I think he's afraid of the impact new legislation will have on the economy. And who needs a sustainable, healthy environment when you have a strong economy anyway.
Well I know there is some data taken from tree rings. The growth of the tree can tell you information about the weather of the year. There are trees that live for a thousand years, if not more.
From http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080429.html [More stuff in the article, but this seemed most pertinent at first glance] The global climate is currently being influenced by the cold phase of this oscillation, known as La Niña. The current La Niña began to develop in early 2007, having a significant cooling effect on the global average temperature. Despite this, 2007 was one of the ten warmest years since global records began in 1850 with a temperature some 0.4 °C above average. Indeed, the years 2001-2007 recorded an average of 0.44 °C above the 1961-90 average, which is 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the years 1991-2000 Another way of looking at the warming trend is that 1999 was a similar year to 2007 as far as the cooling effects of La Niña are concerned. The global temperature in 1999 was 0.26 °C above the 1961-90 average, whereas 2007 was 0.37 °C above this average - 0.11 °C warmer than 1999. However, as La Niña declines, it is very likely that renewed warming will occur, as was the case when the Earth emerged from the strong La Niña events of 1989 and 1999. Ten-year forecasts produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre capture this levelling of global temperatures in the middle of the decade; effectively La Niña has been masking the underlying trend in rising temperatures. These same forecasts also predict we will experience continued and increased warming into the next decade, with half the years between 2009 and 2014 being warmer than the current warmest on record, 1998. It is worth remembering that 1998 was the warmest year on record because of an El Niño event amplifying the mean global temperature.
There's also ice core data...drilling down into ice deep enough that the atmosphere from many years ago was trapped within the ice. The makeup of that ice can tell scientists what proportions of atmospheric gasses were present. This can give data to hundreds of thousands of years back. There's even water captured in pockets in salt crystals from oceans that are gone now, and that salt is contained in the rocks. Scientists can use that water to see the atmospheric makeup millions of years ago. There's quite a bit of data, going back a long way, to build climate models.
By the way, PapaG, you say you want an explanation of "causation or correlation", but you immediately dismiss theories and models. You can't have it both ways and keep a straight face. I'm guessing econ was your major.
It is also worth remembering that there were El Nino events in 2002/03 and 2006/07. None of those years had a spike as high as 1998. Wouldn't they have read higher, using this logic?
Stupid math trick. You can begin with the geologic scale of the time period or the scale of the numbers (-.6 to +.6). It's a scientific fact (not theory!) that you can zoom in on any graph with ups and downs and get something that looks like this. It's actually unimpressive. But looking at your graph, would you say that temperature has increased by .8 degrees since 1850 (which is hardly anything to be scared of), or would you say that temperature has increased by .9 degrees since 1910? I mean, .9 degrees is way scarier than .8 degrees. I bet PapaG might be interested in this graph below. I'm interested in how you spin it as an upward trend in some respect. Maybe a graph that actually does span geologic time periods holds some real cluse: It's quite evident that it's been hotter than now, when it was hotter than now there was less CO2, and that global warming trends occurred before man existed and the current one has been ongoing for about 10,000 years before the industrial age. It's also clear that CO2 levels actually lag temperature change.
How so? I'm not at all convinced that humans reducing the tiny fraction of greenhouse CO2 by a bit will have any impact on the environment.
Because he's not a scientist? And nobody thinks he is. His role/goal was to push the issue into the public consciousness, and I'd say he did a hell of a good job at that, at least given how often we have a thread on the subject here. barfo
And I'd like to see it factor in other variables that also impact global temp. Again, amazing how you are able to live in the assumption that CO2 is the only impact on temperature. Take away the La Ninja impact and that plot might look very differenct. By the sound of it, El Nino is on the way and we may soon find out first hand.
The problem with your spin here is that 0.6 degrees is quite significant. Every degree of temperature increase is significant. Only a few degrees can create big changes in the world. Both are true, and both are consequential. Nobody's saying that this is historically unprecedented. I've said several times that these things cycle up and down naturally. The problem is that some local maxima/minima result in the extinction of species. It's probably not a comfort for them that temperatures cycled back the other way thousands of years after they died out. So, showing that this has happened before and temperatures go up and down naturally isn't at all compelling. We're in a natural up-cycle...the concern is that if we also augment it with our own warming dynamics, we can make it one of those species-killing temperature peaks (we may not be among the species killed in that scenario, but losing any significant species can have real consequences). It's not guaranteed that mankind's actions will do so, but it's certainly a possibility.
As Minstrel has already pointed out, when the human life span reaches 200,000 years, that time period will be relevant to us. For now, 100 years is about the right timescale. Interesting that the labels on the x-axis are out of order, anyway. barfo
Fair enough. Honestly. You might be right, but consider other viewpoints and most importantly data to come to that conclusion. So far this thread has primarily been about you staking claim to one plot you don't fully understand and asking other people to refute it. At this point, it's clear to me that no matter what I type you'll find one squirrelly blog or another to cling to your flimsy agenda. One takeaway I had from that air chem class a long time ago was that the number of variables and interconnectedness of those variables is incredibly complex. It's great you're interested in this, but maybe take the time to fully understand the field before you start taking crazy stands on a topic is this important.
