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Not trying to argue against manmade climate change here, but the conclusion is inconsistent with the stated point/headline. The main question is whether or not humans are the primary driving factor in the changes observed. Graphs show lack of correlation with various manmade causes and some natural causes, but then the conclusion is reached with the graph of "the influence of greenhouse gas emissions." In other words…
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http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/ghg/ghg-... http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract
Are there any data on water vapor concentrations? I ask that because I have read that the contribution of water vapor to the greenhouse effect is perhaps two to four times greater than CO2.
Of course there are plenty of anthropogenic water emissions to go about. When you irrigate, you are effectively throwing water into the air - by increasing the surface area of water evaporation through plant transpiration networks.
I have never seen anyone talk about this alternative hypothesis.
A disclaimer - I am all for reducing CO2 emissions strictly on principle (this is not dependent on the effects of CO2) and have put my money behind my beliefs - I have driven hybrid vehicles to support technology towards that end since 2003. But in my judgement as a scientist in general (and to some degree as a chemist who has done advanced spectroscopy including IR spectroscopy) I am losing confidence in climatology.
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Citation needed.
Here's a good one: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming-slowdown-... 44 Climate Models all fighting to out-panic one another, not a single one guessing low enough to predict the actual values for 2012 (when it seems the dataset in question ended) ... and a seemingly more reputable one showing roughly the same thing: http://phys.org/news/2015-01-peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator...
Not trying to argue against manmade climate change here, but the conclusion is inconsistent with the stated point/headline. The main question is whether or not humans are the primary driving factor in the changes observed. Graphs show lack of correlation with various manmade causes and some natural causes, but then the conclusion is reached with the graph of "the influence of greenhouse gas emissions." In other words…
1. Certainly in years past, anyone who even dared question that global warming wasn't real or wasn't man made was lambasted. That's not science. That's religion. Even just asking questions gets you labelled a denier. These, to me, have been and are reasonable questions to ask:
- On what basis are we saying the earth is warming? Datasets for the last 1-2 centuries are still pretty narrow compared to how old the earth is and how hot and cold it has been at various points;
- Is that warming, if proven, man-made? It's reasonable to investigate other possible factors that may well add to the effect caused by man;
- Can we even do anything about it if it is? How expensive will it be?
- What, if any, are the good effects of climate change? It can't be all bad but it just bothers me when I see things talking about how it will hurt, say, North America. But will it makes other parts of the world, currently largely uninhabitable, more hospitable?
I'm actually genuinely curious about these and other questions and it bothers me that even asking them is a problem.
2. The lack of transparency. This goes beyond climate science actually but any published thesis or study on the subject should make data sets publicly available and--this one is really important--make any code for any computer models open source. Transparency and reproducibility are at the heart of scientific method are they not?
There have been incidents (eg climategate) where no scientific misconduct was found but the text of certain emails really leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it reads very much like "here's the conclusion, now let's prove it".
3. The history of climate predictions has been pretty terrible and each time we're told "no trust us, this time it's totally different".
It's not that I don't believe in man-made climate change. I actually think whether or not it's true it's probably largely irrelevant. There are simply too many of us and we're running out of too many things in the coming centuries that this will be corrected one way or another in such a way that climate change--true or not--will be the least of our problems.
One of the interesting and depressing explanations for the Fermi Paradox is that the sphere of influence of life is ultimately capped by the speed of light, which is geometric, and life expands exponentially. Life always catches up eventually.
You see this in nature where algae blooms for example will explode in rivers killing all other life until they themselves can't survive and they all die. In more balanced ecosystems there are other factors to keep any one species in check. It really seems like nothing is keeping up in check now so are we just another algae bloom?
Please don't take this as a denial of climate change, it is an honest question. How do scientists learn the levels of ozone, aerosols, green house gases, and the other data points going so far back at a global scale? Is the data from before the latter half of the 20th century spotty? If so, why is it considered good enough to use in a context of scientific research where quality and correctness of data is paramount?
To understand these issues and much more, I highly recommend spend a little time on the IPCC reports:
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Is there a scorecard for which models have performed well?
None of the models have performed very well. You probably won't find a scorecard because it's embarrassing.
A significant part of the difference disappears if you adjust for CO2 produced vs predicted. Granted, you can argue that the older models needed to account for both, but what we want to validate is predictions of impacts not predictions of fossil fuel use.
It's extremely disingenuous to show a single line as the 'prediction'. There have been plenty of projections that include possible reductions in temperature. As well as a wide range of types of measurements.
PS: You can also do a lot of cherry picking on both sides: http://phys.org/news/2012-04-climate-eerily-accurate.html
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FWIW, my parents were rabid climate deniers, after they got cable and foolishly started watching Fox, porn for the ancient (but I digress..). Then Super Storm Sandy. Now when it is being discussed they sit silently. Personally, it doesn't seem to me that one storm is all that persuasive, from a statistical standpoint. But we are not talking about reason here.
A single storm isn't, but if it's part of a trend, something might be up.
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Spencer is pretty out there. He's gone on record to say that warming proponents are advancing an argument that will lead to more deaths than the NSDAP's policies did, and is a signatory to the Evangelical Declaration on Climate Change, which suggests that this is largely a matter of faith for him...
He does also maintain one of the satellite records, which does show global warming over the period 1960-2000 (not so much the last 10 years because of the global warming hiatus).
Not trying to argue against manmade climate change here, but the conclusion is inconsistent with the stated point/headline. The main question is whether or not humans are the primary driving factor in the changes observed. Graphs show lack of correlation with various manmade causes and some natural causes, but then the conclusion is reached with the graph of "the influence of greenhouse gas emissions." In other words…
The rise in CO2 is man made, as determined by the isotopes of carbon present in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels contain no C14, and the decrease in the ratio of C14 to C12 in the atmosphere since 1800 corresponds to the rise in fossil fuel consumption. Alternate hypotheses for the modified ratio of C14 to C12 would have to account for this.