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Do humans have an impact on global climate? Probably. Almost certainly, I would say. That's not the point. The point is that no one can answer this simple question -- how significant is that impact?

There's actually a second question no one can answer -- is that impact beneficial on the whole or negative on the whole -- but until the first question is answered the second is pretty meaningless.

What causes such immense merriment to open-minded people like Diploid and Viveka and Seuss and Zap and myself is how utterly earnest and absolutely convinced those who claim "the science is settled" are about how we must significantly impoverish ourselves today because maybe -- if the myriad computer models (none of which agree with one another) are correct -- half a century or so down the road the rich folks with expensive beachfront property might have to either build a seawall or move their houses back a hundred feet or so to keep their lawns from being burned by salt spray.

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Do humans have an impact on global climate? Probably. Almost certainly, I would say. That's not the point. The point is that no one can answer this simple question -- how significant is that impact?

There's actually a second question no one can answer -- is that impact beneficial on the whole or negative on the whole -- but until the first question is answered the second is pretty meaningless.

What causes such immense merriment to open-minded people like Diploid and Viveka and Seuss and Zap and myself is how utterly earnest and absolutely convinced those who claim "the science is settled" are about how we must significantly impoverish ourselves today because maybe -- if the myriad computer models (none of which agree with one another) are correct -- half a century or so down the road the rich folks with expensive beachfront property might have to either build a seawall or move their houses back a hundred feet or so to keep their lawns from being burned by salt spray.

I must point out again (though the Warmenists will again ignore it) that prior to 1880 the Earth's temperature changed many, many times by a lot more than a degree Fahrenheit in a lot less than 120 years. What mechanism was responsible for all those hundreds (or thousands or tens of thousands) of swings of more than a degree? It sure as shit wasn't human activity. Even the Warmenists have to admit that.

Despite this admission, the Warmenists continue to insist that the first ten thousand times the Earth warmed it was because of natural mechanisms, but the ten-thousand-and-first time the Earth warmed it was because of human activity. That's as logical as me tossing a pebble at a streetlight, observing that a few seconds later it turns from red to green, and then insisting to all my buddies that it was my pebble that caused the light to change, and that any of them who reject my pebble hypothesis are "deniers", even when every single one of us knows that damn light has been changing from green to red and back again over and over from the first day it was installed at the intersection.

I'm getting pretty tired of rehashing all this crap for the seven hundredth time on this forum. The question of whether or not the Earth is warming is not a political question. This discussion really belongs in the Science and Technology forum, along with the other seven hundred previous global warming threads. Unless someone can add some kind of political tie-in to the discussion, I might as well lock it.




Phred

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Perhaps in your world, nobody can answer the question of how significant the human impact is. True, nobody ever will come up with a 100% correct answer, there are too many variables. The evidence shows, though, that the impact is striking. We are pumping out dramatic amounts of CO2, the likes of which have seldom if ever been seen in the world. The radiative absorbtion spectrum of CO2 is firmly established, and many papers have been written on the topic. We debated this point several times in this thread, and I direct users to these posts to see where I attempted to show connections between the actions of mankind and climate:

Where I list 30 sources that have concluded CO2 affects temperature
Where I give official quotes from scientific organizations that solar variation is not responsible for the current warming trend
Where I explain why and provide sources for why anthropogenic CO2 is the reason for the CO2 increase since 1880.
Where another poster, seemingly caught between the sides, makes a good argument and comes to the conclusion that solar forcing is not responsible for modern heating
Another post where I showed a lack of correlation with solar irradiance
Where I post two charts, showing lack of correlation with both Irradiance and Sunspot Numbers



For what other explanation is there, that when mankind began emitting fossil fuels, the CO2 has skyrocketed out of control and temperature has begun to increase, in SPITE of being in a solar minimum, in SPITE of not having an el-nino of the magnitude we had in 1998.

Still, in spite of all of this data in front of you, Zappa and you refuse to even give into the possibility that anthropogenic global warming is happening. The body of evidence is vast, and in the face of such evidence, it is hard to maintain the stance that your side represents "open mindedness." Take what you say on computer models, for instance... You posted a peer-reviwed source in this post right here saying that the computer models disagreed with actual climate trends:
Where Phred posts a source saying that 22 model runs did not agree with actual temperature records

I had never heard of this study. Rather than just dismissing it and walking away, like you seem to have done on several issues in this thread, I instead was open-minded and did my own research on the matter. Upon doing some pretty simple searches of climatology journals, google, and realclimate.org, I discovered that a paper came out directly after that paper, showing that paper's flaws, showing that the models DO agree with the temperature records, and even plotting their agreement on graphs, as seen here:

The post where I answered the claim that models are invalid, and provided sources that were equally up to date showing the validation of the models



You then go on to say that the first ten thousand times, the earth warmed because of natural mechanisms. These mechanisms, by the way, are referred Milankovitch cycles to as seen in the following paper:

Hays, J.D.; Imbrie, J.; Shackleton, N.J. (1976). "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages". Science 194 (4270): 1121-1132. doi:10.1126/science.194.4270.1121.

These cycles last over thousands, hundreds of thousands, even 400,000 years, and are clearly measurable (they happen because of orbital eccentricity and the like). The current warming trend is unique in that it is happening at a faster pace. A temperature change of .6 degrees C in less than 60 years (using 1950 as a baseline to compare anomalies to) is phenomenal heating. I'm glad we've moved the argument away from whether or not the planet IS heating, though, because it most certainly is, as I've shown in several posts here. That part of the debate is settled, it would seem.

As far as correlation, the causation is already established through an understanding of the mechanisms behind CO2 trapping energy. CO2 absorbs large swaths of infrared radiation. Some people believe that because it is in such low quantities (300 parts per MILLION), that it is silly to believe it has an effect. I like to use the pool analogy... A 10 foot deep pool of the most crystal clear, pure water, will not block as much light as a single sheet of construction paper. Research going back to Tyndall, Arhenius, and modern research of Plass, Callender show the infrared absorbtion powers of CO2.

So to your pebble analogy, replace the pebble with a remote. The traffic light has turned green to red consistantly, in a timed fashion, for the last.. oh, 10 years. Yet, directly after the light turns red, you press a button... and the light turns green. There is no proof that the traffic light did not just suddenly turn green because of a wiring problem, but using your own understanding of how radio waves work, how this particular traffic light may be sensitive to radio waves, and the correlation between pressing the button and the light changing colors, you can conclude that your remote has an effect on the traffic light.

CO2 is the global remote. It has risen and fallen in accordance with temperature for all of the ages. Usually temperature goes up first in paleo-history, because CO2 was not the primary forcer back then, Milankovitch cycles were. Now, however, the CO2 global remote is pressed, and it has a direct effect on temperature that we can observe right now. It's happening, and it's been happening all the while our fingers have been on the button.

What tires me is to see people that misrepresent data, as seen in this post right here:
Where I answer the misrepresentation that 1934 was the hottest year on record (which Phred and Zappa have STILL not conceded)

And what also tires me is when people deny that the trends are even happening, as seen here:
Where I show that, even in 1998, the trendline has been positive in the last decade

What also bothers me is that, looking back several pages, before I came into this debate, several people were being mislead by HORRIBLE attempts at science... Where people use the "mspaint best fit method" on contrast to data analysis. It would be funny, if it weren't so depressing, to look at these charts from page 10 and 11...

Seriously guys, this was just silly. I mean, you can use an anomaly year all you want, but the hard data shows a clear warming trend, even over the past decade, as I demonstrated in this post:

WhereI demosntrate that the warming trend in the past decade has been positive, and use a real statistical analysis method to draw a trendline for the last 10 years

So yes, I can look at this data right here


and mathematically say that we are indeed warming still...




With this debate settled, its up to you guys where you want to take it. Do you want to talk about the politics, about how warming, as you say, might be good for the environment? I doubt it will be (After all, you do point out that historically, we have warmed before. Do you know how high the ocean levels rose historically? You're looking at the transition of farmland to deseart (offset by the transition of cold areas to farmland), the warmth of sea surface temperatures, the breakdown of the gulf stream current, an accelerating warming trend due to feedback effects, an increase in sea surface temperatures (already observed by the GISS, NCDC, and Hadcrut), an increase in the months at which hurricanes can form, the mass extinction of several species on our planet, etc.

THAT is the politics part of this debate.

If you feel like we should not be debating the science anymore, than my work here is done. I am a scientist, not a politician. Its up to you guys what you want to do with these findings.

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I'm not going to move it to another forum, but I will lock it if the discussion doesn't turn towards politics rather than science. This is NOT the Science and Technology forum.



Phred

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supernovasky said:
Fireworks: You were the one that got me into this debate. If it were not for your post on this topic, I never would have responded to it, and I never would have gotten into the debate in the first place had I not noticed that there was someone who was truthfully looking for an answer on the topic, rather than just debating it.

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I was joking with my lady how amusing it was to be the subtle antagonist for ten more pages of graphs.

I'd like to thank you for your contribution to this thread, I've learned a lot!

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The radiative absorbtion spectrum of CO2 is firmly established, and many papers have been written on the topic.

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Yes, it is firmly established. What is also firmly established is that --

1) CO2 is a very, VERY minor greenhouse gas

2) The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is already so high that no IR radiation (at CO2's absorption frequencies) emanating from the Earth's surface makes it all the way through the atmosphere to be radiated into space anyway. This is because IR absorption is a logarithmic function, not an arithmetic or geometric function. To modify your analogy, it's as if you were to spray some translucent paint on a piece of glass and hold it up to a light source and note that the light getting through is decreased by say 90 per cent. You then spray a second layer of the same translucent paint (thereby doubling the amount of paint) and note that the light is now reduced by 99 per cent. Spray a third and a fourth layer (doubling it again to 4) and we're reducing the light getting through by 99.9 per cent, etc. In this analogy the paint is CO2, and we're long past four layers of paint.

3) There are very few absorption bands in the CO2 spectrum not already duplicated by other gases (O2, O3, Methane, H2O) so even if there were no CO2 in the atmosphere at all, the amount of IR radiation escaping back into space would be increased by a trivial amount.

The other inconvenient truth (to plagiarize Al Gore) is that the correlation between CO2 increase and global temperature increase is far less than the correlation between other climate factors (such as total solar irradiance, Pacific decadal oscillation/Atlantic multidecadal oscillation) and temperature increase.

Now again, we must remember that correlation does not equal causation. So even though both TSI (total solar irradiance) and PDO/AMO (Pacific decadal oscillation/Atlantic multidecadal oscillation), correlate vastly better with the Earth's temperature changes than does the level of atmospheric CO2, this does not mean warming is necessarily caused by either STI or to PDO/AMO. There may be some other factor/s at work which drive all three phenomenona. Maybe cloud cover or aerosol. Maybe something else entirely.

Still, it's interesting to see just how much better a fit TSI and especially PDO/AMO show with the temperature record.

First, CO2 --





next, TSI --





and finally, PDO+AMO --


Those of you interested enough to click on these thumbnails to embiggen them may have noticed a notation at the bottom of each giving the R2 (R-squared) coefficient. The R2 coefficient is just a metric describing the correlation between two curves. A perfect correlation gives an R2 of 1.0 (only achieved when two curves are absolutely identical over their entire length).

So an R2 of 1.0 is "perfect". An R2 of .90 is considered "good". An R2 of .50 is considered "fair". An R2 of .25 is "poor". Anything less than .25 is not worth even glancing at.

So how does the CO2 correlation look? Why... it is .44. Between fair and poor. Hmmm.

And TSI? Quite a bit better at .57 -- between fair and good.

And PDO+AMO? Quite a bit better still at .83 -- almost double the R2 value for CO2. Still not quite "good" yet. If I'm not mistaken, there are few scientists willing to commit themselves to anything less than .90 or "good". But non-scientists looking at this might not be so picky.

Getting back to the political aspect of this, if I were sitting on a Senate subcommittee trying to decide whether or not to cripple America's economy further by imposing punitive legislation on American businesses emitting carbon dioxide (and even private citizens -- see the push to ban incandescent lightbulbs), and someone showed me those three graphs and provided verified and audited data sets from which they were composed, I'd sure as shit vote against that legislation.



Phred

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The_Red_Crayon said:
Its no more different then blaming the latest crop failures on a vengeful god.

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Well if you guys would have built that skydome I wanted...

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Phred, can you give us the link to the source where you obtained these graphs?

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Getting back to the political aspect of this, if I were sitting on a Senate subcommittee trying to decide whether or not to cripple America's economy further ...

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overall jobs will be lost, not gained, as companies cut costs where they can to comply with new pollution standards.

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I would like to see some corroboration of that claim rather than seeing it continually repeated as an unquestioned fact. For example, the space program is frequently cited as an expense when in reality it has been an investment, paying for itself many times over in the form of technological spinoffs.

This picture shows some of the technologies that the space program has helped create or contribute to the development of:



Here is another site showing spinoff technologies spawned by our investment in space:
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html#computer

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zorbman said:

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overall jobs will be lost, not gained, as companies cut costs where they can to comply with new pollution standards.

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I would like to see some corroboration of that claim rather than seeing it continually repeated as an unquestioned fact. For example, the space program is frequently cited as an expense when in reality it has been an investment, paying for itself many times over in the form of technological spinoffs.

This picture shows some of the technologies that the space program has helped create or contribute to the development of:



Here is another site showing spinoff technologies spawned by our investment in space:
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html#computer

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