And now brace yourself for an ice age

Jenn

That is incredibly simplified and wrong.

Experts are now saying that at the time of Snowball earth (630 million years ago) the planet was shrouded in greehouse gases, in particular CO2.

So no, more CO2 isn't equal to more heat.

richardb70

Hi Nik - when you say "growing voice", can you support this? I'm well aware that some scientists in the IPCC (including Dr Lindzen) are sceptical - the so-called "100% consensus" is a myth. Like other fields, it can only be good for science to have the theories challenged! However, last time I checked, the percentage of IPCC scientists who believe in AGW are 90% .

And just because one scientist is a doubting voice, and publishes a couple of papers, doesn't mean that the whole mountain of evidence will collapse...

deckingman

IPCC. This is the "unbiased", scientific body who's outpoorings are treated as Gospel.


Yet it's stated mission is to assess "the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant to understanding the risk of human induced climate change".

It is not set up to conduct impartial research which would focus on all causes of climate change. An impartial,
disinterested panel would consider all the main drivers of changing climate. At the top of the list must come the Sun, that vast thermonuclear furnace at the centre of our universe from which comes all the heat energy received by Earth and indeed all the planets in the solar system. In particular, the interactions of solar magnetic cycles, sunspot cycles and cosmic radiation have recently been shown to correlate well over millenial timescales with planetary temperatures. A disinterested panel would also look at climate change linked to the Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity), axial tilt (or obliquity); Earth's axial orientation (or precession); Earth's evolving shape (or dynamic oblateness); Earth’s magnetic field; the rotational velocity of Earth’s core; tectonic movements of the Earth’s surface; volcanic eruptions; circulation patterns of the oceans; salinity and chemistry of the oceans; reflectivity of the Earth (or albedo); variations in atmospheric water vapour, clouds and cloudiness. Somewhere close to last on the list would come minute variations in trace atmospheric gases, such as carbon dioxide. IPCC, for reasons of government policy - primarily European government policy - focuses solely on anthropogenic global warming, or AGW,


If you set up a bureaucracy to investigate human-induced climate change, naturally the first thing it's going to do
is establish that it's actually there.


It was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP), two organizations of the United Nations. The IPCC does not carry out its own original research, nor does it do the work of monitoring climate or related phenomena itself. A main activity of the IPCC is publishing special reports on topics relevant to the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).


The IPCC is not a scientific body but a governmental one; it employs bureaucrats, not scientists; its chairman, for
example, Rajendra Pachauri, is a railway engineer.

Every five years or so, IPCC publishes ‘assessment reports’, of which the fourth and latest, called AR4, came out in 2007. The most-quoted part is the government-written Summary for Policymakers, which, pursuant to IPCC rules, was published before the rest of it. In other words,
the political conclusions preceded any objective evaluation of scientific knowledge both temporally and philosophically.

This by itself is a corruption of the scientific process, but it goes unremarked in official quarters.

The research portions are prepared by three working groups, the first - WG1 - focuses on the physical science; the second - WG2 - on impacts; and the third - WG3 - on mitigation. Since Working Groups 2 and 3 start off by accepting the conclusions of WG1, if these are wrong, then the entire work product of WG2 and 3 must also be wrong. So the entire edifice of AR4's logic rests on the credibility of WG1; and the entire credibility of WG1 rests on ch.9 of its 'physical science report': if ch.9 is undermined, then IPCC’s
entire AGW argument is compromised and all the catastrophist conclusions of the AR4 report collapse.
Disclosures show that ch.9 had 53 authors, all of whom were part of a network who previously worked together. The last exposure draft received comments from many reviewers, only 5 of whom explicitly endorsed the entire chapter.

So a more accurate view on IPCC’s basic claim in AR4 - that man-made CO2 is causing temperatures to rise dangerously
- is that 53 possibly biased authors and 5 reviewers agree with it – far from IPCC’s duplicitous claim that 2,500
‘scientists’ (most of whom are actually not scientists at all) agree upon so-called ‘settled science’.

DPinBucks

Yes it is. Yes it is. Yes it is. (We need a Smilie for head against brick wall).

What the planet does with that heat is another issue, but more CO2 will trap more heat.

Of course the planet was shrouded with CO2 during Snowball Earth periods. How the hell do you think they ended? CO2 didn't cause SE; CO2-driven greenhouse effects finished them.

SE events were probably caused by a random increase in polar ice causing a runaway albedo effect. There was no way out of this until random volcanic CO2 trapped enough heat.

DPinBucks

Whether the IPCC is disinterested or not, many many disinterested climatologists, mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, geologists and palaeontologists have looked at all the factors you mention. The result is simply to confirm the obvious: tiny or not, anthropogenic CO2 is having a significant effect on climatic trends. Dynamic systems are metastable. Alter any contributing factor and the whole shebang shifts to a new stability. No other factors have been able to account for the warming trend of the past 20 years.

GasDad

Until it reaches the point where all the heat in a very narrow band is already being trapped - at this point adding more C02 will not make any difference.

I'd like to know what this saturation point is.

deckingman

There is that. It's also a bit more complicated because the band where water vapour absorbs long wave radiation overlaps the band in which CO2 absorbs. Water vapour is by far more of a "greenhouse" gas because of it's proliferation (approx 4% as opposed to 0.04% for CO2).

The argument is that heat arrives from the sun by short wave radiation and is emitted back out by long wave radiation. CO2 alows short wave radiation to reach the earth but reflects that portion of the long wave radiation which falls within the absorption band of CO2 back (but only that part which comes into contact with CO2.

I'll most likely get flamed for this but people will describe the CO2 as a blanket around the earth but it's more like a net (mostly holes). The holes are 99.96% of the area and the threads are 0.04% of the area (the concentration of CO2). What mankind has done is to increase the thickness of the thread from 0.03% to 0.04%. So if you had a greenhouse made from netting rather than glass (which would equate to 100% CO2) how much warmer do you think it would be with strands making up 0.04% of the area as opposed to 0.03%? I'd say not at all because the heat is escaping through the holes. Technically, you could say that the thicker thread must be trapping more heat than the thinner thread and if you ignored alll other factors (as Dpin will persist in doing), then you would conclude that your greenhouse must therefore be hotter.

deckingman

That last sentence is a joke right?

NikB

Here are some of them
List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As you can see it is not just a single scientist but many.

simonoaks

Just been reading about paleoclimatologists, as I have never heard of this field of science before. My exploration into global warming is getting very complicated!

Anyway, I use this site a lot and came across this a very interesting article:

HowStuffWorks "Probing the History of Climate Change"