Is there as yet any actual experimental proof that demonstrates the link between human-emitted CO2 and global warming or are we still operating on models? Because one of the complaints of conservatives is that an awful lot of people are receiving money on what appears to them to be an unsupported claim. Remember that correlation is not causation. Remember also that the climate changes naturally. How much of the warming we are seeing is caused by man and how much from nature?
I don’t think the climate is really something that can be experimented on, at least not in the sense that you can do chemistry experiments, etc…
What they do have is a combination of climate models and historical observations, and they line up in a spookily accurate fashion, and all the AGW started about the same time the Industrial Revolution did. That’s hard to discount. But the fact that it’s hard to prove through experimentation means that there’s a segment of the population who views it as something that’s more in the realms of the hypothetical rather than something that’s shown to be true through empirical observation. Which is silly, and shows an ignorance of the way science works, much like the evolution-deniers cry “But it’s a theory!” as if that means that it’s unproven or hypothetical.
Not simply that it will hurt our global position and standard of living - that we make the sacrifices and it doesn’t do any good, because the Chinese don’t care any more about greenhouse gases than they do about the air over Beijing now.
Same problem with Harry Reid and Yucca Mountain, or Ted Kennedy and the wind farm.. The same folks who complain about discrimination against the poor because junk yards tend to wind up in the poor side of town, always got a million good reasons why you can’t put near my property either.
Regards,
Shodan
Given that the models are based in part on the observations, it would be surprising if they were not accurate, at least to start with.
I’ll also ask if there are any issues of falsifiability that have been found and found in favour of AGW.
As pointed many times before the scientists are not relying just on models.
In particular point 6:
For the umpteenth time, the right wing media continues to misled you. And the mainstream media is just lazy.
Been away for a few days. Seems I struck a nerve here 
First of all, thank you for all the responses. Many of you–both conservative and liberal–have provided input that I hadn’t considered, and a few have made perfectly reasonable objections to the phrasing of my post, which was indeed condescending in retrospect. Apologies to those offended. I don’t understand the science myself, I’m merely putting faith in those who do, so I certainly have no right to condescend.
So let me clarify my background and position. I am believer in climate change, though I wasn’t as a younger man (read: in my 20’s). I was raised conservative and religious, and therefore followed the passionate views of my elders on most matters. As I got older and invested more faith in science, I came to believe that indeed the world may be warming up. The idea of climate change didn’t infuriate me as a concept because, I suppose, I separated the theory from the action that would be required to address it. Also, as I said in my original post, I didn’t see any biblical evidence that God wouldn’t allow us to modify our planet on a global scale, either intentionally or unintentionally.
So maybe my question could have been more targeted than “why they so mad, bro?” I was looking for thoughts and opinions on why conservatives refuse to believe when action could potentially be action taken that doesn’t necessarily require sacrifice, why shut down the conversation? I love when conservatives are willing to admit that it may exist then offer solutions that don’t threaten their deeply held beliefs about the size of government and individual liberties. Being infuriated by the idea of climate change itself and shutting down the debate is foolhardy and counterproductive, IMO. Even if climate change isn’t real, we have limited carbon fuel on earth and we need to take action anyway sooner or later.
Framing this as a “conservatives vs. liberals” debate may give on the smug satisfaction of being on the “right” side but automatically polarizes what should be a technical and economic discussion about the impact of climate change and what steps can and should be taken to mitigate it to the degree practicable. This criticism isn’t just aimed as Shodan; the same is also true for self-identified “liberals” who want to spend time lambasting “conservatives” rather than assessing the data and discussing solutions.
This becomes even more polarized by advocates on both sides who have some particular hobbyhorse they want to claim will solve all problems with no real harms whatsoever, end of discussion. The truth is that “conservatives” don’t want a fission power plant or nuclear waste repository in their backyard any more than “liberals” want a wind farm marring their skyline or within audible range. It is easy to talk of “nuclear” in concept as a blanket solution until you start discussing the technical challenges through the entire fuel production and disposal chain and system lifecycle of a nuclear fission plant. The reality of conventional nuclear fission is that the grid cost is substantially higher than coal or oil, and probably higher than solar thermal electric if the latter were implemented on a broad scale, notwithstanding that the real costs of nuclear fuel production infrastructure were masked by nuclear weapon material production during the Cold War that are untenable today. On the other hand, of the truly renewable energy sources, wind and wave have very limited scaleability even setting aside the local resident objections to otherwise suitable sites. Only solar has sufficient statistical consistency and broad geographical utility for scaleability, and its wide footprint per megawatt of production makes it more suited to localized use than a comprehensive replacement for industrial energy demands.
Those who claim that opposition and defunding to depositing waste in the Yucca Mountain Repository is political are more-or-less correct but are ignoring the fact that the selection of Yucca Mountain (which is not actually a mountain) was itself a political decision made over establishing regional storage sites in more geographically stable and hydrologically impermeable locations because at the time the decision was made Nevada had a smaller population, was less politically influential, and the Nevada Proving Grounds were largely considered a write-off due to contamination from decades of above ground nuclear testing. Regardless of siting, the notion of taking unprocessed used nuclear fuel elements and burying them underground is an “out of sight, out of mind” solution akin to that which led to Love Canal or the Rosharon deep well venting, and conveniently ignores the fact that the once-through enriched uranium cycle only extracts less than 2% of total energy that could be recovered in progressive fissile reactions by activation of fertile nuclides. While no energy production reactor currently in use is capable of doing this, this isn’t some theoretical capability; it has been demonstrated in operating nuclear reactors dating back to the 1960s. There are proposed Generation IV designs that may improve on the efficiency of current once-through pressurized water and boiling water reactor designs by orders of magnitude while reducing waste and potential for hazard. You rarely hear advocates of expanded nuclear fission energy production discuss these, either out of ignorance or because they aren’t the current baseline, and because suggesting that conventional nuclear reactors are inefficient, not as safe as claimed, or produce excess waste would be tantamount to admitting to cardinal sin.
It is true that we don’t have any control over how China, India, or other nations manage their waste production, but that ignores the fact that China is doing what it is doing specifically to “keep up with the Jones”. Taking the lead in innovating cleaner and lower carbon emitting energy production technology and sitting down at a table and making a commitment to sharing that technology may be unpalatable to jingoistic contingents but is the only viable way to protect the shared resource that is our planet. We need to move past the notion that “the market” will provide some kind of optimal, technomagical solution. Economic markets only optimize for cost versus demand; they have no foresight for either the eventual costs or long term environmental and social consequences. The notion that we shouldn’t or can’t do anything until the crisis is looming is the same kind of short-sighted, provincial thinking that collectively led us down the path to world wars, the conflict that threatened global nuclear exchange, and a failure to actively address health and basic resource issues in the developing world that could be resolved for the cost of less than a month of invading Iraq or Afghanistan.
It is true that Al Gore is a hypocrite who used the threat of climate change to line his own pockets while touring around in a manner that he criticized others for but that doesn’t negate the fact that the data clearly shows a correlation between historic and current human activity in producing atmospheric carbon dioxide and the clear correlation with a rising average global temperature trend. The fact is that we are all hypocrites to some greater or lesser degree; we all do things that unnecessarily contribute to carbon production and fail to occupationally, politically, and philosophically support technologies and measures that would reduce energy usage and atmospheric carbon production. The scale of the problem is beyond that addressable by individuals (even influential ones) or single technologies; it requires a concerted effort on a multinational and ultimately global scale to commit to taking real, significant, and proactive measures to advance and adopt carbon neutral technologies and reduce energy wastage, even at some cost.
Relying on the ingenuity of some future innovator to develop magic pixie dust to make global climate effects go away is one step above just leaving the refrigerator door open to cool the atmosphere. Climate change is one of the three or four potential hazards which could result in the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people and set human civilization back hundreds of years of social and technical progress, and we have the means to address it in a practical, progressive fashion. We just lack the political discipline to do so and will continue to as long as we proceed to argue over whether this is a “liberal” or “conservative” problem, or try to deny the fact-based evidence by arguing over confidence in trending or manipulating the data to produce a result most favorable to one’s ideology.
Stranger
Actually, it’s point 5 you should be emphasising. Unfortunately, satellites haven’t been up there very long - certainly not long enough to rule out other factors like the sun - we’ll need a good few solar cycles for that.
Then you’ll have no trouble detailing the issues here instead of trying to argue from authority.
I should emphasise that I am drawing a distinction here between global warming and anthropogenic global warming. I don’t believe that anyone is arguing that the Earth isn’t warming or that we aren’t emitting fossil CO2 into the atmosphere. Both are factually and testably correct. It’s the jump between the two that’s the issue.
The “correlation is not causation” trope is one of the favorites of the climate change denial circle who either don’t understand or are willfully ignorant of how models-based verification is applied and validated in actual applied science for a mechanism or phenomenon too complicated to be replicated by experiment. When you’ve looked at only a single factor and find an apparent correlation to an effect without a clear mechanism, then the argument that the correlation is not validated is a legitimate criticism, but when you’ve looked at an entire system in context and simulated it with an analytical model that captures all inputs and validated it by prediction against measured data and historical trends, correlation of a predicted behavior of a mechanism to a particular effect can be determined with statistical confidence. We do the same thing to validate modern evolutionary synthesis (which is only demonstrable by experiment at the microscopic level to a limited degree) and the theory is almost universally accepted except by religiously influenced skeptics whose alternatives are completely unfalsifiable claims of invisible gods or intelligent designers who don’t seem to be all that clever about avoiding basic design flaws like the vermiform appendix or wisdom teeth.
So please, instead of just repeating catchphrases spit out by pundits or casting ill-informed confusion upon the question, make the effort to go and look at the data and educate yourself on how the models are constructed and validated. You don’t take anyone else’s word for it; despite claims that there is some kind of subversive cabal of researchers and climate change fearmongers somehow contaminating the data or creating bogus models, everything involved in the research is publicly available from a variety of governmental, non-governmental organization, and academic sources. Either this is the most massive yet inexplicably successful conspiracy in the history of all conspiracies including those dreamed up by Dan Brown, or supposed “skeptics” are demonstrating more credulity than a five year old on Christmas Eve.
Stranger
Only by ignoring what was discussed many times before.
Paleoclimate was one of the strongest bits of evidence that showed that a high concentration of CO2 was going to increase the average temperature of the planet, and then other evidence from atmospheric scientists showed that the concentrations of CO2 are increasing the temperature.
To all that one has to add even more direct evidence that also did confirm that many models are on the right track, that information is not reported by the denialosphere to their readers and viewers.
Sure, but I meant that new information and observations seem to align closely with what the models would predict, which is more of a confirmation that the models are on the right track.
Essentially we have geological record information that shows that higher CO2 levels cause warmer temperatures, physics and chemistry information that indicates that this would be the case independent of the historical record, and we have historical evidence of rising CO2 levels and corresponding rising temps, and finally we have climatological models that are used to predict this sort of thing, and they’re saying the same thing that the other stuff is pointing toward, which is that increased CO2 emissions are causing the Earth to retain heat and grow warmer.
I don’t know if there’s anything conclusive that’s saying that it’s definitely man-made greenhouse gas emissions that are causing this vs. natural solar cycles, but the coincidences seem too glaring to be just coincidence. For example, based on tree rings and ice cores and what-not, the advent of the global warming and atmospheric CO2 rise started sometime around the early 19th century, right about the time when coal started being burned in, well, industrial quantities. And it’s tracked forward at about the same rate that energy usage has increased across the globe.
All this could be sunspots or whatever, but the timing is suspect, and geologically/astronomically speaking, 200 years is like a nanosecond (or less, probably). Things like this just don’t happen over such short time frames- it takes tens of thousands of years for things like this to happen, and that’s for rapid onset phenomena.
So we have a series of unlikely coincidences here that could be explained by natural phenomena, but Occam’s Razor would indicate that the simplest explanation (anthropomorphic global warming) is the most likely one.
Actually, there is the odd counter-example. We have had ice ages where CO2 levels were massively higher than now, like the Ordovician ice age (~2500-3000 ppm). Some suggest that the cause of that ice age was a dimmer sun (without evidence, but apparently consistent with models (heh) of stellar evolution - how convenient) but assuredly not a lack of CO2!
Right now the link between human-emitted CO2 and the global warming we have seen is a matter of belief, not actual evidence. That’s not to say it’s incorrect, but science is about evidence and proof, not belief.
The sun has been on a mild cooling trend since circa 1980 as averaged over the 11 year solar activity (sunspot) cycle. At the same time, average global temperature has increased by about 0.5 °C. (This may not sound like much until you look at a calculation of how much extra energy must be stored in the atmosphere, and that additional energy is stored in the oceans to maintain an equilibrium condition.) The correlation in global temperatures and the 11 year annual variation is apparent but modest, requiring frequency domain analysis to tease out the correlation. We don’t have record of direct observation of solar activity prior to about 1860; everthing previous is based on climate observations and geomagnetic data. It is true that there was a minimum in solar activity at the beginning of the 19th Century and ending around 1840, and that solar activity since about 1950 has been slightly higher than the historical average, but the average radiance of the sun has changed significantly less than 0.1% over that period which is accounted for in the global climate circulation models.
The correlation to the increase in additional carbon dioxide released by the use of coal and petrochemical fuels, however, is pronounced and obvious to even a casual inspection, and statistical analysis demonstrates that it is a very significant correlation. There is no other proposed mechanism for the warming trend of this magnitude, nor anything like the degree of correlation seen in the data when adjusted for other known variances like solar radience as noted above.
Even if anthropogenic carbon dioxide is not the only contributor to global climate change and the average warming trend, it is the one that we can affect by our choices and behavior, and given the potential (if not rigorously quantified) impact of climate change it would behoove us to start making plans to minimize the impact. And even setting aside climate change, it would simply be smart policy from both an economic and strategic standpoint to develop sustainable sources of energy that don’t depend on oil and natural gas imports, don’t consume limited resources, and don’t produce so much pollution and waste. The argument that we should do nothing and wait it out is obtuse in every conceivable way.
Stranger
I’m just going to stop writing since it is clear that you intend to spout one distortion after another and just post links to refutations which you can elect to read or not as suits your desire to maintain your preconceived convictions: “Do higher levels of CO[SUB]2[/SUB] in the past contradict the warming effect of CO[SUB]2[/SUB]?”.
Stranger
The fact that it is available right now (or would be, if Obama hadn’t killed it under pressure from the Left) is a major selling point. But I’m open to other solutions; if you can get liberals to support any form of nuclear power that we could implement soon to help AGW I’m sure the conservatives would support it. I haven’t seen that support.
Again with the “wise conservatives versus obstructive liberals” rhetoric, which ignores the fact that Yucca Mountain was selected politically and represents short-term thinking to the disposal of nuclear fuel waste instead of considering reprocessing or technologies for energetic burnup, and no consideration given to more efficient or lower waste technologies like the molten salt reactor.
Meanwhile, Mother Jones magazine–you know, that self-avowed bastion of far-left liberalism–has run a number of articles in the past few years in cautious support for nuclear fission power such as “Will Thorium Nuclear Energy Save Us All?”, “The Pro-Nukes Environmental Movement”, and the unambiguously titled “Why We Need Nuclear Power”.
Trying to frame nuclear power as a conservative vs. liberal issue doesn’t seem to be working out very well. Try again.
Stranger
Which is why we aren’t going to do anything about global warming proactively. Liberals won’t implement practical solutions because there is no magic technological fix for their problems. Conservatives won’t implement impractical ones because there is no magic technological fix for their problems.
Regards,
Shodan
Funnily enough I was citing a pro-AGW site.
Your biases are showing. I’ve never said conservatives are wise; overall they are just as stupid as liberals. Unfortunately, the big-business fears that liberals appear to have end up opposing nuclear power. But let you ask you again: what current solution is better than Yucca Mountain? Otherwise you’re just relying on the same stall tactics that AGW skeptics use.
That’s good. Plenty of liberals are pro nuclear (like GIGO), just like plenty of conservatives are pro-AGW. However, what has the liberal political establishment done to push nuclear power? Very little.
As before, we’ll just have to disagree. It is pretty obvious to me that on this one issue that it’s liberals who fear nuclear power more than conservatives.
Again, when I see that 76% of Nevadans oppose the dump site you have to eventually confront the reality that when one looks at the polls we can find that usually less than 1/3 of the population is composed of self described liberals.
Unless you make the point that that 76% of that are all liberals… but that would mean that Nevada is no longer a swing state…
Nah, it is really NIMBY, and yes, I’m on the record of criticising liberals that are against nuclear power, but lets not magically ignore that many conservatives and independents fear it too and are also a big part of the problem.
As I pointed before there were moves in Arizona to make our own nuclear dump facility to replace Yucca Mountain, but even on the reddest of states, after some moves a few years back, there is mostly silence.