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- #41
konradv- I think you are mistaken in your belief that no one could come up with a model that explains the present climate conditions without CO2 being the major driving force. the current models were written to emphysize CO2's effects and they do. mind you I dont believe that models that could be written to emphysize other factors would be any more reliable than the one we have now, just different.
There are only two ways that the atmosphere and oceans on the surface of the earth can warm up. One is an increase in the Total Solar Iradiance, the other is an increase in the retention of that heat.
The Earth reflects much of the TSI it receives from the sun. And radiates some of the heat away. As early as 1820, Joseph Fourier calculated that between the albedo of the Earth and the radiation of the heat at the surface, the Earth should have the oceans frozen nearly to the equator. He correctly hypothesized that something in the atmosphere was absorbing the heat. In 1858, Tyndall of England did the first mapping of the absorption spectra of greenhouse gases, water vapor, CO2, CH4, ect.
In the last 50 years, there has been a slight decline in the TSI. Yet, we have been rapidly warming. That leaves only an increase in the absorption of the reflected and radiated heat by our atmosphere to explain the increase in temperature. So, how would that occur?
In the last 150 years, by the burning of fossil fuels, we have increased the CO2 content of our atmosphere by 40%. We also have increased the CH4 by 150%.
Pretty damned simple, except for the many simpletons on this board.
We are in the start of the cooling period in the Milankovic Cycles, we have a decreased TSI, but we are rapidly warming. Every decade is warmer than the last. The only factor that would increase warming is the increase in GHGs in the atmosphere.
The simplicity is there. But the politics of preventing the inevitable results of a rapid warming and climate change is too great to address the problem. Too much money would be lost to the very wealthy of this nation and others. So we will do the grand experiment. At what point does the consequences become so great that even the willfully blind can no long deny the problem? And, realizing that no matter what we do, there is 30 to 50 more years of warming in the pipeline because of the lag in the warming of the oceans, that is how long we have to see how far the changes in climate will go.
And yet there is still not a single repeatable laboratory experiment that reproduces those results at the amounts indicated.
So what? Like someone could create a climate in a lab!!! I guess you have to keep repeating this, because the way the theory is tested, simulations, has repeatedly shown that man IS having an effect. The effect may vary from model to model, but none I'm aware of or anything the skeptics have presented show the opposite.