Oh, I thought that maybe you didn't know. The post is pretty stupid. I figure you are too.
Human-induced climate change requires urgent action
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Oh, I thought that maybe you didn't know. The post is pretty stupid. I figure you are too.
How about you jsp? Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Care to weigh in?
Given your command (or lack thereof) of grammar and critical thinking, no. I have better things to do. Last I heard, 39 of every 100,000 air molecules were CO2, and...nevermind, I don't want to find out how innumerate you are.
Really? You don't know if CO2 is a greenhouse gas either? It's like an epidemic of stupid around here.
I didn't even comment on it. You failed to grasp the significance of my point. And your last sentence is pure projection.
Judging by the confusion here, I thought revisiting some basic key principles was in order. Sorry, no Kelly Byron in this one though. But here's a pic to keep up interest.
Mythbusters tests global warming theory - does CO2 warm air?
Mythbusters tests global warming theory - does CO2 warm air?
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mythbusters? that was ricter's only science too... no wonder you were asking me if co2 was a greenhouse gas... you have no practical understanding of the theory.
so let me get this straight you are telling me that you have proven that man made co2 warms because CO2 directly warms the air now? I thought the greenhouse gas theory stated sunlight and (light bulb radiation) passed through co2 to the earth?
if anything... that study shows that co2 is not a blanket but a shield preventing some of the suns energy from getting past the atmosphere to the earth.
so let me get this straight you are telling me that you have proven that man made co2 warms because CO2 directly warms the air now? I thought the greenhouse gas theory stated sunlight and (light bulb radiation) passed through co2 to the earth?
if anything... that study shows that co2 is not a blanket but a shield preventing some of the suns energy from getting past the atmosphere to the earth.
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I think jerm needs to watch again. He is still confused. I guess he did not notice the darkened back of the box.
Jerm, watch a few more times, read up on "greenhouse gasses" and get back to us when you are ready to say whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not. K? Because this is getting inane now.
Jerm, watch a few more times, read up on "greenhouse gasses" and get back to us when you are ready to say whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not. K? Because this is getting inane now.
I haven't heard of the Hab Theory before now. Perhaps I'll look for it on the net when I get time.
James Hansen hypothesized (he may not be the true originator) sometime in the 1980's that since CO2 is a green house gas and we are dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere via our fossil fuel burning that we might be causing the Earth's surface temperature to increase. If the turnover time for CO2 in the atmosphere is very long then we could be in trouble, because even if we greatly cut our CO2 emissions right away we might not see much benefit for perhaps a century or more.
I am no expert when it comes to atmospheric physics, climate, and certainly not meteorology. Fortunately my training and experience is such, however, that I can read and understand most of the the peer review literature in these fields. Actually, in the very beginning of this CO2 climate change business I read a couple of Richard Lindzen's papers, out of curiosity, but then nothing more until fairly recently when I started to get involved, against my better judgement, in these ET forums. (I, like most others, initially accepted the Hansen hypothesis as true without much thought.)
One of the things I've learned, since I became more interested in the topic, is that the extent of agreement among the true experts was being misrepresented and is not nearly so monolithic, nor has it ever been, as one would surmise from media stories and posts such as these in ET. In most fundamental research papers no position at all is taken with regard to whether man is significantly influencing climate for the worse, because most deal with narrowly focused aspects and appropriately narrow conclusions.
When the early research results became available, sure enough, we found that CO2 was reaching what we then believed to be unprecedented levels that accorded well with our estimates of how much additional CO2 we had been adding. On top of that, we found that ocean temperatures were rising, and the rise correlated beautifully with increasing CO2. Ice core data seemed to confirm that current levels of CO2 were as high or higher than they had been for at least a very long time. Plants metabolize C-13 CO2 more slowly than C-12 CO2, so fossil fuels have a higher C12/C13 ratio than the atmosphere in general. If a significant amount of CO2 in the air was of fossil fuel origin we ought to see the C-13/C-12 ratio in air decline as we burn more and more fossil fuel. And when we looked, that's indeed what we saw. We used tree rings, and deuterium and CO2 in ice cores to estimate temperature and atmospheric CO2 in ancient times, not without considerable error however. The pieces seemed to fit the Hansen hypothesis. We were doomed if we didn't do something about our CO2 emissions.
Money could be made, or lost, on either side of the CO2 issue, and environmentalists, too, were involved. The issue was ripe for politicizing and sensationalizing. Egos, personalities, and vested interests became intertwined to the point where it wasn't easy to know where the science left off and pure showmanship had taken over. Even film makers got in on the act. Against this backdrop, objective, dispassionate science was becoming more difficult.
(...continued below)
(My reply to dbPhoenix, continued...)
Our understanding of the chaotic, interlinked phenomena that together account for our atmosphere and our weather was, and is, far too meager to allow us to develop models that can reliably predict the Earth's surface temperature a decade hence, let alone a century later. But undaunted, we developed models anyway, and with exactly the results one would expect. The models are in excellent agreement with the past, because they were fit to past climate data to determine the past values of key parameters. But they are virtually worthless when it comes to predicting future temperatures. There is more than one reason for their failure, but the main reason may be that the premise that underlies all of them is wrong. They all assume that temperature is strong function of CO2 concentration, because CO2 is, after all, a green house gas, and because of the strong correlation between rising CO2 and rising ocean temperatures from the late 19th century onward -- until the last 17 years of course. Failure of these models, which all depend on the underlying premise of the Hansen hypothesis, is just one more nail in the Hansen hypothesis coffin. The models have proven no more reliable in predicting future temperature based on CO2 concentration then a deck of Taro cards would have been. Nevertheless, we use them anyway to predict dire consequences if we do not get our CO2 act together, and soon!
Our politicians have split into two camps, those who think they can get re-elected without support from the fossil fuel industry and those that think they can't, or don't want to give up easy money. There have been enough in the former camp to facilitate acceleration of the science by injections of money. Meanwhile the political and media side show continues. We have learned "inconvenient truths" as more data gathering satellites have been put up, more cores drilled, and more real-time is data collected and examined.
While all scientists recognize that correlation does not prove cause, scientists share the predilections we all share. It is easy to become mesmerized by strong correlation. The charts make colorful, though often misleading, illustrations for media use. These pop up incessantly to impress upon us our precarious situation, garner viewer- and reader-ship, and, of course, bring in advertising dollars.
New information that would cast serious doubt on the Hansen hypothesis wasn't widely available or accepted as correct in the scientific community until after a majority of us everyday citizens (except, of course, those who would lose, or make less, money if fossil fuel burning was curtailed) were of one mind, i.e., something must be done.
Ironically, we are now going to be forced, like it or not, to deal with a VERY "inconvenient truth"! The latest data and analysis will require that James Hansen's premise, i.e., that CO2 is driving our temperature up, be reconsidered! I don't think we are paying enough attention quite yet, but we will not be able to ignore forever the inconsistencies between observation and "theory." It isn't going to be easy to admit mistakes because we've got our egos and pride on the line and we've let ourselves get emotionally involved.. no thanks to the media and politics. We've become victims of our own egos. It's particularly hard for those in the environmental camp, toward where I myself tend to gravitate, to admit that the Koch Brothers might have been right all along. (But we can at least tell ourselves that they got on the right side of the Hansen issue by chance, rather then brilliant reasoning.)
Had we not gotten so personally involved, the realization that we weren't going to burn up any time soon would have been welcome news. Certainly those who were licking their chops over the money they were going to make dealing in carbon credits and the politicians who had staked out a position in the "we are all going to be incinerated camp" will not be easily dislodged from their entrenched positions. For them, "Las Vegas and step on it", typifies their eagerness to push forward with carbon emission controls.
New data coming mostly from the remote sensing satellites, and new analyses done on old data are showing results consistent with previous observations but inconsistent with the bed rock premise of the Hansen hypothesis. For example, it's been recognized ever since the ice core data became available that the Earth's climate shows a strong cyclical pattern, but Hansen adherents had to scramble to explain the phase relationship between CO2 and temperature in the core record. If CO2 was driving the temperature, why did the temperature sometimes lead CO2? Now comes the NCDC data for short term cyclical temperature swings, but these short cycle swings are of the same magnitude we observed for net, integrated temperature change from the late 19th Century on! The short cycle swings are associated with CO2 changes of only a few ppm, but the century long swings, of the same magnitude, are associated, according to the Hansen hypothesis, with a CO2 change of more than a hundred ppm. This is possible if Temperature is virtually independent of CO2, and something other than CO2 concentration is driving temperature. The Hansen hypothesis is in trouble.
It turns out that the observations inconsistent with Hansen are consistent with the entire body of climate information so long as the Hansen hypothesis is rejected and a new hypothesis is adopted, viz., temperature is being driven primarily by something other than CO2 concentration.
And this is why we should all care about the Hansen hypothesis and whether it is true. Billions of dollars in resources, and possibly even our continued existence on this planet, depend on whether this hypothesis is correct.
Our understanding of the chaotic, interlinked phenomena that together account for our atmosphere and our weather was, and is, far too meager to allow us to develop models that can reliably predict the Earth's surface temperature a decade hence, let alone a century later. But undaunted, we developed models anyway, and with exactly the results one would expect. The models are in excellent agreement with the past, because they were fit to past climate data to determine the past values of key parameters. But they are virtually worthless when it comes to predicting future temperatures. There is more than one reason for their failure, but the main reason may be that the premise that underlies all of them is wrong. They all assume that temperature is strong function of CO2 concentration, because CO2 is, after all, a green house gas, and because of the strong correlation between rising CO2 and rising ocean temperatures from the late 19th century onward -- until the last 17 years of course. Failure of these models, which all depend on the underlying premise of the Hansen hypothesis, is just one more nail in the Hansen hypothesis coffin. The models have proven no more reliable in predicting future temperature based on CO2 concentration then a deck of Taro cards would have been. Nevertheless, we use them anyway to predict dire consequences if we do not get our CO2 act together, and soon!
Our politicians have split into two camps, those who think they can get re-elected without support from the fossil fuel industry and those that think they can't, or don't want to give up easy money. There have been enough in the former camp to facilitate acceleration of the science by injections of money. Meanwhile the political and media side show continues. We have learned "inconvenient truths" as more data gathering satellites have been put up, more cores drilled, and more real-time is data collected and examined.
While all scientists recognize that correlation does not prove cause, scientists share the predilections we all share. It is easy to become mesmerized by strong correlation. The charts make colorful, though often misleading, illustrations for media use. These pop up incessantly to impress upon us our precarious situation, garner viewer- and reader-ship, and, of course, bring in advertising dollars.
New information that would cast serious doubt on the Hansen hypothesis wasn't widely available or accepted as correct in the scientific community until after a majority of us everyday citizens (except, of course, those who would lose, or make less, money if fossil fuel burning was curtailed) were of one mind, i.e., something must be done.
Ironically, we are now going to be forced, like it or not, to deal with a VERY "inconvenient truth"! The latest data and analysis will require that James Hansen's premise, i.e., that CO2 is driving our temperature up, be reconsidered! I don't think we are paying enough attention quite yet, but we will not be able to ignore forever the inconsistencies between observation and "theory." It isn't going to be easy to admit mistakes because we've got our egos and pride on the line and we've let ourselves get emotionally involved.. no thanks to the media and politics. We've become victims of our own egos. It's particularly hard for those in the environmental camp, toward where I myself tend to gravitate, to admit that the Koch Brothers might have been right all along. (But we can at least tell ourselves that they got on the right side of the Hansen issue by chance, rather then brilliant reasoning.)
Had we not gotten so personally involved, the realization that we weren't going to burn up any time soon would have been welcome news. Certainly those who were licking their chops over the money they were going to make dealing in carbon credits and the politicians who had staked out a position in the "we are all going to be incinerated camp" will not be easily dislodged from their entrenched positions. For them, "Las Vegas and step on it", typifies their eagerness to push forward with carbon emission controls.
New data coming mostly from the remote sensing satellites, and new analyses done on old data are showing results consistent with previous observations but inconsistent with the bed rock premise of the Hansen hypothesis. For example, it's been recognized ever since the ice core data became available that the Earth's climate shows a strong cyclical pattern, but Hansen adherents had to scramble to explain the phase relationship between CO2 and temperature in the core record. If CO2 was driving the temperature, why did the temperature sometimes lead CO2? Now comes the NCDC data for short term cyclical temperature swings, but these short cycle swings are of the same magnitude we observed for net, integrated temperature change from the late 19th Century on! The short cycle swings are associated with CO2 changes of only a few ppm, but the century long swings, of the same magnitude, are associated, according to the Hansen hypothesis, with a CO2 change of more than a hundred ppm. This is possible if Temperature is virtually independent of CO2, and something other than CO2 concentration is driving temperature. The Hansen hypothesis is in trouble.
It turns out that the observations inconsistent with Hansen are consistent with the entire body of climate information so long as the Hansen hypothesis is rejected and a new hypothesis is adopted, viz., temperature is being driven primarily by something other than CO2 concentration.
And this is why we should all care about the Hansen hypothesis and whether it is true. Billions of dollars in resources, and possibly even our continued existence on this planet, depend on whether this hypothesis is correct.