shoggoth

Does Carbon Dioxide Really Affect Temperatures? Yeah it does. Carbon dioxide is the second most powerful greenhouse gas behind water vapor. Being a greenhouse gas means that it acts to warm the planet. If levels of co2 increase then this will definitely enhance the greenhouse effect that warms Earth. How much? There's uncertainty due to the complexity of the climate but the current science puts the eventual warming per doubling of co2 in the range of between 1.5C to 4.5C Does the co2-temp lag in the ice core record disprove the theory that co2 rise is causing current warming? No. It is however a problem for the theory that interglacial temperature rises were caused primarily by co2, but that is a different theory altogether. But does the co2-temp lag in the ice core record prove that co2 doesn't cause any warming at all? Again no, because the co2 rise in those periods (~50%) is small compared to the temperature rise (~10C), and most of that warming occured after co2 started rising. The record is not compatible with co2 being the primary driver of the warming, but is compatible with it causing some of it. But if temperature caused co2 to rise in the ice core record, doesn't that mean co2 cannot cause temperature to rise? Temperature can cause co2 rise and co2 rise can cause temperature rise. This two way relationship is not contradictory, and doesn't contradict either the lag seen in the ice core record, or global warming theory. If temperature caused co2 to rise back then, could temperature be the primary cause of the co2 rise today? No, the cause of the recent co2 rise is already known to be primarily due to human carbon emissions. Besides this though, the amount of co2 rise seen recently is well above the sensitivity which ice cores indicate is possible from temperature rise. The ice cores show about 10ppm co2 rise per 1C rise in temperature. Yet the recent co2 rise of over 100ppm has occured during a period of less than 1C rise in temperature. Also of course there is a lag time in the ice core records of many hundreds of years before co2 levels start rising. The situation today and the situations during the interglacial warming periods in the ice core record do not match. It's fairly easy for contrarians to survive off this issue because there are many ways of implying co2 doesn't cause warming by selecting some facts to mention while omitting others. For example "The Global Warming Swindle" documentary selectively used some of the above facts and omitted others to imply that current co2 rise is due to warmer oceans emitting co2.

It hinges on whether particular arguments are reasonable though, and in most cases only scientists working in the field are going to be capable of determining that. For example is it reasonable to suggest that co2 levels might be rising because of the oceans? Is it reasonable to suggest that all of recent warming may be caused by the sun? Many arguments against AGW will exist which are simply are not reasonably backed by current scientific knowledge. That's why it's a case by case basis and some (not all) skeptical scientists might back ideas whcih have no solid foundation and that's why they are discriminated against.

The NCDC site has also graphed their data and it shows otherwise: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/resear.../anomalies.html Not only is 2006 warmer than 1998 according to their data, but the smoothed 5-year trend remains upward. There is nothing in the last 6 year period that looks any different from the rest of the warming trend over the last 30 years.

Some people would argue that the age of the earth is not settled and the scientific community is currently discriminating against anyone who suggests it is under one million years old. And that would be true. Any geology professor who claimed the Earth was under one million years old would probably lose thier job. Any senior geologist doing the same would probably lose their job. Any scientist submitting that idea to peer review would not get published, and their credibility may be questioned. But it's discriminating against the idea because the evidence presented for the idea, and the arguments against the consensus are flimsy. And the people who primarily decide whether the evidence and arguments are flimsy are other scientists. All this is justified. But a person on the outside who had no idea about geology and the quality of the arguments and evidence either way might conclude that one minority idea is being unfairly discriminated against by the majority of scientists. They might further conclude that the majority of scientists are simply trying to oppress alternative theories to defend the consensus. They might ask how science is supposed to proceed if minority ideas are being outcast? How will the next galileo get through? Sometimes discrimination in science is not justified, but my point is that the mere existance of an example of discrimination does not imply something wrong is going on. It has to be taken on a case by case basis. There are geologists who still argue the earth is young. The reason they are biased against in terms of having work on the topic published and getting certain positions is because their peers do not find their arguments credible. That's precisely the kind of argument isn't going to go down well. There is no more indication of temperatures being stable in the last 6 years than at any other point in the last 30 years of temperature rise: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2_lrg.gif Nor should a 6 year stable period imply anything even if it did exist in the last 6 years, given that the periods 1990-1996 and 1981-1987 were relatively stable. If the current warming trend is not primarily anthropogenic then there's no reason to expect it to continue rising. On the otherhand if a cooling trend does occur over the next 10 years it's going to falsify AGW So it's hard to imagine why scientists would put their credibility on the line when the theory faces potential falsification in the very near future.

It's no more discrimatory than peer review itself. Some ideas won't get published, and that's not always unjustified. The sole fact that someone lost their job because of a view they held is not alone unjustified, anymore than someone not getting a paper published is unjustified. If there weren't so many new ideas floating around all the time, most of them wrong, then it would be a lot easier for the genuine ones to get through.

What's the alternative? Allow an ideas free-for-all without any limit? I imagine if NASA were interviewing for a research director position they would turn down any candidate who claimed the big bang didn't happen, and that would be totally justified. Paradigm shifts are difficult to achieve in science, but in time if such a shift is justified it will happen regardless. Galileo is a prime example of this.

What asinine logic. In effect you're saying that all scientists should agree to the same thing regardless of scientific enquiry. Your analogy is even sillier, since it posits the growing number of sceptics as fools, when in fact they are doing their job. No im definitely not saying they should all agree to the same thing. I am saying there are limits. You call my analogy silly, but surely you agree that a geologist who believes the earth was only 6000 years old should not be employed in positions of scientific representation. So when a scientist is kicked out of a position for their viewpoint, it might not necessarily be unjustified.

Yea all those climate scientists driving around in Ferraris.. As for scientists losing positions over alternative views sometimes that's justified. For example if a geology professor at a university started claiming the earth was only 6000 years old, then who could argue that they shouldn't lose their position? That goes double for directors, spokespeople or heads of departments, because they should reflect the underlying views of scientists in their administration. It's no use having 10 scientists in a physics department accepting the big bang yet the head of that department derides it publically all the time and claims the steady state model is true. It makes sense that spokespeople will lose positions if their views start becoming at odds of those they are supposed to be speaking for.

Nope, I never made any such claim. The point made was that earth has warmed in the past, with the implication that therefore man couldn't be causing warming today. That is analogous to pointing out that natural forest fires have occured in the past, as if that is evidence that man cannot be causing them today.

And this paper is far worse than the hockey stick. They can be tested and by extention they can be falsified EmpiricAL data. And why would that be an inconvenient truth? The fact is that today co2 is not following temperature. It's following emissions, so past co2/temperature trends are a completely different topic than discussed in the paper. The paper is dead wrong to conclude that the recent co2 rise is not anthropogenic. Since the 1900s anyway. That's like pointing out that forest fires were occuring millions of years BEFORE arsonists even existed. What's does that prove though? That forest fires today cannot be caused by arsonists? Same thing with the above argument. The planet has warmed and cooled naturally plenty in the past for reasons not connected to greenhouse gases, but how does that mean the planet cannot be warming via increased greenhouse gases today? It's an illogical argument. That's the noun, and was used incorrectly as an adjective in the paper. The adjective is empiricAL.

No this paper is bad. It would not pass peer review of any major (or even intermediate) journal. -Empirical observations -Laboratory experiments are a source of empirical observations. Neither laboratories or experiments are specifically needed. -no "theory based on these" is needed. The hypothesis can be tested without needing to invoke a theory. -There's nothing about a theory here. It's soley about the hypothesis. If they hypothesis can be used to predict future results then it's a useful hypothesis. Seeing if it can be used to predict future results is a test of the hypothesis. -It will be exalted to a scientific theory, not a law of nature. Laws are descriptions, not explainations. Looks like the paper has just slid into a politics editorial... Section 4 "The building of the dogma - recent atmospheric CO2 measurements" focuses on Mauna Loa, as if it is the only co2 monitoring station. It isn't. The paper fails to address any other stations, aircraft measurements, tower measurements, and the fact that they all agree with the rising trend. It also falsely claims that wet chemical measurements were more accurate than modern measurements taken by IR analysis. Common sense alone would tell you that scientists wouldn't switch from an accurate measurement system to a less accurate measurement system.

Pretty bad indeed.

While many skeptics cited and based arguments on the cooling in the original paper without scrutinizing the paper. Eg: realclimate was pointing out that the cooling mentioned in the original paper may be incorrect: Here's another example of a common skeptic argument taking actual research without mentioning the caveats. Coincidentally it's an article from the National Post: But look what came up recently: Kind of blows their false dilemma "if co2 isn't causing it, it must be the common factor - the sun" argument out of the water. Notice they didn't offer any mention of the possibility of something like dust storms causing it. But realclimate already pointed out this possibility over a year and a half ago: Gives a constrast of reliability. When I read both the above articles on realclimate for the first time, in both cases I suspected they were just trying to wriggle out of it by giving unlikely possilities. But in both cases the further research has yeilded results in the directions they mentioned. It's not so much that realclimate mentioned what eventually came true (that could just be luck mixed with giving all the possibilities). But it does show which sources are less reliable precisely because they didn't even mention the possibility of what eventually turned out to be the case.

But it must have caused some of the 4000 years of warming that occured after the co2 started rising...

The fact is it had no effect in the past when it was much much higher. To assume that it does now is not just unscientific but absolutely ridiculous. http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/historical_CO2.html To think that page proves co2 has had no effect in the past is the only ridiculous thing

Humans emit over 26 billion tons of co2 into the atmosphere each year co2 in the atmosphere is rising at about 16 billion tons per year The oceans are absorbing more co2 from the atmosphere than they emit. Volcanoes emit less than 1% of co2 that humans emit. They are a bit player. The cause of the ongoing co2 rise is human emissions. Sometimes you hear that humans only emit a small amount of co2 compared to nature. But nature also absorbs co2. When you take that into account - and you have to - nature is acting to remove co2 from the atmosphere. It isn't a net source of co2 so the co2 rise does not have a natural cause. It's the human emissions that are driving it upward. You can see that from the first two lines of this post which show that humans are emitting almost twice as much co2 needed to account for the rise. If you need sources: human co2 emissions: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.htm atmospheric levels of co2: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm general summary of why co2 is rising: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/fung_01/

Where did they "admit" that? Which contradicts what Monkton claims (the British Columnist), because by factoring in this amplification of warming by water vapor you increase the warming effect of doubling co2. That's why the forcing for co2 is higher than monkton says it should be. It's not because they have "doubled the value for lambda", it's because they have included feedbacks such as the water vapor feedback you mention above. Monkton's calculation is based on such a water vapor feedback not existing. I disagree with that last fact. http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/sun...e.html&edu=high http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/SSN/image/annual.gif http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/resea...ded-temp-pg.gif The correlation between sunspots and temperature in the past is pretty good (notice the large increasing sunspot trend between 1900-1960 matches the early 20th century warming), but that makes it all the more unlikely that the sun is causing the recent warming (1980 onwards) given that there is no such increase in sunspot numbers during the current warming.

We do know that co2 levels increase temperature, what we don't know precisely is by how much. The mainstream figure given is between 1.5-4.5C warming from a doubling of co2, which represents the consensus. But of course there are people who say it's lower than that.

It's not clear how much of the temperature levels in the ice cores are caused by the co2 rises and how much of the co2 level is caused by the temperature level, so the close correlation isn't really evidence for manmade global warming.

Remember the northern latitudes are expected to warm more than the global average (as they are doing at the moment). The warming by 2100 (given as 1.4 to 5.8°C in the new report) is the global average. The higher latitudes will probably be more than that. So they may be refering specifically to expected temepratures around canada.

Yes there is: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/Doc_3rev.pdf The changes proposed are mainly clarfifications, and the proposed changes had to go through the scientific authors again to make sure they reflect the science before being accepted.

I don't see anything crumbling, if anything it's heading the other way and the positions of the skeptics are crumbling. For example recently corrected satellite records show warming in the lower troposphere. A lack of clear warming there used to be an argument used by skeptics against global warming. It was used to claim that the warming seen on the surface was just an artifact of urbanization. I believe even critchton used this argument in his book. The continuing warming trend has also further weakened claims that warming has stopped, or that it never started. Further research during this recent period of warming has found that the sun can explain at most about 35% of the warming seen in the last 3 decades, and that's the most pro-solar conclusion. The 20th century can be reproduced well using climate models, biting into the claims by skeptics that climate models cannot reproduce the 20th century trend. Then we have stuff like the swindled documentary that showed, which backfired on skeptics.

Cheap ad hominem. This is drawing a false parallel in order to obscure the real question, which is selection of right-think scientists. Drawing a parallel between that and creationism is like saying Hirler had scientists and therefore science is Nazism. Ridiculous and not worthy of publishing. Creationists complain all the time about the same kind of right-think scientist selection. Just becuase it is claimed doesn't mean that is the actual reason.

I use the position of scientific bodies as a benchmark for whether there is a consensus on something or not. You use what?