I find the inability of you guys to extrapolate, empathize and or even think outside the box amazing. It fascinates because there is lots of evidence, should we ruin the earth as we did rivers, streams, and many landfills to prove we can do it? Or should we help as we did for acid rain? There is enough evidence to sink the Titanic, but if the mind cannot accept something it does not want to accept. Has nothing to do with reality as proving the earth is not flat to those who believe it so is like .... oh, did you hear the moon is made of cheese.
As was once said on the floor of parliment,"The right gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and his imagination for his facts."
Our rivers and streams are cleaner today than they were 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Much cleaner.
So is the air.
Acid rain was a provable, very straight line bit of logic. We were putting sulfur into the air. The rain is dilute sulfuric acid. The sulfur is combining with water and oxygen and this is what is creating the sulfuric acid. Since the water and the oxygen is in the air, we will stop adding sulfur and that will eliminate the sulfuric acid.
It worked.
CO2 into the air is a bit different.
We are putting carbon into the air. Carbon is combining with oxygen creating CO2. At this point, the logic becomes less clear. There may or may not be a connection between this and anything. Global Climate is changing, but seems to change out of sync with the very constant rise of CO2. CO2 has always been an effect of changing temperature, not a cause.
Can rising CO2 be the cause now. Causes happen before effects. That is one of the defining charachteristics of causes. Effects happen after and as a result of causes. Again, a defining charchteristic. Saying that an effect can cause a cause is saying that the future can cause the past. This does not happen in real life.
The period of warming that we now enjoy started years before the Industrial Revolution and the resulting rise in CO2. That should present a problem for the thesis, but is conveniently ignored.
Warming caused by a rise in CO2 has not happened for 5 million years. This has not happened during the recent period of alternating glaciation and interglacials. Cooling has always started at the peak of the CO2 cycle and warming has always started at the lowest point of the CO2 cycle.
The logic of CO2 warming collapses in the real world. The example of Acid Rain does not apply since the example of acid rain existed in the real world and was the result of real world cause effect.
Of course real scientists in programs like this say just the diametrically opposite of what you claim. The physics of GHGs were established with Tyndal and Arrnhenius. In 1858 and 1896.
Teachers' Domain: Global Warming: The Physics of the Greenhouse Effect
Earth's relatively stable and hospitable average temperature is the result of a phenomenon called the greenhouse effect. The presence in the atmosphere of naturally occurring compounds, known as greenhouse gases, maintains Earth's temperature. This video segment adapted from NOVA/FRONTLINE describes how human activities are increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and explains what effect this might have on global temperatures.
The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect
The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect
In the 19th century, scientists realized that gases in the atmosphere cause a "greenhouse effect" which affects the planet's temperature. These scientists were interested chiefly in the possibility that a lower level of carbon dioxide gas might explain the ice ages of the distant past. At the turn of the century, Svante Arrhenius calculated that emissions from human industry might someday bring a global warming. Other scientists dismissed his idea as faulty. In 1938, G.S. Callendar argued that the level of carbon dioxide was climbing and raising global temperature, but most scientists found his arguments implausible. It was almost by chance that a few researchers in the 1950s discovered that global warming truly was possible. In the early 1960s, C.D. Keeling measured the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: it was rising fast. Researchers began to take an interest, struggling to understand how the level of carbon dioxide had changed in the past, and how the level was influenced by chemical and biological forces. They found that the gas plays a crucial role in climate change, so that the rising level could gravely affect our future. (This essay covers only developments relating directly to carbon dioxide, with a separate essay for Other Greenhouse Gases. For related theoretical issues, see the essay on Simple Models of
The last article is from the American Institute of Physics.
There were many things proven and believed in the 1800's that have been discredited today. Superiority of whites, inferiority of blacks especially but really anybody not British, missing link skeletons, faked skeletons, miracle cures, bleeding as a remedy of almost anything... you probably get the point.
To use the parlance of the AGW science, the "trick" is to prove it.
Go ahead.
Start with the warming that started before the start of the Industrial Revolution and complete with the cooling over the last 8 years in spite of the highest CO2 ever recorded in the history of the unverse (apply heavy reverb to the last few words).
You might want to address the start of the cycle of Ice Ages, the relation of Ice Ages to CO2 variations, the impact that CO2 had on the beginning of the cycle of Ice Ages and whether or not ocean currents like those interupted by the joining of North and South America or the Gulf Stream or the Japan Current have a stronger or weaker effect on the climate than CO2.
When that has been completed, please explain how Dr. James Hansen still has a highly respected reputation within the AGW community in spite of being unable to predict anything that has to do with climate.
This stuff is like kids clapping for Tinkerbell. If you really, really believe, Tink won't die.