Is Global Warming Unstoppable?

Im no longer skeptical.
RadioPrius showed a graph of the previous interglacial warming periods which made me 99% certain global warming is natural.
The only thing that bugged me was the glaciers melting.
Now that there is proof that meltng glaciers is a natural occurrence, Im convinced that AGW is a fallacy promoted by Enron and now by Goldman Sachs to profit from carbon offsets.

 

This one.

 

To compare the current observations with glaciations is incorrect. Natural glaciations arise and recede over hundreds of thousands of years and are the result of well-understood processes. The key with anthropogenic global warming is that it is happening over decades. The timeframe is precisely what shows it is anthropogenic and not a natural cycle.

I have explained before, expertise is required to understand the complex and sometimes downright counter-intuitive nature of complex subjects.

I am going to make some heads explode and cite John Kerry at Copenhagen:

"Ladies and Gentlemen: Here in Copenhagen, now and forever, amateur hour is over. It’s time for science fact to trump science fiction."

PS: Note also how deniers only appear to have an argument when they use incorrect timeframes or ranges.

The lack of consensus keeps coming up so I am just going to post this graph again:



It is false there are thousands of climatologists that disagree with AGW.

 

Your 'consensus' graph is from 2008, what do you think that graph would look like right now? AGW is toast at least until the data can be researched by a neutral third party. Kerry has 25 votes in the senate, not 50 not 55 not 59, but 25. do you think the climate bill would pass the house right now? Not a chance. I still think Obama is looking for any way to avoid appearing in Copenhagen.

 

Just like Ufourya said, the statement that you made is this:

Just a note again, I firmly believe that humans are contributing to change of temperature on earth. But I do not believe that things are as bad or as dire as Al Gore would have you believe.

I do not agree with you that global warming is "based on reproducible scientific experiments, the vast majority of them lead to conclusive proof!" The fact is there isn't conclusive proof of AGW. None. We have some pretty smart scientists doing a lot of studies and trying to reason a lot of things out, but there is not solid proof.

Where I come from the phrase "based on" means "firmly established." You said that global warming is "based on" reproducible scientific experiments, the vast majority of them leading to conclusive proof.

This is simply not true.

That's what you are being called out on. You have been told at least 5 times that you are being called out on that exact statement. And then you keep side stepping it.

 

See what I mean folks! And Malorn is right behind him. It's not about the science at all..

LOL!

 

This is not "reproducible scientific experiments, the vast majority of them lead to conclusive proof!" I do believe that CO2 is contributing to some of our warming, but it is not the only thing. Merely having increased CO2 and change in temperature means nothing. That is pure correlation, not causality.

The fact is we see changes in temperature throughout the history of the world. We need better methods and better computer models to build confidence in the world's population and demonstrate to denialists and other skeptics that CO2 is strongly correlated with increased temperatures. The fact is, and it's a travesty that this is true, that there is a poor correlation between CO2 and temperatures. The only part of the last 150 years that strongly correlates with CO2 is the last 30-35 years.

You are 100% wrong. You said "Even if you argue there are natural causes behind the warming (which there aren't)." The scientific literature attributes some (not the majority, but some) of our warming to the sun. The computer models they use try to discern what percent of our warming is due to the sun and other natural causes and what percent is due to anthropogenic causes.

I am for curbing emissions, but we should not be spreading misinformation.

 

Sorry I lost the link in the quote somehow.

Fibb222, did you read that article? It basically said that we have previously seen much higher temperatures in the poles than we see now, and that rising sea levels is very natural. That was 12,000 years ago, before humans had produced any appreciable level of CO2. It ended by stating that it is "predicted" that it could be even worse.

All that article shows is that the "catastrophic" rise of sea levels are very natural and when it happens again it will be unrelated to the anthropogenic production of green house gases.

If you are going to post articles on the AGW side, please read them first.

 

I smell yet another troll passing himself off in much the way RP started out.

 

The science? you mean splicing together two sets of data to create the data which supports your case(mann hockey stick)? using [olitical pressure to silence critics and make sure that scientific journals only print papers with one viewpoint, studies being 'peer-reviewed' by a chosen few? Or how about the latest news, hadley using only station data that show a warming trend and leaving the rest out of the data? I am not a scientist but I don't think any of that is 'science', isn't science about searching for the truth using verifiable data?

 

Yes. Models take into account forcing by the sun and this is the current understanding:

"However, researchers at the MPS have shown that the Sun can be responsible for, at most, only a small part of the warming over the last 20-30 years. They took the measured and calculated variations in the solar brightness over the last 150 years and compared them to the temperature of the Earth. Although the changes in the two values tend to follow each other for roughly the first 120 years, the Earth’s temperature has risen dramatically in the last 30 years while the solar brightness has not appreciably increased in this time."

Max Planck Society - Press Release

Do you have a reference that shows the sun or other natural sources can be responsible for the accelerating recent warming?

 

The earth has been cooling since 1999.

 

Another claim popular with denialists debunked:

Russian analysis confirms 20th century CRU temperatures : Deltoid

The problem here is the IEA report does not support the claims made in the news story. I've reproduced the final graph from the report below. The red curve is the temperature trend using the 121 Russian stations that CRU has released data for, while the blue hockey stick is from a larger set of 476 stations. I've put them on top of the CRU temperatures for northern extratropics. The red and blue curves agree very well in the period after 1950, thus confirming the CRU temperatures. Well done, IEA!




The red and blue curves do diverge in the 19th century, but the one that provides more support for anthropogenic global warming is the blue hockey stick. The red curve shows warming in the 19th century before there were significant CO2 emissions, so it weakens the case that global warming is man-made. If CRU (not HAdley as claimed in the Russian news story) have "tampered" with the data, it would seem that they must have been trying to make a case against AGW.

The IEA analysis is, in any case, misguided. CRU has not released all the station data they use, so the red curve is not the CRU temperature trend for Russia at all. If you want that, all you have to do is download the gridded data and average all the grid cells in Russia. You have to wonder why the IEA did not do this.

Since Russia is a pretty fair chunk of the land north of 30 degrees north, the CRU graph above is a rough approximation of the what the CRUTEM3 trends for Russia is, and you can see that it looks like the blue curve and not the red one.

 

Er,, but you said this:

And you just stated at the top of this post that there are some natural forces behind global warming. I agree with what you posted at the top, but in this quote you did not attribute any of the 1980 - 1998 warming to the sun.

I truly believe we should be careful with what we write. If we are careless it gives fodder to the trolls.

 

No it hasn't. The caption in this graph is hilarious considering the "analyses" shown here in the past few days:



RealClimate: A warming pause?

 

No. There are natural forcings that naturally warm the planet and there there is AGW. It's perfectly written if you don't nitpick and read in context.

 

I do not believe we should cherry pick any data.

But, if you accept that graph that shows the most recent 10 years are warming, then you absolutely and undeniably must accept the other graph posted by the denialists that shows the 8 or 9 most recent years of cooling.

 

Yes, but the two are operating at the same time.

 

Read the caption. Denialists are likely not including all the data points.

 

That's the problem isn't it. One does not diminish the other. They are additive. Finding more causes of natural warming doesn't alleviate the human-generated one.