Call it global warming or climate change, lots of scientists and educated people are convinced that CO2-generating human activity is having a significant impact on the atmosphere. My take on this is based on what I learned in college getting a degree in physics, with a math minor. What I learned is that the math associated with thermodynamics is hard. Among the most difficult classes I took dealt with partial differential equations. These are the equations that we use to model the physical world. Our instructor told us that a small subset of these equations can be solved to a closed solution. There is a whole field that solves special cases of PDEs numerically through finite element analysis.

Currently, meteorologists use PDEs to predict the weather. The most important inputs are initial conditions. This information is gleaned from various sensors in weather stations around the world. Most weather forecasts blow up after about 5 days, mainly because the initial conditions are not very accurate from a global perspective. After initial conditions, the driver of the function are insolence (solar radiation per unit area), clouds and precipitation, heat exchange with outer space, soil, vegetation, surface water, the effects of mountains, etc. In no instance is the concentration of CO2 an input to any forecasting model I am aware of.

Why is this important? Let’s start with the relationship between weather and climate. The true believers like to say that the two are unrelated. This is simply not true. In fact, there is a very well-understood relationship between the two that every person who ever took calculus will immediately recognize as true, which is that the climate is the integral of weather. That is, unless you believe that some cosmic Being has their thumb on the scale. Climate is the integral of weather, nothing more or less.

Now we know how integrals work. You have a function with variables and relationships between the variables, and there are rules for calculating the integral of the function. Note that if a factor is not present in the function, by definition, it cannot be present in the integral of that function.

The true believers want us to believe that a factor not even relevant for weather prediction is the dominant driving factor in climate. This simply does not pass the sniff test.

There are factors that affect the weather that aren’t in forecasting models. For example, volcanism. That is true, but volcanic eruptions definitely affect insolence, which is in the model.
Any mathematicians on the Fire see any flaws in this argument?

Not a mathematician, but it definitely makes sense that a whole is made from it's parts.

I know the global warmists would have you believe that weather has nothing to do with climate change...unless it is unusually hot or extreme. Then, of course, climate change is the obvious culprit.

You can't use logic to critique a religion.

I got lost on line five.

Exactly what it is.

Like talkin' to a brick wall. Only the wall carries more IQ points.

Like

Weather is a short term local phenomenon. Predictions are hard due to turbulence and the inability to quantify all the variables.

GLOBAL (note that word) climate is a long term integrated (to use your word) phenomenon.

It is elementary that adding CO2 (or other greenhouse gases) will in fact increase global temperature. We are doing this by burning fossil fuels. It is also a fact that other influences (sun variations, volcanoes) and feedback effects (more heating makes more water evaporate which makes more clouds which reflect sunlight etc.) influence climate.

Although I will stack up my university physics education against yours if need be, it takes no more than a high school chemistry class to realize that we are, in fact, adding more CO2, and that increases average temperature over what it would have been from other causes alone. That is indisputable. What I disagree with is the assertion that this is 100% bad and also with the suggested remedies, which the Paris accords seemed to think should be the US giving trillions of dollars to third-world tin-pot dictators, while China, which emits more CO2 than us, gets a free pass until "later."

The US has reduced emissions more than any other country just by our competent economic growth.



.

The theory that humans can cause climate change is where the flaw is.

Just like with acid rain.

And with the huge hole in the ozone that was supposed to fry us all by now.

Their theory includes guilt. That's what makes it a religion.

Punishment includes banning plastic straws, driving a Prius, using a Cat-O-Nine-Tails on themselves when they fart accidentally.

It is absolutely plausible that human produced CO2 causes a rise in global temperature. But, is it 90% or .01%? The warmists would have you believe that it is 90% or more. This is based largely on the close correlation of C02 levels and temperature over the last several hundred thousand years. This in no way shows causation. In, fact the evidence shows that rising CO2 levels actually follows temperature by a couple hundred years and not the other way around. It is likely that rising temperatures caused more CO2 to be released from the oceans which are the largest reservoir of C02 on the planet. There is some other mechanism that is the primary driver of climate change with many possible candidates. The fact that CO2 is the only variable considered and that it can be taxed should tell you all you need to know.

The Economist Thomas Sowell noted this at the very beginning of the global warming debate. The order is backwards for the alleged cause and effect.

pde= partial differential equation

Bullshit. Always cracks me up that the biggest slice o' bullshit in an argument is often prefaced by "it is elementary". The global scamming scientists got no idea what the atmospheric level of CO2 was in the past.
And they hadda fake the hockey stick, along with the CO2 lie, to try and make this bullshit stick.



More bullshit. The cause of formation of clouds is still unknown to this day. And it ain't simply evaporation, otherwise it'd be cloudy over the oceans all the time.

There is no close correlation between CO2 and temperature. More precisely, many times through history there have been seriously skewed relationships.

So...what is the most prevalent "greenhouse gas" of all?

It is NOT indisputable. More clouds reflecting more heat causes COOLING, not heating. Else why do volcanic eruptions result in global cooling? Even as recently as the last decade, Mt Pinatubo lowered global temperatures by a significant amount.

More CO2 results in more vegetation, which is supposed to be good for the climate, is it not?

Human activity can indeed affect weather on a small scale, but there is absolutely no evidence that we affect climate.

I am neither a physicist or a mathematician but I see things in simple terms. The population of the earth has more than doubled since 1960. The demand and use of non sustainable resources far exceeds the population growth because of increased expectations of the rapidly expanding population, most of whom consume more than they produce. The natural sources of environmental buffering, forest, ocean etc are rapidly becoming less significant due to decreased volume and capability secondary to exploitation and pollution.

In geological time man's impact is difficult to measure because we have not been doing it for very long.

You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to realize that too many people are consuming too many resources for the system too be sustainable. My solutions would probably not be politically correct.


mike r

The main variable and determining factor in our climate is that giant yellow ball of gas 93,000,000 miles out there.

You could do the world a favor and reduce the problem by one.

You'd be a hero.

I heard just recently that some some knotheads are thinking they can devise a way to regulate the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth. I think we should cut their freekin heads off before they utter another word about it.

Saying things like "of course adding CO2 to the atmosphere is going to warm the climate, any high school student can understand that."
ignores the actual complexity of the system. It's like saying "of course a mass will drop to the ground due to the Earth's gravity, any high school student understands this simple process, right? Here, let me demonstrate this principal with this balloon filled with hydrogen gas". Oh, yeah, there are other things interacting in the system as well. Climate is a lot of things, but simple isn't one of them. Simplistic statements about it will seldom be terribly accurate or useful. Our activities may well be adding to the climate system. But in what ways precisely and to what extent isn't easy to answer.

What is easy to answer though, is that there has always been and will always be "climate change"; the statistical likelihood that there has ever been a period of "climate stasis" on our planet is essentially zero. Saying "climate change" is about as significant as saying "wet water"; what else should it be?

What's also sure is that there have been many rapidly warming periods in the past that had absolutely nothing to do human activity, and when there were humans around during these very warm periods they are generally known as "climate optimum" periods by the people that study past human activities, not "end of the world" periods. A warming climate does not by necessity equate to negative outcomes. Rather, past evidence suggests exactly the opposite with respect to human populations.

It's also pretty clear that at the time humans were developing the technology to quantitatively measure temperatures, around the 1860s, the climate was also shifting out of the last cold period, the Little Ice Age. Well, what would one expect to measure during such a climate period, other than a warming climate? Makes "warmest year ever measured!" seem less impressive as there have many, many of them since we developed the technology to take the measurements. If you've been gradually climbing a ladder for 150 years, should there be that much surprise that you're currently standing on the highest rung to date?

I know that the more I've actually studied the issue, the less convinced and concerned I've become about "anthropogenic warming". It really seems to be more of a fanatical religion of "belief" than a discussion of data and evidence. In fact, most people I know that are passionate about the subject, if anything, get flustered and angry when presented with evidence contrary to their beliefs on the subject.

Does not warming have some potential benefits? Like maybe farming moving further North into Canada and Russia? Maybe more rain in places that need it?

Warming has -many- potential benefits. Evidence suggests the warmest period since the end of the last glacial period, warmer than our current climate, the Holocene Climate Optimum was a boon to human population, with the Nile region being as lush and verdant as it has ever been in human history. Agriculture began to flourish in many human populations across the planet and even the Sahara was relatively wet and fertile.

Drought and pestilence, as in the dark ages, has generally coincided with colder climate periods. The deserts in the south west of the United States (not the US at the time, obviously) suffered a very long drought during one of these cold periods, I believe, that drove out the people that farmed there, during the previous (warm) period.

Probably good for some locations and bad for others.

There have been some thoughtful posts on this thread. I think the whole climate change issue is extremely complicated and probably beyond our current abilities to make accurate predictions. All the short term predictions of the climate alarmists have been wrong, so how can anyone believe their long term predictions?

Still, it does seem to be getting warmer overall. If there is a way to decrease CO2 emissions it will be through technology. Human nature prevents people from accepting significant reductions in their standard of living unless the situation becomes very dire and they see no other choice.

You make one big, BIG elemental error.

Climate is not the integral of weather. Climate is nothing more than the AVERAGE of the weather. Weather is not influenced by climate, it determines the climate.

Inputs include water vapor, greenhouse gases, atmospheric clarity, average cloud cover, the strength of the Earth's magnetic field, ocean temperature, and the proverbial butterly in the Amazon. Does human produced CO2 add to the greenhouse gases? Absolutely. What is the net effect of that? WTF knows? Multivariable analysis is always a crap shoot. Odds are, however, that adding greenhouse gases that trap energy is not going to lower the average temperature.

The warmests' data set is too small to make any viable prediction of future climate change.
Accurate, instrument read temp. data on a world wide scale goes back less than 200 years, and yet the world is 3 BILLION+ years old. Like the OP stated, do the math.

The computer models used to predict future activity are incomplete in their useful data as well. Major holes in the data set, such as lack of accurate water vapor values for any given year let alone week, are "filled" with proxies ie guesses as to what the values should be. By doing so they are able "predict" what they want by changing the unknown values to those that backup their agenda. Water vapor numbers alone can make or break values across the board since there is about 25 times more water vapor than CO2 in the atmosphere on any given day/week/month/year.

What we know of geologic history shows there is little correlation between temp and CO2 levels. The two rarely if every parallel each other for any meaningful time period and as mentioned earlier temp brings on CO2, not the other way around this has been shown by ice core studies.

We also know from the geologic record that the planet has been in a cooling trend since its beginning. At the moment we are sitting in an inter glacial period in the Quaternary Ice Age (Pleistocene glaciation) and will head back into another glaciation period, just hope not too soon, but considering the lack of sun spot activity that has been going on for some years now we may be heading into a more severe solar minimum than has occurred in the last several centuries. If this trend continues for several more months/year experts predict we could head into another mini ice age such as happened during the Maunder minimum, the last half of the 1600's to early 1700's. Might be a good time to stock up on some extra wool socks and a warm coat.

What about all the chemicals that they are spraying from planes?

Farts?

yes, the technical term is hu-methane I think. the kind you can light.

[quote][elementary that adding CO2 (or other /quote]

CO2 is a weak as a greenhouse gas gas. Interestingly, CO2 levels generally follow temperarture rather than drive temperatures.

Weather is never constant, neither is climate. Weather is a short term- look at this variability. Climate long-term.

Increased population densities in areas that are chronically susceptible to adverse weather events, such as droughth in the SW US or hurricanes in the SE, flood plains, etc means that humans are become more likely to suffer from changes in the climate. It does not mean humans are responsible for the changes, nor can they stop them.

Sometimes when a Warmists goes off the rails, I tell them how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, just to get them back on track with a sense of perspective. It's four one hundredths of one percent.

That's a pretty damn small number. For a gas that has very little effect especially compared to H2O.

When competing scientists make their arguments using terminology we don’t fully understand, relying on data we can’t check, we have to make our decision about the truth by relying on something within our own experience.

For me, it’s this :

How should I react when someone knocks on my door, tries to convince me that I have a BIG problem that I’ve been ignoring? ( I should wait for his next pitch )

Now he tells me he has a solution. ( I’m still listening )

Then he tells me how much it’s going to cost me to implement his solution. ( OK.....gotcha. You’re the same guy who came by last month trying to sell me an antenna to soak up the harmful microwaves attacking my house. )

Making money by convincing people that THEY have a problem, and YOU have a solution has been going on for six thousand years, at least.

It also means not being able to farm in other places and less rain in places that have always had it. It means rising oceans and with a significant number of people and infrastructure within 5 miles of the coast world wide would have to be relocated into a shrinking land mass on earth.

There is no doubt that Global Warming is real. The debate is whether or not humans are having an impact on it. The earth has always gone through cooling and warming cycles long before humans were here and that is the point those who don't believe keep making. The difference, and the best argument those make who believe humans are responsible is the time line. It only takes 5-6 degrees of average temperature change over the course of a year to have a significant impact on weather patterns and melting polar ice. In the past when these cycles happened it took thousands of years to see just a few degrees difference. This time we've seen the same rise in temperatures in just 200 years.

I'm not smart enough to know the answer. But within reason don't see any downsides to taking some precautions. Just in case humans truly are part of the problem. To completely ignore the issue is irresponsible.

In answer to the OP. CO2 concentration isn't used as a variable in the weather predictions because it is not "variable" over the course of a few days. Variables need to have variability in order to matter to an equation.

Technical point: How do we calculate the average?

Bingo...Except now it's the Globalist's selling the snake oil. They have a plan for everyone to pay. Big business, small business, mom & pop business, and individuals. When they figure out how to charge you for the air you breath you will pay for that as well.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck......

This is very likely false. This is the orthodoxy that has been perpetuated for the last century. It is called gradualism. It has now been largely debunked. The evidence shows extreme warming and cooling to the tune of 15-18 degrees over as little as a few years or decades at most. The earths climate is subject to wild temperature swings that have been going on since long before man burned any fossil fuels. Even within the Holocene interglacial that we are in now there have been fairly dramatic temperature swings over a short period of time. Do a little research on the Little Ice Age to give you an idea.

Another of my problems with the alarmists. They keep rattling off claims such as the temperature will rise by 2.31° if we don't do this or that. But ask them to say with the same precision how much effect this or that will have, and they go silent.

Any proposed "climate corrective" action can have only three possible outcomes: too little effect, the correct effect, and too much effect. (That's ignoring the very real possibility of no effect at all, but they ignore that so we can, too.) Too little (or none) means we have wasted all the trillions we spent. Too much means we have to spend even more trillions to re-correct the correction or risk starting a new glacial age. But since they can't predict what if any change their proposals will cause, we have only a one in three (or four) chance of them being right.

Yet they want us to make massive changes in the way humans live, with absolutely no idea of how much if any the climate will change as a result.

The year summer never arrived...

I would take some issue with this assertion. Although there is a lot of evidence showing no correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2 in deep time, the last 400,000 years has shown a close correlation between the two.

Convoluted and pointless when there is a easier more precise method to determine veracity...politicians and media love it, it is a lie.

tag

To answer that question, I'd have to know who issued the grant.....

Look, it is simply ostrich head-in-the-sand to say that humans don't influence climate. Take the Sahara desert. Some nomads and a bunch of goats and cows, and presto!. The size of the desert has doubled. Climate has changed.

Denying that cutting half the rain forest of the Amazon is going to change the climate locally is not a sign of intelligence.

How did Paul Bunyan and his blue ox change the climate in the US? How does the recent increase in timber coverage in the central US change climate? Will we ever know?

What would happen if we made a deliberate attempt at de-desertification? The Chinese are attempting it. (http://time.com/4851013/china-greening-kubuqi-desert-land-restoration/) Should we try something like it in the Great Basin? And what would happen to the earth's climate if we turned the Sahara, the Great Basin and other deserts green?

Those are questions that are a lot more interesting to discuss, and a lot more practical (and cheaper) to implement than trying to tell the Chinese to quit using fossil fuels......

Anyone that predicts the weather 5 days out....should be hanged!

The Sahara desert goes through roughly 26,000 year cycles going from desert to savannah/forest and back again. This is based on the wobble of the earth on it's axis. This has happened numerous times over the last several millions years and has nothing to do with human influence.

Like Yogi said "It's hard to predict anything, especially when it's about the future".

One thing you can believe, if they do it correctly then it is for damn sure they don't work for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.


One of these days I am going to get put of bed and the weather report will be an absolute 100% guarantee of no rain...I know then that it is going to piss down buckets.

The bigger question is what would out lives be like if Paul Bunyan hadn't logged? Should the Amazon be left to a few isolated tribes? Do we need aluminum, copper, moly, the poisons batteries are made from? What correlation is there in the temperature at Denvers City Park in 1880 and that in 1960 at Stapleton, and 2015 at DIA? That is a lot of their data. Is there really enough ice to melt and raise the oceans 250 feet? I know the Mercator projection shows Greenland being larger than the US, but a globe shows different.

I have read Colorado (big rectangle with no geographic/economic relationship in the areas) supported 50,000 Indians at most. And they had high infant mortality, went hungry and cold in winter.

Was it too many farts that forced the Anasazi out? When the "experts" give up their private jets maybe I will listen a bit more.

The part I disagree with the Warmist bigots about is the idea that changing climate is one big problem.

They miss the fact that the thing people do best is adapt. Frankly, I really don't care about climate change. It hasn't affected me and if it has, I've adapted to it. Everyone else with their own particular problems will adapt as well.

Just to add to the confusion I recently heard the Ozone hole was repairing itself. There are several articles over the last two years suggesting this is the case, then one in February saying- No, sorry, then this one last month.
Is it getting better?

Warming would mean an awful lot more wet weather for Australia, cooling will make it drier...I know which I prefer.

In recent history (2,000 or so years), cool periods have been periods of regression, wars and famines (i.e. dark ages), and warm periods are associated with prosperity and progression (i.e. the renaissance).

Absolutely, but the desertification of the second part of the last century wasn't part of that cycle. At it's core, it was created by foreign aid drilling wells to provide water for people that didn't have it. People being people, they used that water to increase their herds dramatically and overgrazed the land.

Unintended consequences are a bitch.

If that one was you.


mike r

Bingo

I am guessing you prefer wetter. And that goes along with my earlier question about warming being beneficial. As to the rise in sea level, I understand that land based ice melt would add to the ocean but Arctic ice is floating so I assume it displaces all the water it can for its weight. As to the CO2 increase, it seems to me that would enhance plant growth. What we maybe should be more concerned about is global cooling. I can only imagine the disaster of a 10% reduction in food production.

I'd say since mankind has not been on the planet that long, vs what the effects we are blamed for, then its easy. Sure we might be able to change it a hair. But not much more. And that would be a fine frog one at that IMHO.

While I'm neither a scientist or mathematician, my son got his undergrad degrees in Physics and Math and then went on to get a PhD in Physics, specifically Condensed Matter Physics and now he works at NIST, a National Lab in Boulder, CO, as a research scientist. In all there are three Nation Labs on the Boulder Federal campus; the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) - promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology; the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) - managed by UCAR, is a National Science Foundation R&D Center; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - the federal government's top agency for monitoring our climate, the space environment, and ocean resources.

In addition, within 50 miles of Boulder, there are four more National Labs; the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) - dedicated to exploring and studying our atmosphere and its interaction with the sun, oceans, biosphere, and society also in Boulder. The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) - dedicated to research targeted at all aspects of Earth System Science and communicating its findings to the global scientific community located on the University of Colorado, Boulder's East Campus. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) - the nation's primary laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency R&D located in Golden, CO (25 miles south and also home of Coors Brewery). The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) - directs research in the atmospheric sciences into practical applications in weather and climate located in Fort Collins, CO (about 50 miles north of Boulder).

Together, these 7 National labs are world leaders in the study of the world's climate and work closely with all major labs around the world studying the world's climate.

Just a bit of background on issue of 'Global Warming' would be helpful. Scientists studying ice core samples dating back some 6 million years have long known that the world's average temperature runs in cycles. In fact, currently, we are some 4°C (7.2°F) cooler than 12,000 years ago (the start of man's impact on the weather) and are in a naturally occurring warming cycle. The 'Global Warming' debate is based on the current faster rate of temperature increase (not that it's increasing because that is a naturally occurring cycle) and what, or who, is the cause. While there is some disagreement on how much man's use of fossil fuels has added to the rate of warming in the current global warming cycle, there is no disagreement that man's use of fossil fuels has had an impact. It's also true that the computer models used by scientist around the world have not mapped to the observed data as well as they had predicted, but it's clear that the warming cycle we are in is ramping at a rate faster than any previously observed during the last 6 million years of data.

Because the models are used by the faction that argues that man is 'killing the planet' and Global Warming will be the death of us all unless draconian measures are taken world wide today, their accuracy in predicting the future is fundamental to the whole issue. So, the fact that the models predictions aren't mapping well to observable data means that the debate over man's contribution to the problem or even if there is a problem is problematic. So, therein lies the basis for the argument.

Most scientists believe that long term effects of the greenhouse gasses released by burning fossil fuels will ultimately cause the warming cycle to peak at a higher temperature than the average high. Some predict that it might peak at 4°C (7.2°F) higher than the normal high. This will cause issues with global weather intensity, crop growth paterns, and ocean levels. With the increased energy in the atmosphere due to the rising temperature, we are already seeing weather spikes, both highs and lows, that are larger than those seen during the previous 300 yrs and scientists believe that the extra energy put into the global weather system is the cause.

Now, the $6 Million question. How much of this rate change in temperature rise is due to man's impact? If it's all of it, then changes in man's impact will slow the rate of change. If man's impact is small, then changes in man's impact will have no effect. That's where the science and modeling runs into issues. Intuitively, adding greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, reducing the ozone layer, and all the other 'bad' things mad does should be adding to the rate change so reducing those 'bad' things should help. Problem is that as we measure increase of the 'bad' things we've added to the atmosphere, the observed results don't fit the models of what affect those 'bad' things should produce.

Bottom line is that the models everyone uses to claim 'the sky is falling' aren't accurate and even small variations from predicted to observed are huge drivers for the validity and even the believably of future predictions. So, we are left with trying to divine what the truth is. The scientists are convinced that we are on a bad temperature rise curve but can't use their modeling to 'prove' it because the observables don't match the model's predictions well enough to use them to absolutely say with certainty that the models can accurately predict future temperature and weather patterns.

I, for one, assume that man's actions are having a negative effect on the globe in general, not just the weather and temperatures. That said, I've not seen any data, not hypothesis based on ??, but real, scientific data supported by the scientific method, that shows me how much of the effect man is causing. Some scientists and environmentalists suggest man is responsible for most or all of the rate of rise and predicted dire consequences while other scientists and people working in the field suggest our impact may be as little as 4% of the change.

So I ask myself, how does a nation or the world agree on a hugely expensive policy, estimated in the Hundred's of Trillions of Dollars, that could cripple the world's economies and cause the deaths of millions of the poor and impoverished from lack of support, based upon a set of models that track so poorly to observable data? The answer is . . . we don't. Further, as China and India together make up 34% of the Global CO2 emissions from fuel combustion (the US share is next at 15% with Russia next at 5%) and they have yet to acknowledge their responsibility, what affect will the entire rest of the world's draconian efforts really have?

Water Vapor

COSteve: Very good post, "our impact may be as little as 4% of the change" "China and India together make up 34% of the Global CO2" "the US share is next at 15%". That leaves 51% to countries that probably along with China and India will pick up the slack if we could cut our 15% emissions to zero. All the while as you stated we will "cripple the world's economies and cause the death of millions of the poor and impoverished". Something needs to be done about over population but I hope starvation and disease isn't the solution, which more and more seems to be the plan. And I believe the deaths would be billions not millions.

ABSOLUTELY! Another unintended consequence came from the spotted owl debacle a couple of decades ago that crippled the lumber industry in this country by making it illegal to harvest trees from old-growth forests - which were thought to be critical to the survival of this bird.

As a result, other, less developed countries jumped into clearcutting to take advantage of the sharp increase in the price of lumber, destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of natural forests. A study by the US Forest Service estimates that more than 1,000 species went extinct as a result of trying to protect one bird - that was later shown to NOT need old-growth timber to survive!

Absolutely right. You can't make a model of the future without knowing exactly where you're starting from, and we just don't have precise information for large areas of the ocean (especially for deep water temperatures where much of the earth's warmth is stored) or at many remote land areas (where atmospheric scientists simply GUESS what conditions are, based on surrounding data often hundreds of miles away), much less measurements for every point in the atmosphere in 3 dimensions across the globe at one given time.

But there are a couple of other reasons, too. One is that the calculations themselves are immensely complicated and can't help but getting some answers wrong to some degree, introducing chaos theory to the whole mess.

The second is that weather - and climate - is immensely more complicated than any mathematical equation can adequately represent except in a very crude form. Think of this statement: “If my barrel is straight, I should be able to fire a 120 grain bullet at 2,950 fps that will hit exactly HERE at 100 yards.”

We could start a very, very long thread on all the variables that could cause a bullet to NOT hit that exact spot at any given distance. How much more complex is climate?

Another is that water vapor variability is not part of any equation in any current climate model, and it is hundreds of times more influential as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.

Finally, there are far more influences on climate than are included in any climate model. The wobble of the earth as it rotates (as has been mentioned in another post), how cosmic rays ionize our upper atmosphere, increasing or decreasing high clouds that block incoming sunlight, variations in the amount of the sun’s radiation reaching the earth and changes in the direction and strength of ocean currents are all important influences on climate and are routinely ignored because they are too difficult to include in any mathematical model.

Yes, of course carbon dioxide levels influence temperatures. But then you can also accurately say that you are contributing to global warming every time you light a match. The REAL questions are, how much effect does it have, is that effect good or bad, how much will it cost to make a change, can I reverse the change if I find it is harmful in some unexpected way and is it worth it?

These questions have never been seriously addressed.

You fellows can debate the minutiae of why, but regardless of the cause there is incontrovertible fact that gives pause. Sea levels are rising and have been doing so for quite some time. The records I am aware of date back to around 1930. It is slow of course and at the end of the day will not precipitate abrupt catastrophe. It is the result of rising temps in the oceans which cause expansion of the mass of water that surrounds us. I'll leave it to you to debate the why, it does not present as settled science to my eye. The only constant in this universe is change and we are experiencing some of that.

Al Gore is an idiot. -Fact-
There was a time long past when the Florida peninsula was several hundred feet below sea level. -Fact-

Have fun,

DD

Interesting point about where the earth's heat is stored. So, what percentage of the earth's mass is the atmosphere itself? I' could look it up, but I don't care what the figure would be...I just know it's probably pretty damned insignificant. But then I start to think about just how much heat is transferred back and forth between the atmosphere and the rest of the planet. And from that point, I can only say to myself "I wonder WTH really is going on."

The Mississippi river sends 550 metric tons of silt into the gulf, by itself.

Put a buncha mud in the bottom of the ocean, guess what, the water rises!

Oh, the horror.

Not even countin undersea volcano formation, uplift from tectonics, etc.

It's the voodoo effect.

Simple minds attribute whatever observed condition exists to their curse of choice.

Is that a per/day figure?

This^^^, mostly.

More co2 begats more veggies to produced more o2. God figured things out pretty well, and Jupiter sucks in most meteors.

Who took the mud off the bottom to allow for the sea level to recede back before Ingwe was born?

Good catch on that.

Per year.

While on a ferry from Anacortes, Wa to see friends on Orcas Island, we read up on the geology of the Puget Sound area. 10,000 years ago (not long in geologic time) Seattle was under 3,000 feet of ice. It must of warmed up a bit from then.

It's established science at this point, in 2018 it's not even a debate.

https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

Horseshit. Why did IPCC falsify data? This was exposed YEARS ago, and the "settled science" claim was debunked then. Nothing but socialist politics.

This.

Rome fell during a period of global cooling.

Make that 550 MILLION metric tons, annually, and you've got it.

550 Metric tons isn't even a train load.

What is really, really interesting is this graph of CO2 over (geological) history.

As you can see, over the history of life on earth, CO2 has been steadily decreasing. This is primarily caused by sequestration of CO2 by crustaceans (think the white cliffs of Dover; all that chalk was made by little shellfish).

Objectively, we were coming pretty close to the point where there was not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to support plant life -- a few million years, perhaps, and in geological time, that was not very much time at all!

Without the intervention of man and the release of fossil carbon, plant life on earth might have come to a dramatic halt....

Well, fcked that one up twice.

Not my day.

Good catch.

Want to reduce climate change then reduce the population.

1) The hole in the ozone layer is a vent. It opens larger when the earth warms, and shrinks when the earth cools.
2) If CO2 was so bad for the environment, why do folks pump it into greenhouses?
3) Climate is cyclical in nature.
4) As to rising sea levels, the entire planet was at one time covered in water.
5) As to melting ice causing sea level rise, try this experiment. Fill a glass with ice. Then fill it with water. Watch as the ice melts. Did this cause the water level in the glass to rise?

Al Gore and others invented a new religion to try and scam dumbazzes out of a lot of money.

The ice is only floating on the water on the Artic. On Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic the ice is on land, and the run off most definitely raises the sea level.

Interestingly enough, as the ice melts, the LAND that had been covered with ice actually RISES. Many parts of North America and Northern Europe are still rising, since ice has been melted off rather recently.

Florida,however, is still fIIcked.

You realize you've attacked the point you tried to make in the opening paragraph by your own statement in your final sentence, don't you?

Yes, you are correct, there was a time when the Florida peninsula was under water and maybe that's the correct state of the planet. There is no absolute rule that says that today's climate conditions are the 'correct' state. In fact, there is 6 million years worth of data that shows it's not. Sucks to be a Floridan if the steady temperature state has Florida 50 ft under water but if that's the state the planet should be in, who are we humans to try to demand that it be something else.

I've read somewhere that one volcanic erruption puts out more CO2 than the entire industrial world in one year. You never know when one is going to errupt. Also solar flare activity affects the weather far more than human activity.

Seems like I heard there is a theory stating that a substantial polar melt would possibly bury the warm gulf stream under frigid polar freshwater, because the fresh is lighter than sea water. This would in turn cool Western Europe dramatically, because of losing the gulf stream's moderating effect on their weather, then another ice age would set in. Too many variables in this predicting game, and way too much money and effort being expended or proposed being expended. Maybe we need to deal with issues and problems that lie clearly at hand instead of what dimly (or might not) lies in the future.

All I know is, the Chinese are going to say, "Fugga buncha global warming. We're going to keep burning coal".

So even if the global warming Commies are correct (and I doubt that they are) The Chinese will knock 'em in the head and sell their internal organs on the open market if they start their schitt over there.

So it really doesn't matter what anybody else on Earth does.

All those labs.....centered in Boulder......and you don't see the problem with this?

You need another cuppa Joe.

The purveyors of CC realize that the average public has little science knowledge and aptitude. Therefore, they have simplified the villain (CO2) so they can draw a straight line to the cause of anthropogenic CC. This was cleverly done so as to blame the fossil fuel industry for the pending world calamity. The study of paleoclimate confirms an ever-changing climate, but scientists have dumbed down the facts so as to pursue their political agendas.


Please take a few minutes and watch Levin's interview with Dr. Patrick Michael.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5sGtj7QKQ&t=2s

The past tells us a couple of important points with respect to what you've (and all of us have) been told, over and over...

1. Past temperature changes with respect to climate have not been slow. Take a look at proxy data regarding climate since the end of the last glacial period 20K YA.. There have been -many- periods where warming and cooling rates appear to have been very similar, perhaps even faster, than what we see today.

2. Humans have flourished during the warmest periods relative to the coldest periods. We're all given only gloom and doom pictures of a warming climate with droughts and others catastrophes through the media. Actual human history and geologic data from past warm periods simply do not support these claims.

There us a growing amount of scientists that are disagreeing with the man made global warming nonsense. When you put garbage in you get garbage out of any computer program. What this has always been about is grant money and power usurped by governments around the world.

In discussions about climate change, I think all this talk about land masses being submerged is a bit silly. Climate or weather are not the only geological processes taking place.

This is a good point, and the Sahara was actually less of a desert during the warmest period in the last 20k years.

The fact is that we have been -trained- from a young age to look for humans as the sole cause in any environmental issue deemed as negative; it's always the right answer. Yes, we may well be part of the climate system, but the assumption that we are the sole or main driver and by necessity making the climate "worse" is more a matter of our indoctrination than the available evidence.

Another thing those "wizards of smart" never enter into the equation is how much water we've pumped out of the aquifers. In a lot of places, it's more than several feet over millions of acres. Water, being all but atomic, doesn't leave the system, it just gets displaced into the rivers and atmosphere then, into the ocean.

The Earth has a hot core. If it didn't, the planet would be cold & dry with no atmosphere.

It is not at all clear to me that CO2 causes warming. It is entirely conceivable that it is the other way around, i.e. that warming causes increases of CO2 concentration. Anyone who has taken basic chemistry knows that the partial pressure of a gas suspended over a liquid is dependent on the temperature of the liquid. When the oceans warm for some reason, they release CO2. Then they cool for some reason and absorb CO2. This is consistent with the fossil record in the ice cores where CO2 lags temperature changes.

Pardon me for being suspicious, but this whole deal smells like a setup and a pretext for the institution of draconian government (maybe U.N. based, worldwide) action. Same thing goes for the push for single payer health care. Same thing goes for the push to urbanize the population. There is something ugly in the works. I firmly believe the accidental election of President Trump has put a bump in the road for those who are pushing these control agendas.

1) Of course it's a debate. Lots of scientists are extremely skeptical of this assertion
2) Consensus is not a scientific term, it is a political term
3) Literally 100% of their published papers take a hugely complicated mathematical challenge and hand-wave it into a trivial least-squares relationship between CO2 and temperature, which I believe is mathematical malpractice
4) The conventional wisdom is *always* wrong
5) Sometimes the emperor is stark raving nekkid

I could go on, but I think you get the point that I hold all of these organization in contempt, and for very good reasons. One of my best buddies is an ER doc. I've known him since college, and he is scary smart. He scored in the top 99.5% of people taking the MCAT. He thinks the AMA is run by a bunch of complete idiots. It seems like most of these groups are run by politicians who put out statements like this that their rank and file reject.

See the UN's Agenda 21. And there's more than that they'd like to impose upon humanity.

The books say, Des Moines, Iowa was part of the artic ice cap in the last ice age. What shrank that ice?

Mastodon farts?

Bingo!

Shifting tilt of the earth's axis, sun spots, distance to the sun, earth's magnetic field direction.

Of course, modern humans evolved during the last ice age, so, therefore, Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc, humans caused it......

And if you watched Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday during his interview with Bill Gates, then you know that the science behind global warming is settled. They said it was laughable that anyone would even question it.

I guess I am laughable. I do know a bit about algorithms, and that bad data in means bad data out. Or in this case rigged data in means rigged data out.

NASA issued a report this fall by one of their meteorologists that said that sun spots are are a record low right now. He predicts a major cooling period in the next few years.

Except for that whole black death plague thing, which was concurrent with an extended warm period and dry conditions across Europe. And the results, of course, of the plague was a couple centuries of the dark ages and religious despotism.

Very good, Steve. May I quote your post on another forum?

The biggest argument I see that the C-C alarmists make is that they always show some sort of graph that shows an exponential increase in CO2 levels since man begin burning fossil fuels along with a graph showing an exponential increase in temperature. I'm always at a loss to explain why there's an exponential increase in temperature over that period.