First, I am not a climate ideologue; I am open to what the data and analysis says. I am also not susceptible to weak arguments, if you are going to beat the champ, you have to knock him out or at least thrash him convincingly, to use a boxing analogy. I read climate deniers papers in depth, with precision, and in detail. I read the whole paper, then ask “what did he say, and why did he say it”. I have never seen anyone knock out the preponderance of evidence from IPCC.
First, CO2 is linked with the atmosphere warming.
- I have never seen anyone deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
- Clearly man began burning fosil fuels (wood, coal, oil, natural gas) at higher rates beginning in the 1700’s to power steam engines, locomotives, to electrify and light the world, and for transportation in cars, trucks and planes.
- The concentration of CO2 at Mauna Loa Hawaii has increased far above the average natural level of the last 800,000 years, since the 1700’s.
- The average temperature of the earth has risen at a rapid rate especially in the 20th and 21st centuries.
- Once CO2 is in the atmosphere, it remains there for a long time, 200 – 1000 years.
- Man can interact with the climate and we have done a good job reducing aerosols negative effect over the last 30 years.
- We need to stop burning so many fossil fuels and reduce the CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere. That’s not going to happen overnight.
Those are my general observations.
Colion provided several videos and papers that he thought overturned the IPCC AGW story. I investigated them and find them all weak or meaningless in terms of overturning AGW.
The first is a video by Dr. Lindzen. He provides no data, and no analysis for what is occurring in regard to CO2 and global warming. He spends a lot of time insulting his fellow scientists, and seems to think the global warming is just the weather changing with no particular cause. He concludes with “if I’m right I’ll save you all a lot of money, and if I’m wrong we’ll know in 50 years”. That is irresponsible and pathetic. Science should be used to help mankind, not to fail to give a darn about us.
Next I reviewed a paper by Dr. Koutsoyainnis that attempted to prove that temperature drives CO2 today like it did in pre-industrial revolution times. He failed to prove it.
In his paper he makes the following statement:
It must be stressed that the above conditions are considered as necessary and not sufficient conditions for a causative relationship between the processes ̲ and ̲.
Following Koutsoyiannis [30] (where additional necessary conditions are discussed), we avoid seeking sufficient conditions, a task that would be too difficult or impossible due to its deep philosophical complications as well as the logical and technical ones.”
That paper is not going to overturn AGW because it has a hole in it and we don’t even know how big the hole is.
Then I reviewed Dr. Munshi’s little paper using high school regression and correlation that attempted to prove there was not a relation between CO2 in the atmosphere and man’s production of CO2. He expected “close correlation” between the observed data and the de-trended data, on an annual basis in recent history. The PHD in Business Administration failed. He grabbed very course data like the total annual CO2 produced by man, and made no adjustment for the physical processing in the real world, like absorption of CO2 by the oceans, absorption of CO2 by plants, respiration by plants, volcano activity, or how long it take for CO2 produced in the US (which produce a LOT of CO2) to reach Mauna Loa. Why on earth should you expect close correlation of an inherently variable process?
So, we have this from Dr. Prentice in 2001 as he describes the flux in how CO2 is absorbed or released into the atmosphere:
The first panel of Figure 3.1 shows the major components of the carbon cycle, estimates of the current storage in the active compartments, and estimates of the gross fluxes between compartments. The second panel shows best estimates of the additional flux (release to the atmosphere – positive; uptake – negative) associated with the human perturbation of the carbon cycle during the 1980s. Note that the gross amounts of carbon annually exchanged between the ocean and atmosphere, and between the land and atmosphere, represent a sizeable fraction of the atmospheric CO2 content – and are many times larger than the total anthropogenic CO2 input. In consequence, an imbalance in these exchanges could easily lead to an anomaly of comparable magnitude to the direct anthropogenic perturbation. This implies that it is important to consider how these fluxes may be changing in response to human activities.
What is the bottom line of Dr. Munshi’s analysis? It is overly simplistic and fails to take into account the complex physical interactions that affect atmospheric CO2. Basically, the study is not relevant at all.
So, I have not seen anything that overturns AGW. I am open to evidence, but all evidence I have seen presented, not just in this discussion but every time I have question the climate deniers, I have found far short of the task of overturning AGW or presenting a creditable case for an alternative scenario that demonstrates what really is happening in our environment.
If you are going to have an opinion on AGW or being a denier, get in and demand proof. If a paper is submitted, read the paper, in detail. What is the author saying, does it make sense, and has the author done enough work to prove his point? Then you can have an informed opinion. I’ll close with a few graphs.
The first is atmospheric CO2 level over the last 800,000 years.
The next graph has a gray line that is CO2 produced by man and a blue line that is CO2 in the atmosphere.
And the final is global average surface temperature since 1880.
