be overlooked for something which releases 1/8000 of the energy.

But this brings us back to the original problem as suggested by Mets, that fluctuating solar incidence as seen in the Milankovitch cycles support everything I have said and yet somehow have found their way into the climate scientists camp. In his theory, CO2 has some very special qualities that appear at some critical level to create a massive climate change and are triggered by increased solar incidence. Unfortunately, throughout these cycles, water would take a starring role and carbon would be scalping tickets. The better water performed the more tickets carbon could scalp and when water lost its heyday, carbon would be out of work and on the decline.

You can make all the chemical models you want to show that carbon changes the characteristics of the atmosphere; the atmosphere is not bound like iron and won't become steel if you add carbon. It is unbound and subject to the laws of thermodynamics for gases. Carbon has no special properties which make it a significant threat, unlike water, and is not present in remotely significant quantities to pose a threat, unlike a minor fluctuation in the sun. While the law that governs the ability to emit radiation is governed by an emissivity constant to the material, which for carbon to become a factor would need to be increased several thousand times, the same equation means that a slight increase in the suns temperature, or more correctly it's increased surface of emitting area would see an increase in temperature to the power of 4. Or, a single sun flare could do as much global warming as a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, but the effect would not be felt in the carbon cycle, it would be felt in the water cycle.

I would like to give a simple anecdotal comparison. You're in a forest, sun goes down and the temperature drops ten degrees. So of course you get mad and burn the forest down, which heats you up for a day. The next night the sun goes down, and the temperature drops 13 degrees and the windchill kicks in as well. You've just burnt you carbon storage sink in exchange for a quick heat and releasing the carbon to the fate of entropy. As long as you don't lose the ground cover which acts as a blackbody, the temperature won't drop much more, but if you lose the ground cover, you find yourself in a desert and nothing will regulate the temperature.

Carbon dioxide itself is not significant, but the pollutants surrounding the use of it, used in agriculture and in construction create a harmful environment leading to health issues and ability to survive on this planet. For example, biodiesel does not increase the level of pollutants in the atmosphere and several methods are available to generate it cheaply and without interfering with food production, ignored by climate change scientist who are afraid of global warming, and yet is a carbon neutral, non-polluting means of production. Thorium, 1kg produces the equivalent energy from burning 135,000,000 kg of coal, hempcrete provides an improved finished product while being carbon neutral.

It's not the carbon dioxide which is going to harm us, it is the assorted mix of pollutants which we throw willy nilly into our air, water and onto our land. It's postulating theory as fact in order to instigate a worldwide aerial bombing campaign which we have to be wary of.

[Metsfanmax]

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law

The earth's atmosphere has a emissivity of 0.83, providing a 33k increase in the earth's temperature. Of this .83 e, 0.66 is created by water vapor in the sky. All other gases combine to give the remaining .17 e. Of all the other gases, CO2 represents about 0.04% of other atmospheric gases. It is less conductive than nitrogen and oxygen, about the same as argon. So let's see what that means, all atmospheric gases make up .017 of e, CO2 is 33% less conductive than N or O and composes 0.04% of the atmosphere, therefore: 0.04% x 1.33= 0.053% of .17 e= .00009 e or roughly a 0.003 k difference. Of course that is the total carbon present and if what climate scientists are saying, ie that a 25% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere will generate a massive climate change, it must not be related to emissivity of carbon since it would only create a 0.00075k temperature difference.

There's an important difference between carbon dioxide and the other gases you mentioned (nitrogen, oxygen, and argon). The latter gases do not absorb in the infrared, whereas CO2 does so plentifully. Since most of the Sun's light arrives as visible light, but leaves the Earth as infrared, this is what is responsible for the greenhouse effect of water and carbon dioxide. So yes, that 400 parts-per-million can do an outsized job relative to its absolute concentration in the atmosphere, because the major constituents of the atmosphere play essentially no role in setting the emissivity. It is only fairly dilute gases such as carbon dioxide, water and methane (that happen to absorb well in the infrared) that determine the emissivity.

Note: (thermal) conductivity plays no role in this process. The emissivity is governed by the amount of radiation that is captured by the atmosphere on its way out to space. The physics of this process is that the CO2 (and water, methane, etc.) captures photons at infrared wavelengths that were emitted from the ground level. Conductivity is a completely different physical process, where atoms and molecules kinetically slam into each other and transfer energy. That is important in determining the characteristics and structure of the atmosphere, but it's not related to the greenhouse effect. So your calculations don't really go anywhere. And you won't be able to understand the physics of the atmosphere if you don't stop thinking about it as a solid wall that heat is trying to conduct through. That's just not how radiation works.

But this brings us back to the original problem as suggested by Mets, that fluctuating solar incidence as seen in the Milankovitch cycles support everything I have said and yet somehow have found their way into the climate scientists camp.

"Found their way into the climate scientists camp?" Climate scientists have understood these cycles as the dominant driver of ice ages and interglacial periods for decades. These cycles take place over tens of thousands of years though, as Earth's orientation and orbit change, so they can't explain the rapid upward trend that we presently observe.

In his theory, CO2 has some very special qualities that appear at some critical level to create a massive climate change and are triggered by increased solar incidence. Unfortunately, throughout these cycles, water would take a starring role and carbon would be scalping tickets. The better water performed the more tickets carbon could scalp and when water lost its heyday, carbon would be out of work and on the decline.

You are right that the importance of water should not be forgotten. However, there's a key difference between CO2 and water, which makes all the difference. Water lives a very short time in the atmosphere, and so there is generally always an equilibrium between the concentration of water in the atmosphere and in the liquid state. If you were to suddenly take a large amount of ocean water and boil it into the atmosphere, that water would quickly go back into the liquid state, to match the available equilibrium (since the amount of water the atmosphere can hold is dependent on the temperature). So water cannot, by itself, force a temperature rise. On the other hand, if the temperature does rise (due to some external factor), the amount of water in the atmosphere increases, and therefore the greenhouse effect of water increases. This is a classic example of a positive feedback. So while CO2 and water are both important in explaining the observed temperature increases in previous interglacials, only CO2 can explain the actual cause of most of the warming. (This is the same reason you won't see water listed as a climate forcer in the IPCC reports, for example.)

[_sabotage_]

Unfortunately entropy takes care of the difference, any added heat trapped by carbon dioxide would be dissipated through the system through conductivity. It's interesting that you don't take this into account, ie you assume that each factor takes place in a vacuum to justify even a slightly significant contribution to global warming.

Well put all the ingredients in a vacuum and increase carbon by 0.01% in one and show a warming. It just won't happen.

[PLAYER57832]

Isn't it amazing how all of those peer-reviewed journals are reviewed by people who are dead-set on pushing man-made global warming and government control so that they can reject as many dissenting articles as possible, thereby pushing those dissenting articles into "unapproved" publications that they can denounce as not respectable?

These journals have gone out of their way to accept articles by dissenters, but rarely do the dissenters come up with real data. Claims don't mean data. A bunch of numbers don't mean accurate science data. AND,more importantly, even if the base data is correct, using faulty analysis turns conclusions into lies.

Just like the old joke "where is the most dangerous place to be?...bed, because more people die there" The missing part is the most important, namely cause.

A LOT of the supposed "disent" to science is like the above joke. It makes sense, ONLY if you con't really know the subject. The problem is science actually is complicated. Its much easier, to just believe some looney (or very smart, but misguided, even outright fraudulant) individual. that "knows"

[PLAYER57832]

Can you think of a major policy that has followed the science when it meant losing an economic incentive because it was better for the people?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_ ... ts_of_1990

Actually, i would add a ream of others... essentially ANY limit to pollution, fair labor standards, workplace safety standards, truth in advertising legislation, limits to ads druing kiddie programs....

most zoning laws, building standards, etc, etc, etc.

The truth is that most laws impinge upon someone, but were passed because they benefit a good deal of others. Certainly, some laws were political payback and such (bridge to nowhere,anyone? .. or better yet,the Trent Lott International airport".

AND, as much as some people are harmed, or will percieve themselves as harmed (even if htey really are not) by any legislation, others will find benefit.

[PLAYER57832]

I do have glaring evidence that climate change is not man-made:

Precedent: all climate change until today has been natural.

Prove this.

You make the very mistake you accuse sicentists of making... you find data,asn then assume you understand why it happened. Seeing pattterns is one thing. Proving why they happen requires testing. Much of that testing has not even been possible until very recently becuase the math and data are just so very, very, very complex. So, your statement that all climate change until today is natural is just wrong.

Also, remember, human beings have been around for quite some time. Our impact has changed, but to assume we have not been impacting oru world,including climate all along to some extent is a mistake.

One key and easy to understand example is fire. Fire very much does impact local climates.

[Metsfanmax]

Unfortunately entropy takes care of the difference, any added heat trapped by carbon dioxide would be dissipated through the system through conductivity.

Think about the emissivity this way. If there were no atmosphere at all, then the Earth's surface would absorb virtually all of the incident solar radiation, and re-radiate it as heat (in the infrared) back into space. This would establish an equilibrium with an emissivity of one. Now consider what happens if you add some greenhouse gases.



The greenhouse gases will absorb some of the outgoing heat (but they won't absorb any incoming solar radiation because it's the wrong wavelengths). They'll then re-radiate that in all directions. Some of it will go out into space, but some of it will go back down to Earth. This will increase the temperature of the Earth until a new equilibrium is established at the surface (this equilibrium is reached because hotter objects radiate more energy). This decrease in emissivity (which is closer to 0.6, not 0.8, when you take into account advanced effects like clouds) means that the Earth emits 40% less energy back into space than it would have without the atmosphere. That energy is trapped in, in a sense. This results in a warming effect.

The actual process by which that extra energy gets distributed throughout the Earth depends on a complicated interaction of heat transfer effects, including radiation, diffusion and conduction. But the only way for the energy to really leave the Earth is via radiation (since there's no air in space to transfer the heat to, via conduction), and the CO2 is blocking it from totally doing so.

[Lootifer]

Unfortunately entropy takes care of the difference, any added heat trapped by carbon dioxide would be dissipated through the system through conductivity. It's interesting that you don't take this into account, ie you assume that each factor takes place in a vacuum to justify even a slightly significant contribution to global warming.

Well put all the ingredients in a vacuum and increase carbon by 0.01% in one and show a warming. It just won't happen.

Quick question: whats your background in this area? do you have a degree in science/engineering or something? Just trying to get a feel for how deep your knowledge is, your posts strike me as one of two things: Good solid understanding of the science but poor communication skills, or, informal understanding of the science (i.e. not formmaly trained in the science at college or university).

Neither are neccessarily bad, its just easier to try and figure out your argument by having a little context.