Anyone who can follow them can call them bullshit - no particular expertise required. Take a look at the last post there with the graph - not only is he "refuting" a twenty year old model forecast (IIRC the models didn't include clouds at all, at the time) as if it represented "global warming" predictions in general, but he's pretending that I objected to his .3/decade figure over the allegedly (I haven't checked) correct .2, instead of my actual objection that no one (with any credibility, anyway) is or has been predicting monotonic anything with respect to the climate. That's completely typical. There are several futures that the models rule out - it's just that a spate of atmospheric cooling in itself is not one of them. That's not quite true - continuation of the climate patterns of the past few thousand years would be inconsistent with all the models. And it overlooks the major point - before the detection and evaluation of the human CO2 boost accumulation in the lower atmosphere, a global atmospheric warming of 3 degrees C over the next century would have been inconceivable. Now it is possible - even predicted with some (small) probability. Large and rapid alterations of the earth's climate - larger and more rapid than anything in the paleontological record - are quite possible, even likely, now. That is a new situation.
Only because you say so? Hardly if ever scientifically convincing, except for yourself maybe. You begin to sound monotonic. Can you produce an IPCC graph or model where a 1998-2015 cooling is predicted? You seem to have an immense confidence in computer climate models. GIGO = Garbage In Gospel Out.
Can anyone produce any sort of graph that predicts a trend of any sort over the next 2 decades? Can you?
"PS. you don’t need climate models to know we have a problem. - gavin (Schmidt from Real Climate)]" yeah right.... Re GMC's, the first (USA) National Academy of Science review of the brand-new topic of global warming in 1979 put the climate sensitivity at 1.5C to 4.5C per doubling. After 30 years and kazillions dollars of tax payers money spent to pay climate modellers their dazzling new computers with megaflop memory and lightspeed processors, the IPCC AR4 came up with a climate sensitivity of.....(drum roll).... 2.0C to 4.5C!! (mentioning values less than 1.5C are very unlikely). Oh well.....
So, regarding my earlier question: what does this model predict? What's your prediction and how much did it cost? If the IPCC or you have a prediction of a trend, how reliable is it, or how worried should we all be - not at all, a little bit, a whole lot...?
The paleontological record is only useful for establishing long term trends in temperature. That doesn't mean rapid, short term change never happened, or can't happen. If the global climate is as flimsy as modern research says then I'd be shocked if climate didn't change rapidly in the past. One event can trigger a chain reaction in climate, and such a chain reaction wouldn't take millions of years.
I have referred to a few of the many examples - if you are willing to take that sort of thing as persuasive, nothing else I say is going to make any difference to you. No. I have a certain disrespect for people who deliberately ignore them for silly, essentially political, reasons, though. I would like to hear from someone who can conjure up reasonable conjectures for what an anthropogenic doubling of the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere will do to the planetary climate without using a computer model or two. The resolution of the paleontological temperature record is down to a year or smaller, in some places. And nowhere does it include the consequences, if any, of the kind of CO2 boost we are now experiencing.
Only in the very young records, a few hundred thousand years or so. Even if we're generous and say 1 million years (the limit of glacial ice records) that's a blink of an eye in the history of the planet. Such a short record certainly doesn't rule out a CO2 boost like the one we have now, and we know CO2 levels today are still some of the lowest of the last 500 million years.
This is a real question, because I'm not sure : Isn't it true that only 5-8% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere is from human emissions, and the other 92-95% is from natural sources ?
No, it isn't true. There was an estimated 400 Gigatonnes before we started burning all that coal and oil. We've added 200 Gigatonnes since the start of the Industrial Revolution. So we're responsible for about 50% of the current CO2 loading. Of course, total CO2 is still a very small percentage of the atmospheric volume; but how does increasing it by 50% alter the climate? How sensitive is the atmosphere, and climate patterns, to these kinds of changes? We don't really know, is the answer to both questions.
200+400=600, so we'd be responsible for 33% not 50%. And that's assuming nature itself hasn't added more since the industrial revolution. And that's assuming you're right, do you have a source confirming those figures ?
Yes, as you point out, that makes our actual percentage 33%, but it doesn't alter the 50% more CO2, than before we started changing it. BTW if you sincerely have to ask for references to that claim, then you obviously are out of your depth in this discussion. Or you don't read much about the subject you appear to profess knowledge of.
I asked the question about our contribution of CO2 because I didn't know, therefore I didn't "profess" knowledge about that..... And if you're figures are so prevelant in reading material, than you shouldn't have much trouble finding a link backing your claim, should you ? This was your claim : "No, it isn't true. There was an estimated 400 Gigatonnes before we started burning all that coal and oil. We've added 200 Gigatonnes since the start of the Industrial Revolution. So we're responsible for about 50% of the current CO2 loading."
OK those figures are actually wrongly attributed, it's ppm not Gigatonnes that I should have connected them to. But we've nonetheless added enough since the Industrial Revolution, so that if we add the same amount again - which at about 200 Gigatonnes a year shouldn't take too long - then we'll have doubled the pre-industrial (i.e. 1800s) level, that's 100% of the "natural" CO2. You work it out. Hint: there's a bit more bs in the above, and if you check it somewhere, you should see it sticks out like balls on a dog. Bigger hint: the biosphere turns over >200 Gt p.a., but we puny humans output <10 Gt in the same period. There's the odd volcanic eruption to stuff up the equation, as well. Can you spot the difference?
The other side of the coin is the deforestation and land development we've been doing. Less trees mean less CO2 is removed from the atmosphere each year. I've no doubt we've added to the amount of CO2 in the air over the last century, what I don't agree with is the various doomsday predictions floating around these days. CO2 levels right now are what? 380 ppm? 50 million years ago they were around 700 ppm, 100 million years ago they were as high as 2200 ppm, 500 million years ago they were well over 4000 ppm. If you want to talk about natural, we've been in an ice age this whole time. Temperatures are bound to go up some time, because no ice age lasts forever.
Humans as we know them go back a few hundred thousand years at most - maybe a few tens of thousands in current form. If we change the climate to what it was 60 million years ago in a couple of centuries, catastrophe doesn't begin to describe it. I don't think even the wildest of the alarmist folks predict that.
