Let me ask (or pose) something: What would it take to have you be convinced enough, so that, you would write, here, in your own articles, “this demonstrates to me, that we, as a global community, don’t really need to worry about CO2 right now. This certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continually strive to develop the most efficient, cleanest, and envronmentally approprrate technology and solutions that we can. We should constantly work to clean up old messes too and make the environment as good as new. . But worrying about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere wouldn’t be the best use of our time and talent right now.”

What would you need to see published? Where? Any restrictions placed on whom? It is assumed the publication(s) would only be done to deliver a message – and certainly not to advance anyone’s individual interests or profits.

This is serious, and maybe there is no complete answer for you. But your readers would, I am sure, assume your conviction and reputation for thought and knowledge was enough to inspire them to consider following you.

I hope I’m not putting undue burden on you for your effort, and I hope you don’t regard this question as my idle thinking.

Maybe the question is posed incorrectly for you to answer – and you find yourself empty handed too – to put an answer

I have had the same sense of RealClimate, and have felt their position to be a foregone conclusion. However I sense they have become more balanced and have begu looking at evidence that contrdicts any of their assertions

The reliability issue is why I try to go back to root sources when I can instead of relying on RealClimate.org or the IPCC AR4 – too many skeptics feel RealClimate is biased and believe that the IPCC doesn’t represent the latest science, both of which are true to some extent. However, both can be excellent sources of links back to the original information, especially the IPCC lists of references. Hugely useful, since the AR4 WG1 report has all the footnotes for where they got all the data for their conclusions.

So I’m digging in to locate some sources that you would find reliable.

I assume you have read the IPCC TAR – and I don’t mean the “summary for policy makers.” I really think many parts are very good and are forthright in their assessment of model prediction. For example, Chapter 8, Model Evaluation is a good overview of the strengths and limitations of the GCM the IPCC relies on. Working from their basis for climate change, I ask myself, is there any baiss for a scenario, such as a large temperature rise, what are the conditions for it, and are any such drastic conditions consistent with model predictions of historical climate?

My reading of it – is no – meaniing that conditions to identify large climatic variations in the past, were not found. Such conditions should be quite apparent, I would think.

Anyway, I am still looking for sources you or others would not point to and say, that is tainted. More to follow

Links please?

Sure that R&D was legislated – but hardly led to the economic hardship of industrial companies.

Quite the contrary.

But in the process of combustion, at the peak of efficiency of fuel use, we reach the end of the free energy ladder (free energy is a technical term of thermodynamics, describing the maximum work available from a process)

and we arrive at carbon dioxide from the fuel. All the legislation on Earth can’t change that. And if we want the car, or whatever it is that uses fuel, we get the carbon dioxide whether we don’t like excess corporate profit or we do.

I won’t dipute the drastic results of a three degree increase of average temperature of the atmosphere.

Excepting in the case of fiction writers and motion picture producers, who create drama for entertainment, the scenario won’t occur because there is no way for it to do so.

Atmospheric concentration of CO2 cannot exceed about 1000 ppm before it equilibrates with the ocean. And all the carbon there is, accessible within the troposphere, cannot destabilise the carbonate equilibrium of the ocean water.

I don’t make remarks without considerable effort to assure myself of the validity of it … I hope we inspire further discussion, to the benefit and welfare of the world, what the word “danger” means in relation to carbon dioxide and its appearance because of human presence here on this wonderful, Earth

As an engineer, you know perfectly well what a 3 degree rise in mean temperature would do to all life on the planet…..

The pollution cloud of course the result of a photochemical smog created by automobile emissions; incomplete combusiton of hydocarbons leading to things like acrolein, which in turn reacts wtih other pollution like NOx to create PAN and other pollution. (the most persistent pollution being ozone).

Emission standards on cars eliminated a lot of it (But there is a chance of bringing some pollution back by using alcohol in fuel, because alcohol burns at a lower temperature and the incomplete combustion forms aldehydes.)

The LA basin suffers a periodic temperature inversion problem. Cool air off the Pacific displaces warm air off the Continent, creating a cool under warm layer that can’t dissipate because cool air doesn’t rise. The air just stays there too long – like unwelcome guests.

White man and his gasoline powered pollution machine didn’t create the geographic problem of course – just ask the Tongva who lived there a thousand years ago and periodically had to leave the place because of massive pollution arising from campfire smoke.

That was when I made myself a target in Nam. I still like the putting myself in the position of being a target

- Engineer DeBunk

Of course the obvious conclusion from all of this is that it will take very little anthropogenic warming to kick us right out of the Pleistocene, and indeed the warming we’ve already committed to may well be enough. On the plus side, no worries about another glaciation. On the other plus side, money will be made via glass-bottom boat tours of our former coastal cities. We certainly don’t need to worry about any minor intervening disruptions, right?

http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/story.html?id=164002

This kind of thing makes you wonder – just how did a guy like Freeman Dyson get so hard up that he had to supplement his pension with a few cheques from XOM, anyhow

I am not suggesting that we should do nothing until some sort of incontrovertible proof is provided. Nor do i think that some broad, general consensus must be met as a precondition for acting on environmental concerns. My point was that i often hear global warming arguments based on science (which, in my opinion is sound…if not perfect, which i do not expect) followed by statements like “all the data is in” and “the debate is over”. I believe that the one following the other undercuts the sound science.

Nor do i think that we must be capable of accounting for each flap of a butterfly’s wings before we can/should act. I do think that we must keep in mind that we are not so all knowing as we would like to think. We tend to believe that we are special — above and removed from nature — based on our brains. This thought pattern got us into the mess we are currently in. When i hear talk about humans destroying the Earth, or life on Earth, i cannot help but hear a slightly different manifestation of the same thought process that got us into this mess in the first place. We don’t have that power, as much as we would like to think that we do.

And, no, i do not think that we should do nothing. Pure commonsense tells us that we will eat, drink, and breathe whatever we put into the environment. This is about self-preservation as much as anything.

We have a great deal to do, and much of it would actually generate more wealth as opposed to being some great sacrifice. The public oracles of the environmental movement don’t talk about decentralizing power generation; they speak of a future time when giant wind/solar farms will simply replace our current method of generation. We sometimes hear calls to eat more locally, but those are rarely followed by pressure on Congress to increase the ability of small farmers (particularly livestock) to bring their product to market. (a small cattle farmer must RFID chip every head, the feedlot only 1-100; the small farmer cannot slaughter their own cattle, the cattle must be shipped to an industrial abattoir before being shipped back to the local market)

I am very much for doing something. But debunking scientists who disagree is not doing something. Cutting your personal energy usage, or switching to small scale renewables is something. Growing as much of your own food as you can is doing something. (And you’d be surprised how much you can grow, even indoors during a Northern winter. I choose to make the trade-off to operate HO T5 fluorescent lamps in order to have leafy greens, dwarf tomatoes, and dwarf cucumbers growing hydroponically rather than driving to the grocery store to purchase shipped produce.) Paying more to support local farmers who sell you real food is doing something. Not patronizing the big box energy hogs shilling cheap crap manufactured without environmental constraints and shipped under subsidy to be purchased on credit is doing something. S&R’s using a dark background in the web design is doing something.

I’m trying to express that the solutions we seek will not be found in trying to solve a problem with the thinking that created it. So long as we attempt to maintain the economic orders that got us here, we’ll have a very difficult time changing much of anything. Natural Capitalism is an idea whose time has come, though it should have arrived long ago. What we need to do is learn from nature, to make our process mimic ecological process. Nothing is wasted by nature; most of our problems stem from waste.

What we need to do is treat the disease, not the symptoms. Global warming is a symptom.

Alexi Koltowicz

1: “There are three other planets heating up.” – There are approximately 177 known major bodies in our solar system that could be affected by solar output. We’ve seen three besides Earth (and Venus is not among them so far as I’ve heard – they’re Mars, Jupiter, and Pluto) that appear to be heating up – that’s 2.25% of the entire solar system, not a good bet. Mars looks to be an albedo change at the moment, Jupiter’s heating is guesswork based on increased storm activity, and we’ve got no clue about Pluto (although the Orbital Express spacecraft on its way to Pluto to gather data on a flyby). So sure, maybe it’s solar output. Maybe, like the ice ages here on the Earth, some unknown event triggered a small change that then built up into the bigger change. But simply put, there is no scientific way at this time to connect the temperatures of other planets to the temperature of our own. There may be in the future, but right now it’s all wild-ass guesses when it comes to how other planets operate.
2: “Mini-ice age” – If you mean that Greenland is just warming up to what it used to be, that’s false. There are glacial cores from Greenland that dispute this assertion – Greenland ice is melting at a rate of 59 cubic miles of ice per year, and there every indication that the recent heating has caused glaciers to melt that haven’t melted in hundreds of thousands of years.
3: “ice-caps rebuilding at 2x rate of melt – see photos” Photos give you a snapshot of a single location. If multiple photos are available over multiple locations, then maybe it means something. Alas, in this case it doesn’t. According to satellite measurements (which are WAY more sensitive than a camera – they can detect minute changes in gravity, representing minute changes in the mass – ice – between the satellite and the center of the earth), Greenland is losing 59 cubic miles of ice per year, and the loss increased 250% between measurement periods. The same satellites show that the Antarctic ice cap is losing 36 cubic miles of ice per year.
5: “2000 year cycle changes everything” – before the end of the last ice age, when temperatures and CO2 were much lower, there appears to have been an 1800 year cycle. That cycle a) wasn’t always about 1800 years – it sometimes had gaps as large as 10,000 years, and b) has not been obviously present in the temperature and climate data for something like 12,000 years. This means that whatever the cycle is (and there is much more ongoing research into this topic, as well there needs to be), it’s easily swamped by other factors. Whether an increase in anthropogenic CO2 is one of those factors is a fair question, and one I expect to see researched a great deal. Regardless, though, just because there might have been a cycle 1500-2400 years ago doesn’t mean that there will or won’t be one now, nor does it mean that any possible cycle matters this time.

None of the climatologists that I know of make this claim – that’s why they error bar everything in the data, state conclusions in terms of probabilities instead of certainties, etc. Science progresses and in the process changes. This progress is part of why the IPCC estimated 90% likelihood that people are the dominant cause in AR4 instead of 60% in the TAR – that’s still a 10% chance that the scientists are wrong. The question becomes when the percentage chance of major problems rises high enough that national governments decide to act. I totally understand waiting at the 60% mark, but at 90%? If not now, when there’s only a 1 in 10 chance the climate scientists are wrong, when? 95%? 99%? That is, however, a policy decision based on cost/benefit analyses, not a scientific debate.

So, let’s laugh cosmology out of the lab because we’ve only been taking data for the last 30 years or so and they’re strongly model based (it’s hard to run controlled experiments on the entire universe, after all), never mind that the dataset they’re looking into is ~13 billion years old. Let’s laugh at plate tectonics because it’s a brand new theory, never mind that it is the only explanation that really fits the facts of where volcanoes and earthquakes occur – it was first proposed in 1915 and given it’s first real hard data in 1947. The science of the greenhouse effect goes back to 1896, when it was first proposed.

The data used by climate scientists goes back to the Permian, if not farther, and the branch of climatology that studies that data is called paleoclimatology. Paleoclimatologists use what are called proxies to measure the temperature, amount of CO2 in the air, etc, and those proxies are reasonably well understood (although not perfectly). Whether scientists have 30 years or over 200 depends on what you consider data – the British Empire actually has temperature measurements from around the globe starting in the mid to late 1800s. In addition, you can correlate satellite data, global temperature measurements, and various proxies to extend the data back thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years. And this is what glacial ice records (both the ice and the air bubbles trapped therein), tree rings, oceanic sediments, even geologic formations are good for.

Finally, we don’t need 4.5 billion years of data – the earth has been in its most recent main cycle (the Pleistocene) for the last 2 million years. The problem is that the orbital mechanics of the Earth don’t necessarily support a transition back the warmer periods that occurred over the last billion years – this is a point of debate among scientists, and it’s one of the reasons that there are error bars and probabilities attached to climate scientists’ conclusions.

I believe we are keepers of this planet and need to take care of it. I also know that the natural order of things is beyond mans control. Maybe we should be aware of things happening and accept those things without buying into scare tactics politicians use in the efforts to atract money for special projects.
Relax people, GOD is in control, not man…