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Originally Posted by Qam1
Actually it's the AGW church members who are trying to change the physical properties of CO2 (as well as H2O)
The atmosphere is already saturated at the IR levels CO2 levels absorb
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This is false, and based on a gross misunderstanding of how the greenhouse effect works. Increasing the concentration of CO2 increases the altitude at which saturation occurs for certain wavelengths (at others it's not saturated, so the argument is moot anyway) and is thus like adding an extra blanket over the Earth. The Earth is obvious emitting quite a lot of IR, otherwise temperatures would keep increasing indefinitely. Adding CO2 increases the equilibrium temperature at which we radiate.
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And that's a good thing the atmosphere is already saturated, because even with the small rise in CO2 we've seen we are still at historical lows. There have been times on this planet where the CO2 levels have been 10-18x higher than they are now. If CO2 was anything but a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect, back then when CO2 levels were much higher all life would have fried and none of us would be here right now to discuss it.
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No, you can increase CO2 levels quite a lot without "frying" all living things. Sensitivity to CO2 stays flat with each doubling -- in other words, if a doubling causes an increase in forcing of
y, then you have to increase concentrations by 4 times to get 2
y, and 8 times to get 3
y, etc. CO2 levels were indeed much higher in the very distant past (many hundreds of millions of years ago) and the planet was a much warmer, wetter place.
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HUH?
We would expect a more active sun if it were to affect the earth it would also have effects on all the other planets and that's what exactly we see
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No, we don't see that at all. There is no good evidence that other planets in the solar system are warming -- it's just silly propaganda. Moreover, it's nonsense to think that it would even be possible for other planets in different stages of their orbits to all have the same temperature trend, so the argument is ridiculous on its face.
Let's take Mars for instance. The idea that Mars is warming is based on three flybys from a three year period which show ice melting in the southern polar region. This is readily explained by local conditions in the southern hemisphere, and there is no evidence of planet-wide warming. In fact, Mars has in general been cooling since the 1970s.
So the idea that there's global warming on Mars is bunk. And Mars is the closest and best studied planet. How one infers that there's warming on
Pluto, which requires a powerful telescope merely to see as a fuzzy dot, is beyond me. It's ironic that the very same people claiming that Mars is warming on the basis of three data points are the same ones who denied for many years (and in some cases, still do) that the Earth was warming, in spite of having many thousands of data points over a hundred year period. Consistency is not their strong suit.
This is all moot anyway of course because
there is no detectable increase in solar radiation over the last 30 years. Before using some causal factor to explain a phenomenon, it's necessary that the causal factor actually exist first. Your casual factor doesn't exist. Let's just get this out of the way:
Although the sun may be responsible for some small amount of warming, it cannot explain the amount we've experienced since the 1970s. The only thing that satisfactorily accounts for it is increased forcing by greenhouse gases.
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What graph are you looking at? It clearly peaks in the 1990s
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It clearly does not. There is a minor peak in the 1990s but overall trend for the last 50 years is flat. If you want to ascribe such monumental importance to that minor peak, then you have to explain why there wasn't a cold spell in the 1980s when there was a negative peak of similar magnitude. Temperatures have been rising steadily and dramatically since the 1970s; the trend in solar radiation does not track with it at all.
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Easy, along with the instantaneous effects from the sun there are also cumulative effects. Earth has buffers (i.e. the oceans as heat sinks/reservoirs) to immediate changes, so even if the sun reached its peak earlier and holds at a high level it's still going to take years to decades before its full effects are seen.
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If that were the case then you can't explain why the trend otherwise tracks quite closely with solar radiation
except for the late 20th century. Did the sun only start to sock away its energy starting in the 1970s? You previously wrote the following:
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*Most of the temperature rise in the 20th century happened between 1910-1945, just like most of the increase in solar activity and unlike the CO2 levels
* The temperatures slightly cooled between 1945-1976 which corresponds to a slight decrease in solar activity which is opposite of what you would expect if CO2 whose levels were increasing was the culprit
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Your current argument and your previous argument can't both be correct. If the effect of the sun's radiation doesn't manifest until several years or decades later, then the rise from 1910-1940 would have been strongly delayed, and we would not have seen a drop from 1945-1976.
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For example, The Little Ice age is associated with the Maunder Minimum which we know the dates for, yet scientist still debate when exactly TLIA started and ended.
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That's because the LIA is minor and hard to detect. There is some disagreement that it even exists.
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There's too many unknown and butterfly effects in Climatology for any long or short term predictions to be anymore than a guess
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If true, this means that everything you've said about solar forcing being responsible for our warming trend must be wrong. It's a common tactic among the defenders of pseudoscience to switch from saying "We know X" to saying "We can't know anything" mid-debate. That may be useful propaganda, but it's not intellectually consistent.
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How am I wrong?
The 1910 temps are close to -0.6 and the 1940 temps are at 0, the current temps are at about +0.5. That's 0.6° to 0.5°, Am I missing something?
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Apparently. Given that in the mid 1930s, the temperature anomaly was the same as in 1880, this makes it clear that there wasn't any net warming up to that point. At most, there was a 0.2 degree rise from the mid 30s to 1940, but that quickly went away. By cherry picking 1910, which was an anomalously cold year, and 1940, which was an anomalously warm year, you claimed that most of the 20th century warming occurred between 1910 and 1940. The graph however plainly shows that there was very little net warming until after the 1970s, at which point temperatures shot up dramatically. This is obvious for people who can read graphs.
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hhmmm. So the Earth can cool and heat without the influence of man………..
You don't say
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I'm quite certain that no one has ever argued differently; you're just flogging a strawman.
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1976 is also a cherry-picked year,
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I said the 1970s, I didn't pick any one year. I was careful to avoid the dishonest tactic that you employed.
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...go back further you will see the 20th century is a reversal of a long term cooling trend called the Little Ice Age. Going back the 20th century just looks like a normalization between the medieval warming period and the Little Ice age
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This is wrong. Late 20th century temps are significantly higher than they were prior to the so-called little ice age. It is clearly not normalization, it's a new trend.
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And there's nothing unprecedented about the rise in temps at the end of the 20th century. There have been many time in earth's history (including early in the 20th century) where the temps have rose and fell like they did in the late 20th century
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Given that it's not possible to measure such short-term effects going very far back it time, there is no basis for saying that such dramatic rises have occurred many times throughout Earth history. What we can say with confidence is that the rise appears unprecedented for the last 1000 years, and possibly the last 2000 years. Beyond that we cannot determine short-term temperature changes with enough precision.
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Yeah it's all just one big coincidence that all solar data shows a decrease in activity at this time also.
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Your own graph shows that there was little decrease in solar activity, and that the long-term trend over this period was flat.
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1) Most of the cooling between 1940-1976 occurred between 1945-1950 when
most of the world was recovering from WWII and between 1950-1960 when everything ramped up the world warmed slightly only to again fall. Sorry but there's no consistent pattern there to suggest sulfate aerosols or any other pollutant had anything to do with the cooling
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I'm not sure if you've ever heard, but industrial activity was very, very high during WWII and the immediate post-war period. At any rate it's beside the point, because the effect of increased aerosols has been to mitigate the effects of increased GHG concentrations. Aerosols do not determine temperature trends by themselves, they're the reason why the overall 20th century temperature trend slowed-down mid century and then resumed after the wide-spread introduction of clean air laws.
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2) While we in the US reduced Sulfate Aerosols since the 1940's-1970's, back then China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc weren't as industrialized as they are today, so there are actually more "sulphate aerosols" being released today in the world then there was back then when it was basically just us,
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Yet again, you are making claims that can easily be shown to be false with a little searching. Industries in China and India are not as dirty as industries in the US and Europe were 50 years ago, and thus global aerosol levels are in decline:
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And those aren't the real temperatures, those are adjusted temperatures and what a surprise climatologist whose funding depends on global warming adjust the temperatures to match AGW.
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Meh, mindless conspiracy theorizing. If you can't deal with the evidence, resort to saying that it's all made-up. Why even bother with arguing that temperatures are rising for reasons other than GHGs if you're going to deny that they're rising?
Hm, seems like you're wrong yet again.
Here is a graph of surface temperature anomalies from March to May of this year. It's all well above average in most parts of the world. That's why you need to pay attention to more than just a few cherry-picked anomalies here and there, you need to look at the whole globe.
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Bad Call
Financial, well that's obvious, no global warming = no funding = no job that you get to fly around the world in private jets to attend global warming conferences. And with the way Michael Mann has "altered" data in the past, I highly doubt there's a job waiting for him at any legitimate company as an accountant.
Political , again obvious, I don't think you will find any Republicans over at Realclimate, but RealClimate is hosted by Environmental Media Services
Quote from Wikipedia
Environmental Media Services (EMS) is a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit organization that is "dedicated to expanding media coverage of critical environmental and public health issues"[1]. EMS was founded in 1994 by Arlie Schardt, a former journalist, former communications director for Al Gore's 2000 Presidental campaign, and former head of the Environmental Defense Fund during the 1970s.
Also it's founder, Gavin Schmidt even admits he's a lefty, in the New York Times, in response to his hate man Quote from the New York Times "Really, the hate mail is because I am a bad, atheist, environmentalist lefty." And of course you don't see many AGW activist pushing for the only thing proven to reduce CO2 – Nuclear power but instead their answer to AGW is more and more Socialism.
Religious, start here http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speec...ligion.html%5b
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I specifically asked for
evidence, and you provided none. I am not interested in arm-chair psychology or speculation. Just because a crack-pot like Michael Chricton takes the intellectually lazy route of labeling environmentalism as a religion does not make it so -- in fact it says a lot more about Chricton than it does about the people he attacks.
As for funding, even if one accepts the utterly implausible belief that legions of scientists are lying and faking their data in order get more funding from a government that is strongly hostile to their views, when in fact they could get more money by emphasizing uncertainty, it has nothing to do with RealClimate specifically. Granting agencies will not pay their blog any heed, so there's no motivation for them to run it on the basis of funding.
And when you start arguing on the basis of one person's personal political views, or on a 4th degree association with Al Gore (I'm probably more closely connected with him than that), you are seriously grasping at straws. Having a political viewpoint, which is something that nearly everyone has, is not by itself indicative of bias. Try again.
theyeti
07-09-2007, 12:24 PM
