Global Warming (AGW) - Real or Not

[jllundqu]

I'm on the fence, currently. I think that man has an impact on the climate. I think it's foolish to think we can emit gigatonnes of Co2 into the atmosphere and not have an impact. My question is about the degree of impact.

My sister, the environmentalist, pointed me to this website which contains a collection of arguments and links in an effort to 'convince' me that AGW is real.

So I thought I would share them with the group.

Enjoy!

http://grist.org/series/skeptics/

Below is a complete listing of the articles in “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:
•Stages of Denial,
•Scientific Topics,
•Types of Argument, and
•Levels of Sophistication.

Individual articles will appear under multiple headings and may even appear in multiple subcategories in the same heading.

Stages of Denial
1.There’s nothing happening a.Inadequate evidence ◾There is no evidence
◾One record year is not global warming
◾The temperature record is simply unreliable
◾One hundred years is not enough
◾Glaciers have always grown and receded
◾Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
◾Mauna Loa is a volcano
◾The scientists aren’t even sure

b.Contradictory evidence ◾It’s cold today in Wagga Wagga
◾Antarctic ice is growing
◾The satellites show cooling
◾What about mid-century cooling?
◾Global warming stopped in 1998
◾But the glaciers are not melting
◾Antarctic sea ice is increasing
◾Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
◾Sea level in the Arctic is falling
◾Some sites show cooling

c.No consensus ◾Global warming is a hoax
◾There is no consensus
◾Position statements hide debate
◾Consensus is collusion
◾Peiser refuted Oreskes


2.We don’t know why it’s happening a.Models don’t work ◾We cannot trust unproven computer models
◾The models don’t have clouds
◾If aerosols are blocking the sun, the south should warm faster
◾Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high

b.Prediction is impossible ◾We can’t even predict the weather next week
◾Chaotic systems are not predictable

c.We can’t be sure ◾Hansen has been wrong before
◾If we can’t understand the past, how can we understand the present?
◾The scientists aren’t even sure
◾They predicted global cooling in the 1970s


3.Climate change is natural a.It happened before ◾It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum
◾The medieval warm period was just as warm as today
◾Greenland used to be green
◾Global warming is nothing new!
◾The hockey stick is broken
◾Vineland was full of grapes

b.It’s part of a natural change ◾Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle
◾Mars and Pluto are warming too
◾CO2 in the air comes mostly from volcanoes
◾The null hypothesis says global warming is natural
◾Climate is always changing
◾Natural emissions dwarf human emissions
◾The CO2 rise is natural
◾We are just recovering from the LIA

c.It’s not caused by CO2 ◾Climate scientists dodge the subject of water vapor
◾Water vapor accounts for almost all of the greenhouse effect
◾There is no proof that CO2 is causing global warming
◾Mars and Pluto are warming too
◾CO2 doesn’t lead, it lags
◾What about mid-century cooling?
◾Geological history does not support CO2’s importance
◾Historically, CO2 never caused temperature change
◾It’s the sun, stupid


4.Climate change is not bad
a.The effects are good ◾What’s wrong with warmer weather?


5.Climate change can’t be stopped
a.Too late ◾Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing
b.It’s someone else’s problem ◾Why should the U.S. join Kyoto when China and India haven’t?
◾The U.S. is a net CO2 sink
c.Economically infeasible ◾Climate change mitigation would lead to disaster

Each one is a link to a piece the supposedly provides evidence and explanation to the contrary.

[donnay]

Yes there is climate change--it's called, winter, spring, summer and fall.

[dannno]

Each one is a link to a piece the supposedly provides evidence and explanation to the contrary.

Not completely true.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-...ly-unreliable/

[oyarde]

No , I am not a believer .

[shakey1]

I dunno, but if there is, the goobermint has no business trying to fix it. It's out of their jurisdiction... it's out of their league. They would only do it to place further burdens on you & me.

[Danke]

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Ca...l#anchor147264



There has historically been much more CO2 in our atmosphere than exists today. For example, during the Jurassic Period (200 mya), average CO2 concentrations were about 1800 ppm or about 4.7 times higher than today. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Cambrian Period, nearly 7000 ppm -- about 18 times higher than today.
The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were theonly geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when globaltemperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.

[jllundqu]

Not completely true.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-...ly-unreliable/

Same with this one. Says the 'hockey stick graph' is hotly debated, but if that's an issue for you, simply discard it and look at the other data

[helmuth_hubener]

Thought experiment:

If we were to find out, somehow, that the Sun was going to increase output and so Earth was going to get 1% more solar radiation in the next hundred years (which would cause a warming effect), would the people wanting to Save The Planet (TM) from global warming advocate:

• Spending 15 Trillion dollars to build a solar shade in space to protect us from this extra 1% and prevent this warming from occurring?

No?

They wouldn't?!?

Say it ain't so.

Also, are these Planet Savers calling for:

• the construction of an asteroid and comet defense system?

This is a far more serious threat to life on the planet.

No hysteria about that? None at all? No alarm, no publicity, no constant panic?

Hmm, I wonder why. It couldn't be that they're not actually concerned about The Planet and there's something else at work (such as amygdala damage) motivating them, could it?

[Anti Federalist]

No, don't believe a bit of it.

Man's influence is tiny compared to the total area of the globe.

Where I sit right now, 20,000 years ago (a blink of an eye geologically) was under a sheet of ice.

That did not melt away due to man burning coal and oil in the last two hundred years.

AGW is simply a means by which global authoritarians can exert total, complete and absolute control over every single human being on the planet.

[heavenlyboy34]

I wish AGCC was real. Especially AGW. That way we could have long-ass growing seasons and more plants/critters would thrive. For whatever reason, enviro-fascists tend to forget that cold kills off most organisms. Those that thrive in cold aren't particularly plentiful. And their beloved rainforests are definitely NOT cold.

[AuH20]

The sun can incinerate the planet irrespective of what humans do or don't do. With that said, I am alarmed at the prospect of rampant habitat destruction caused directly by human activity. Conservationists once again have been misdirected to do the bidding of evil men by wasting their goodwill on Global Warming Hysteria.

AGW has always been a titanic scam predicated on fear mongering us to a desired outcome of their choice. The Club of Rome even went as far to make this damning public statement in 1993.

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention… and thus the real enemy, then, is humanity itself… believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is a real one or… one invented for the purpose.

[Suzanimal]

What is this, some kind of recovery group for climate deniers? I gone through all the stages of denial and I'm still skeptical.

Stages of Denial
1.There’s nothing happening a.Inadequate evidence ◾There is no evidence
◾One record year is not global warming
◾The temperature record is simply unreliable
◾One hundred years is not enough
◾Glaciers have always grown and receded
◾Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
◾Mauna Loa is a volcano
◾The scientists aren’t even sure

[Anti Federalist]

What is this, some kind of recovery group for climate deniers? I gone through all the stages of denial and I'm still skeptical.

In the not too distant future, that will be prima facie evidence of mental illness and the state will forcibly confine you for "treatment".

[dannno]

I wish AGCC was real. Especially AGW. That way we could have long-ass growing seasons and more plants/critters would thrive. For whatever reason, enviro-fascists tend to forget that cold kills off most organisms. Those that thrive in cold aren't particularly plentiful. And their beloved rainforests are definitely NOT cold.

But muh ocean acidifuhcation.

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

Isn't their fundamental fact the earth has warmed 1.8 degrees over many decades, since the 1800s? If so, what is the margin of error?

[donnay]

I was watching "Mysteries at the Museum" last night and one of the segments was talking about Mary Shelley and her writing of the book Frankenstein. It was 1816, and a Indonesian volcano caused major climate change around the world. It was noted in the story as, "The summer that never was."

Year Without a Summer

The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year, the Summer that Never Was, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death)[1] because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F).[2] This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[3]

Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (the largest eruption in at least 1,300 years after the extreme weather events of 535–536), perhaps plus the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines. The Earth had already been in a centuries-long period of global cooling that started in the 14th century. Known today as the Little Ice Age, it had already caused considerable agricultural distress in Europe. The Little Ice Age's existing cooling was aggravated by the eruption of Tambora, which occurred during its concluding decades.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

The year without a summer

The following year, 1816, was exceptionally cold and wet and came to be known as the “year without a summer”. What Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “this end of the World Weather” led to incidences of famine, political unrest, and disease across the globe.

The summer of 1816 is also known as one of the most productive periods in the history of English literature. This is not least because it saw the conception of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as major works by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their friend Lord Byron. All were composed during the time that the three spent together near Geneva.

A mixture of terrible weather, the sublime Alpine landscapes that they visited, and their interest in science led them to think hard about the vulnerability of human communities living with uncontrollable natural forces. They even considered the possibility of human extinction.

A key concern for Byron and the Shelleys was global cooling. Responding to contemporary geological theories (and no doubt the unnaturally cold temperature), Percy Shelley argued that the glaciers around Mont Blanc were continually “augmenting”. In a letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, he raised the possibility that “this globe which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost by the encroachments of the polar ice”. And his poem “Mont Blanc” describes glaciers that “creep | Like snakes that watch their prey”; a “flood of ruin” that threatens human existence.

Byron goes further in his poem “Darkness”, imagining the dimming of the entire universe: “The icy earth | Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” In a chillingly apocalyptic vision, the growing cold and darkness leads to resource wars, ecosystem collapse, famine, and eventually the destruction of all life on Earth, leaving it “a lump of death”.

The extinction of the human species is also addressed in Frankenstein and here again it is linked to global cooling. Victor eventually destroys his work on the Creature’s companion due to his fear that the two might procreate and supplant humanity. Significantly, the Creature is much better adapted to cold conditions than his creator. Frankenstein raises the spectre of a post-human future in which a stronger species develops that is able to flourish on an icy globe.

http://theconversation.com/why-a-vol...ropocene-64984

[BubbleBarn]

Well our government is now doing "stratospheric aerosol injections" aka chemtrails to combat this supposed "global warming". The Director of the CIA admitted it last year in this video.

https://youtu.be/LfH5_BiaP8Y

[timosman]

I dunno, but if there is, the goobermint has no business trying to fix it. It's out of their jurisdiction... it's out of their league. They would only do it to place further burdens on you & me.

Has this ever prevented government trolls from actually trying?

[helmuth_hubener]

I'm on the fence, currently. I think that man has an impact on the climate. I think it's foolish to think we can emit gigatonnes of Co2 into the atmosphere and not have an impact.

You have come to a non-meaningful conclusion. Everything has an "impact" on everything else, at least everything within its expanding-at-light-speed bubble.

You need to define the question in controversy more precisely in order to come up with a meaningful answer.

[oyarde]

Isn't their fundamental fact the earth has warmed 1.8 degrees over many decades, since the 1800s? If so, what is the margin of error?

1.95

[Zippyjuan]

I was watching "Mysteries at the Museum" last night and one of the segments was talking about Mary Shelley and her writing of the book Frankenstein. It was 1816, and a Indonesian volcano caused major climate change around the world. It was noted in the story as, "The summer that never was."


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer


http://theconversation.com/why-a-vol...ropocene-64984

If emissions from a volcano can alter the weather and the environment, can the emission from human factories also impact the environment?

[r3volution 3.0]

Is the climate changing?

---Of course, it's always changing.

Are humans responsible?

---To some extent, we must be, simply as a matter of logic.

Do climate scientists know with any certainty how much/what kind of an effect human beings are having?

---I kindly doubt it.

Does anyone know with any certainty that remediation would even be cost effective, relative doing nothing?

---Definitely not.

The last point there is the critical one IMO, and the one most often ignored.

When the climate scientists can make more accurate predictions, so that the economists can estimate costs/benefits, we'll talk.

Till then, this is nothing but rationalization for socialistic policies people want to implement for other reasons.