Somebody asked to clarify my stand on this, I think.
About the fancy scientific independence ideals, read IPCC's mission. It clearly states that it researches human caused climate changes. If I were nasty, I could point out that anything coming from there also is biased, since their personal working places depend on finding those connections.
Well, we know that C02 has a greenhouse effect itself, that can be easily tested in the lab.
Yes, I agree with this.
We also know that the temperature in the last 200 years rose at a rate far higher than every climatic change in earth history. (I think more than 20 times faster)
That is a pretty bold statement, regarding the whole earth history. What is the evidence supporting this?
I just wonder, why shouldnt C02 heat up the earth if it is undoubtedly having the effect of holding back infrared rays, while letting "normal" and ultraviolet light through.
It might be worthwile to check out this, actually quite fresh data from last year. I found the Spencer's article itself (not linked here) quite interesting, and I find it quite well fulfilling the scientific requirements. Worth checking out, definetely. Oh, and I know about guys views about God, so no need to point that out . It shouldn't really matter if he has a point about climate, which I suspect he has, having been constructing NASA's weather measurement satellites for some years.
http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20070320152338-19776.pdfhttp://www.uah.edu/News/newsread.php?newsID=875Shortly: Atmosphere contains more H2O than Co2. H2O is a lot worse than CO2 in terms of green house effect. Since the H2O vapour effects are not understood, anything coming from the computer models must be treated with uncertainity. In the IPCC's report it is stated that the H2O content remains pretty much constant in atmosphere, while there is no explanation why it is so - and it is written that this isn't a well understood area in the models. In Spencer's article, it is shown that there is a flaw in the climate models used in predicting the temperatures, the measured effect is actually the opposite of what is stated in the models.
One of the interesting factors here is the sea level rise (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise). It has been been going up before CO2 outputs were so large as nowadays. The important factor is that there is no consensus about if the sea level rise is accelerating since 1900s, something what would be expected if the CO2 had a large impact.
It is also clear by comparing the emissions to the atmosphere volume that human emmissions are having an effect in the C02 concentration.
I'm quite sure human actions have a measurable effect on CO2 concentration.
Then again somebody questioned the sun activity as causes here. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with satellite instruments measuring the solar flux, but it would be interesting to see if they can measure a fraction of watt up there in absolute terms. For your reference, it is not that easy on the ground, either. Yeah, put a sensor there and so on, no problemo about that, but how do you do it exactly when there are sampling times, measurement frequencies, sensor types, measurement areas, noise and so on that affect the result...
What is known is that the solar activity cycle does change climate. However, this seems to be dismissed as there is no current evidence it could have changed, but this could be a limit of the sensors themselves. I suppose it will be better seen as the sun starts flaring again and dedicated sensors will be measuring these effects.
--- To the other topic then ---
Flipside brought an interesting point of view, it doesn't really matter what is causing it but can we stop it? It could be dangerous, if we don't know what it is about. Soot in the atmosphere has a documented effect of dimming the irradiance on ground level. I haven't heard about this option from any agencies, but it is quite certain that it would work, based on experiences with volcano eruptions. The thing is, we already have the delivery equipment to do this, namely the airplanes. It is the fastest, best-known method, and could be started almost immediately if this was seen as a real threat.
Anything else is multi-billion euro business. One of the things that I always thought strange that Western countries are supposed to curtain their relatively stabile emissions, while developing countries that hold most of the population on Earth can put out as much as they want. Personal buying decision effecting this would be stopping buying anything from China and India.
Unfortunately, views like this are not politically correct, but are the only reasonable way if the global warming is really a threat. Common sense dictates that the output must be slowed down where it is growing at the fastest rate, especially when quite a lot of people more are doing it. Otherwise, it will end up so that Western countries give up the technological edge, and turn out to be putting out a lot more emissions while developing countries do nothing!
Off the record, this is coming from a person that lives 3 km away from the sea, about 10 m above the sea level. And I'm already regretting I put two hours of my weekend on this post, since nobody is going to take it seriously anyway.
Mika
