“Actually, no they don’t, not by much. Mean sea water pH has dropped from 8.179 to 8.104 since pre-industrial times. At that rate, it would take 1,400 years to reach neutrality. The RS’s projection of a 0.5 unit drop by 2100 is based on the IS92a emission scenario which assumes 2xCO2 per century. Even if it were at all likely that the rate would not reduce in future, the present rate of rise is more like 1.36xCO2 per century. (380ppm/280ppm.) The observed rise of CO2 is actually quadratic rather than exponential. And pH is a logarithmic scale.”

I was pointing out that as sea water gets more acidic the shells of animals have a harder time forming. You go off on some tangent about how sea water won’t become acidic.

1 point off for moving goal posts.

On top of that I initially in an earlier post that sea water becomes more acidic, not that it becomes acid which is what you changed to. another point off for goal post shifting. This only thing I missed was your goal post shift.

2 off already. My my.

“China, actually. Estimated figures can be found from the UN’s FAO. I’m afraid you lose a point for not even trying to find out for yourself, but simply quoting the usual media-campaign’s press releases. Two-nil.”

But no actual link. sigh. another point off.

And too bad about the UN FAO Brazil page. Another point off.

““Riebesell showed figures that indicated that…”

But are his figures either relevant or correct?”

Well, you’ve done nothing to disprove them…aside from moving goal posts. 1 point off.

“The linked document says “basic chemistry says that the more CO2 that is present in the environment, the less efficiently these reactions will run” which is true (for animals), but doesn’t say how near we are to that point. Respiration stops when the partial pressure of excreted CO2 equals the partial pressure in the water. Land animals breath out CO2 at 40,000-50,000 ppm, I assume marine biochemistry is not that radically different. Doesn’t sound likely.”

Says…who? CO2 in water makes Carbolic acid. Move CO2, above animal respiration, looks to be a problem.

“There are cases of pure CO2 bubbling out of volcanic vents in the sea bed, with coral and sea weed growing around them. Over much of Earth’s history, coral has coexisted with significantly higher CO2 levels than today. The claims are the result of pessimistic extrapolation and hand waving, and contradict field observations. I think if you had evaluated the story as critically as you’re doing with me, you’d have noticed. Three-nil.”

Really. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7200/full/nature07051.html
talks about your situation and about the coral DISSOLUTION.

By the way, seaweed doesn’t have shells.

1 point off, and another off for the critical crack.

As for being critical…well…If you can’t handle it, c’ya.

You entered this conversation, now your complaining that someone is CRITICAL of you? More of the Denier faux martyr complex again.

“wait a minute. I wrote somnething like that. Odd.”

Is that any odder than you telling me about water vapour feedback after I had just talked about it?

“These guys beg to differ”

Actually, no they don’t, not by much. Mean sea water pH has dropped from 8.179 to 8.104 since pre-industrial times. At that rate, it would take 1,400 years to reach neutrality. The RS’s projection of a 0.5 unit drop by 2100 is based on the IS92a emission scenario which assumes 2xCO2 per century. Even if it were at all likely that the rate would not reduce in future, the present rate of rise is more like 1.36xCO2 per century. (380ppm/280ppm.) The observed rise of CO2 is actually quadratic rather than exponential. And pH is a logarithmic scale.

The problem with making Appeals to Authority rather than working through the evidence is that sometimes you miss important details that authors with an agenda have glossed over. One-nil.

“And maybe you can actually provide said figures on this? And where? Brazil, where a heck of a lot of rain of rainforest is being cut down yearly?”

China, actually. Estimated figures can be found from the UN’s FAO. I’m afraid you lose a point for not even trying to find out for yourself, but simply quoting the usual media-campaign’s press releases. Two-nil.

“Of course that was along time ago.”

So?

“Riebesell showed figures that indicated that…”

But are his figures either relevant or correct?
The linked document says “basic chemistry says that the more CO2 that is present in the environment, the less efficiently these reactions will run” which is true (for animals), but doesn’t say how near we are to that point. Respiration stops when the partial pressure of excreted CO2 equals the partial pressure in the water. Land animals breath out CO2 at 40,000-50,000 ppm, I assume marine biochemistry is not that radically different. Doesn’t sound likely.

There are cases of pure CO2 bubbling out of volcanic vents in the sea bed, with coral and sea weed growing around them. Over much of Earth’s history, coral has coexisted with significantly higher CO2 levels than today. The claims are the result of pessimistic extrapolation and hand waving, and contradict field observations. I think if you had evaluated the story as critically as you’re doing with me, you’d have noticed. Three-nil.

“So far, out of 2, your batting 0.”

How independent is the referee here?

“Increased CO2 appears to induce plants to grow. However, this does not mean their nutritional quality increases”

Never said it did. You appear to be playing balls that I haven’t bowled. Four-nil.

“Last map I saw showing the new growing areas had the new grain belt on the Canadian Shield.”

Then the last map you saw was inaccurate.

“It’s hard growing grain on ROCK.”

It wouldn’t be rock for long. Soil grows.

And it isn’t hard, actually, if you use artificial fertilisers.

“Does this take into account expansion ofthe water due to heating? Somehow I don’t think so.”

On what basis don’t you think so? Are you just guessing?

If so, you guessed wrong. This is taking into account the expansion due to heating.

And you completely failed to answer the point, which was that even the official IPCC estimate (and there are oceanographers who dispute it as being too high) is not going to send billions on the march due to rising oceans. This claim doesn’t come from the science, it has been simply made up.

Five-nil.

“Move home? You make people losing their homes so..sterile.”

Have you never moved home? The point of moving, generally, is to gain a better home. You make people gaining homes sound so miserable. Six-nil.

“Tell me, where is Bangladesh going to go?”

Under the Himalayas. It’s in a tectonic subduction zone.

Oh, sorry, you meant the people in Bangladesh? They’re not going anywhere. Bangladesh is a river delta, it’s level is controlled by river deposition, and it will very likely continue to grow in area. As I just said.

Seven-nil.

“But they live within 100 cms of the sea level.”

Thank you for agreeing with me. Eight-nil.

“But is this new area higher than 23 cm?”

It will be.

The silt deposits where the water slows down because it has hit the sea. That’s how river deltas form. Sea level controls land level. If past floods have placed the land a metre above sea level, future floods will too.

“Why yes, he did. It’s also slow. So, unless these coral islands get a major boost from the mantle soon, this little fantasy will not save your idea.”

You’re guessing again.

The rate of sea level rise projected for next century is roughly the same as it was last century, and far slower than it has been since the ice retreated a mere 10,000 years ago. Coral is nevertheless not extinct. However did it manage to survive the Holocene optimum?

Coral can grow at at least twice the rate it needs to. No volcanic boosts needed. Nine-nil.

“…told the inhabitants of Tuvalu that coral uplift will save their islands…”

Tuvalu is in no danger. Tuvalu’s problem is too much water extraction to supply tourism. The sea level there has been monitored for the past thirty years and has not increased detectably. But if they think they can guilt-trip rich countries into paying them compensation, I’m sure they wouldn’t say no.

A nice, round, ten-nil.

Thankyou for playing.

Seriously, we could argue like this for days, but is there any point? You have not expressed a single concession to any part of my argument. You don’t appear to be critically evaluating your own beliefs; for example, to see whether they fit observations like evidence of past warm periods or times of high CO2. The argument seems to be political/rhetorical, and the aim seems to be not to jointly determine the better argument, but to conclusively win, by showing the opponent to be wrong on every point.
As with most politically-polarised issues, nobody is going to change their minds on the basis of such a discussion, and many will just find it annoying. I can play this game, but I consider it a waste of time.

I expect matters to resolve themselves as the political fashions shift over the next few years, and I expect this will go the way of Paul Ehrlich’s predictions of imminent doom in the 1960s. But no doubt there will be a new doom to replace it. Until then.

“No, but it does dissolve out.”

That sounds familiar. WHere did I hear that before…

‘And while water does seem to absorb it, ‘

wait a minute. I wrote somnething like that. Odd.

“Sea water isn’t acid, it’s slightly alkaline. And at the current rate of progress, it won’t be actually acid for several thousand years.”

These guys beg to differ

http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?id=3249

“If you check the figures, you’ll find forests are re-growing at roughly the same rate they’re being cut down.”

And maybe you can actually provide said figures on this? And where? Brazil, where a heck of a lot of rain of rainforest is being cut down yearly?

” And shell-making animals can withstand far more acidic conditions than are now extant (they evolved during a period when CO2 was far higher than today).”

Of course that was along time ago. And then there’s this

“The second reason for concern is for animals that rely on calcium carbonate for skeletal elements, as this mineral will dissolve in acidic media. Although this will impact shellfish and echinoderms, the big loser here is coral. Riebesell showed figures that indicated that, by 2070, its likely that the optimal growth conditions for warm-water coral will simply no longer exist, and about 60 percent of the environment for cold-water coral will be gone. ”

from http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2008/02/aaas-that-other-carbon-problem-ocean-acidification.ars

“The only actual experiments I’m aware of indicated that CO2 had a net fertilising effect on such biota, but that’s not something I claim to know anything about.”

So far, out of 2, your batting 0. How about land? Increased CO2 appears to induce plants to grow. However, this does not mean their nutritional quality increases…http://pages.unibas.ch/diss/2005/DabsB_7188.pdf

0 for 3.

“But it could destroy our world. Shifting weather patterns destroying food producing areas.”

Or create them”

Where? Last map I saw showing the new growing areas had the new grain belt on the Canadian Shield. It’s hard growing grain on ROCK.

““People displaced by rising oceans waters”

Twenty three centimetres? Over a period of a century?”

Yes. 0.23 meters. Or 0.75 feet. Does this take into account expansion ofthe water due to heating? Somehow I don’t think so.

And of course this seems to be an old figure. It’s projected to be…more.

““How much will it cost when a few million (or billion) humans need to migrate just to live.”

Nothing. People move home all the time. Over a period of a century, almost everybody moves. Even if any movement was necessary.”

Move home? You make people losing their homes so..sterile. Tell me, where is Bangladesh going to go? How are migrating people going to be fed when growing areas become desert, and growing zones move into rocky parts of continents?

“There are certainly not billions living within centimetres of sea level,”

But they live within 100 cms of the sea level.

and those that are tend to be on river deltas or coral reefs where the silt deposited by flooding or coral growth maintains the land level precisely where it is. The land will rise to meet the sea, as it always has. (Bangladesh, for example, is actually increasing in area.) ”

But is this new area higher than 23 cm? If not, so what?

“The mechanism of growth of coral islands was one of Charles Darwin’s discoveries on his voyages.
”

Why yes, he did. It’s also slow. So, unless these coral islands get a major boost from the mantle soon, this little fantasy will not save your idea.

I hope you told the inhabitants of Tuvalu that coral uplift will save their islands…someday.

“Solenadon: Your facts are way out-of-date. The much-publicized claim that most of the warmest years recorded were since 2000 was the result of mathematical errors. NASA has revaluated the data and now it looks like this:

“The new top 10 warmest years are, warmest first: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

By decade, you can see that the 1930’s (dust bowl years) had 4 of the warmest years of the century while the 1990’s had three and the 2000’s has had only one year in the top ten warmest so far. ”

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/347541 /nasa_admits_that_1934_not_1998_was.html
”
Nice little link there. Only one little problem. It states…

According to H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), NASA scientist and famous man-made global warming proponent James Hansen’s well-known claims that 1998 was measured as the warmest year on record in the U.S.

Wait a minute? The U.S.? Since when does the U.S. equal the world?

Nice try there.

On to other things

Strictly speaking Steve O…you devolved into grandstanding first. see your post at February 24th, 2009 at 5:34 pm

Lets just say I feel no inclination to pander to your faux martyr attitude.

“Water vapour is a Green house Gas, but it has a nasty habit of condensing into things called raindrops and snowflakes and thereby leaving the atmosphere as either a liquid/solid. Also, this condensing liberates heat energy. Surely you know what drives hurricanes?”

Yes, certainly. I think I mentioned clouds. And that liberation of energy is one of the negative feedbacks I alluded to – it transports heat from the surface to the upper troposphere (where it creates the so-called “hot spot” that climate models predict but which isn’t observed), and cools the surface.

“Higher atmospheric temperature, the more H2O it can hold.”

True. That’s one of the positive feedbacks I mentioned. But that doesn’t necessarily imply it will be holding more water.

“…CO2 doesn’t condense out.”

No, but it does dissolve out.

Because of the sensitive dependence of solubility on temperature, tropical oceans release huge amounts of CO2, while polar waters absorb almost equally huge amounts. It’s called the solubility pump. (There’s a biological pump, and other exchanges of the Carbon cycle too.) The net result is that Carbon has a half life in the atmosphere of about 5 years. This does not imply, as sceptics sometimes claim, that imbalances will equalise in such a time. A difference between the amount released and the amount absorbed can accumulate and decay more slowly. But neither can we say “CO2 is forever”.

The atmosphere will never dry out, either.

“On top of that it increases water acidity.”

Sea water isn’t acid, it’s slightly alkaline. And at the current rate of progress, it won’t be actually acid for several thousand years.

“CO2 is pulled out by plants and certain shell making sea animals. But we’re cutting down forests and paving over tracts of land at an increasing rate. And water acidification caused by CO2 being absorbed into the ocean lessens the amount of these shell making animals.”

If you check the figures, you’ll find forests are re-growing at roughly the same rate they’re being cut down. And shell-making animals can withstand far more acidic conditions than are now extant (they evolved during a period when CO2 was far higher than today). The only actual experiments I’m aware of indicated that CO2 had a net fertilising effect on such biota, but that’s not something I claim to know anything about.

“But it could destroy our world. Shifting weather patterns destroying food producing areas.”

Or create them.

“People displaced by rising oceans waters”

Twenty three centimetres? Over a period of a century?

“How much will it cost when a few million (or billion) humans need to migrate just to live.”

Nothing. People move home all the time. Over a period of a century, almost everybody moves. Even if any movement was necessary.

There are certainly not billions living within centimetres of sea level, and those that are tend to be on river deltas or coral reefs where the silt deposited by flooding or coral growth maintains the land level precisely where it is. The land will rise to meet the sea, as it always has. (Bangladesh, for example, is actually increasing in area.) The mechanism of growth of coral islands was one of Charles Darwin’s discoveries on his voyages.

One more thing; I may have vastly oversimplified the argument regarding the mechanism for AGW, but I feel you’ve done the same with the argument about the consequences. “A few degrees difference” in average global temperature could mean vastly different precipitation patterns and could disrupt many of the same feedbacks you criticized me for neglecting to mention. I don’t think it’s just the higher average global temperature or the (possibly) higher sea level that have people worried. I know that my own concern about such a thing has more to do with the possibility that a small change in average global temperature could disrupt such a feedback system and precipitate some sort of catastrophic climate change.

Of course, the counterargument is that for every black swan made possible by climate change, there’s a black swan made possible by fighting climate change. Still, oversimplifying the concerns of environmentalists and similar doesn’t help any more than oversimplifying the purported causes.

@Steve O:

Ditto for you. In addition, I’d like to point out that many of us concerned that AGW might actually be a real concern want to be pragmatic about it as well, and understand that developing countries can’t necessarily forgo petroleum as an energy source, at least not in the short term. However, small, sustainable energy sources are probably more efficient and cost-effective in the long run, especially for economies that don’t yet have massive petroleum-fueled power plants supplying all the energy.

Also, not all of us agree that wind farms are ugly, or that the only problems with strip-mining are the aesthetic consequences, or that wind farms are a poor use for otherwise unused and low-utility desert (“virgin” if you prefer). I also doubt that wind mills generate a truly “negligible” amount of power, since they’re in rather high demand — if they couldn’t add value to the economy, they simply wouldn’t be in such high demand. They would cost more than or close enough to the cost of plant and maintenance so that one couldn’t turn a profit with a wind farm however long it stayed open. And no one would bother to open them.

My point is that there doesn’t have to be any FORCE involved. I think there is a good case to make that renewable energy can be a more efficient use of resources than fossil fuels; given that, the most I would advocate is to alter market incentives enough so that this becomes apparent. I feel that the oil industry is subsidized enough to disguise just how viable some of the renewable sources are (when in reality, much of our petroleum costs are merely being written into our income taxes). I’ll have to admit that this is speculation; I don’t have any data on what actual subsidies exist for oil companies, but considering the subsidies for some other industries, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption.

It’s telling that your last post devolves into political grandstanding and name-calling. You provide proof that “Climate Change” is more a political fad than hard science. It’s the left-wing equivalent of silly right-wing fads like “Creation Science”. No surprise that, while the rest of us have been discussing the science, you veer off into a rant against Bush, tax cuts, the Iraq War, Harper, and conservatives in general.

Dan L: AGW would just be another interesting theory that didn’t hold up after further research, if it weren’t for the fact it’s being used today to divert billions of dollars from really important and immediate environmental concerns — Amazon deforestation, over-fishing, air and water pollution, etc. — into the pockets of greedy politicians and crafty carbon traders like Gore and his cronies.

The Green movement rashly jumped onto the AGW bandwagon and now we’re all paying for it. Billions that could be spent really cleaning up the planet are being wasted on vain efforts to eliminate a harmless gas, CO2, that makes up only a few parts per million of the atmosphere.

Future generations will shake their heads at our stupidity, just as we shake our heads at the scientists who insisted on holding to the Phlogiston Theory, decades after it had been conclusively disproven.

Re. alternative energy, I’m all for it. But the fact is fossil fuels are still by far the only affordable way for the poor, especially in the Third World, to heat their comes, cook their meals, and power their vehicles. We’re not all movie stars who can afford hybrid vehicles and million-dollar “green” technology.

The “Climate Change” movement is incredibly callous towards the poor and the Third World in general. The attitude seems to be: let ‘em starve, let ‘em freeze, as long as WE affluent environmentalists get to feel sanctimoniously good about ourselves.

Fossil fuels will all be used up in a century or two, and whatever damage they did to the planet will be indiscernible a century after that. Alternative fuels will naturally come into use as their cost comes down and the cost of oil rises. Trying to force this change-over now is kick in the teeth to everyone who DOESN’T earn $20 million for six weeks work appearing in a movie.

And a lot of “clean energy” is anything but. Anyone who’s driven from Los Angeles to Palm Springs has seen mile after mile of virgin desert despoiled and polluted by huge, hideous wind mills that generate a negligible amount of power. “Wind farms” make strip-mining for coal look environmentally-responsible.

My apologies for the length, but I hope that helps more than my earlier brief description. I appreciate that you took my argument so positively, and once again, it wasn’t my intention to be dismissive of people arguing for AGW honestly based on what they’ve heard. Only for people who are evidently not even listening.

No apologies necessary; I probably came across as a bit more whiny than I intended. I was somewhat offended because I got the impression that you were implicitly assuming I’m arguing in bad faith, which is pretty understandable given the amount of invective on both sides of the argument.

Anyway, I appreciate the time you put into addressing the shortcomings of the “layman” explanation of the greenhouse effect, and I can appreciate why you decided to say it’s wrong rather than incomplete now that you’ve made your reasoning clear.

I can also appreciate that the bigger picture is more complicated than the thumbnail sketch I made above. However, I posted it from the point of view that whatever feedback loops are involved inside the process, ultimately you have an input and an output, and if the input is consistently bigger than the output over a long period of time, the energy of the system is going to increase. (I honestly hadn’t considered the variation of the output due to the atmosphere’s pressure gradient.) And I figured as long as the effect is consistent, an initially low “signal to noise” ratio would get amplified into something significant on some length of time (although it could certainly be so long as to suggest that AGW is not really much of a threat). As you point out, though, the main premise of my argument is in doubt and even if it wasn’t, isn’t quantified to the degree that we could draw any conclusions.

Finally, I think I disagree that everyone is familiar with the overly simplified physical argument I laid out above. I think it’s telling that despite several skeptics posting their own oversimplifications between my post and yours, none of them bothered to address my post. And it should be obvious that I really just haven’t encountered some of the points you’re making before now. Again, I studied physics in undergrad for two years and did quite well (though I ended up getting a math degree); I’m not exactly scientifically illiterate. This speaks to your point of the disservice being done by climate scientists and journalists who are oversimplifying the issue.

My father, who is also a skeptic, has suggested to me in the past that the moral argument against using fossil fuels is much more compelling than than the scientific argument, given how incomplete the latter is. I would add that there’s a compelling economic argument: using petroleum as a fuel is an inefficient use of resources considering the energy sources that we haven’t yet tapped (representing an opportunity cost) and the fact that we need the petroleum to produce synthetic materials. I think I’m beginning to see just how incomplete the scientific argument for AGW is; I’ll certainly look into it some more, but maybe I’ll focus on the non-scientific arguments the next time I get into a discussion about it.

Thanks again for a very satisfying response to my post.

“The new top 10 warmest years are, warmest first: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

By decade, you can see that the 1930’s (dust bowl years) had 4 of the warmest years of the century while the 1990’s had three and the 2000’s has had only one year in the top ten warmest so far. ”

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/347541 /nasa_admits_that_1934_not_1998_was.html

Like I posted before, AGW was an intriguing and important theory in the 1990s. The trouble is AGW advocates, like Solenadon, are still using the old 1990s data and the “Hockey Stick Graph”, which has been debunked as a fraud, while turning a blind eye to more recent research which conflicts with the theory.

One aspect which is rarely mentioned is the growth of cities since these temperature stations were established. Many of the weather stations used to establish the mean global temperature were built outside of cities, but now are in the middle of urban areas which generate “heat islands”, so they’re naturally reporting higher temps.

This effect is clear in cities like my hometown Seattle where, eighty years ago, snow was common. As the city has grown, generating more and more heat, snow has become quite a rare event in the city. But drive thirty miles out into the country, and you see snow accumulations comparable to those in the 19th century. This warming, familiar to any city dweller, is obviously a local effect caused by increasing density, more heat-producing vehicles, machines, and industries, not anything in the atmosphere.

I’m not aware of any global warming study that has controlled for this clearly significant variable.

What is any politician’s ultimate wet dream? An excuse to say: “We HAVE to extend our control over all industries and triple your taxes immediately — or your great-grandchildren WILL ALL DIE!””

Odd. Didn’t Bushco spend lots of time, money and energy denying AGW? Isn’t Prime Minister Harper doing his best to down play it?

This Government using this to overtax us trope is really getting old.

How much money will it cost when this comes to pass? Significantly more than it would now to try and nip it in the bud.

But it’s odd how Conservatives (considering your arguments, that’s the category I’m putting you in) are always short term thinkers.

How about this as a more likely Political wet dream…

We HAVE to extend our control over all your rights and freedoms and triple the military spending while cutting taxes for the top 5-10% of our population – or terrorists WLL KILL YOU!”

“The basic scientific principle of “Occam’s Razor” should be applied here. When solar activity, represented by sunspots (which have been carefully observed and recorded for centuries), is graphed against global temps, they match up almost perfectly. Higher solar activity equals a warmer earth, and vice versa.”

Except for http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/11/climatechange.climatechange1

Apparently solar activity has been DECREASING since 1985, according to the article.

I particularly amused by the solar forcing argument. I once read one such argument claiming that AGW was false because Pluto increased in temperature by 2.5 Kelvin. Of course, the myth didn’t follow the line of reasoning to it’s logical conclusion, just how much of a temperature change on Earth would this cause. Turns out that would be something like 20 degrees Kelvin, significantly more than models predict.

What is any politician’s ultimate wet dream? An excuse to say: “We HAVE to extend our control over all industries and triple your taxes immediately — or your great-grandchildren WILL ALL DIE!”

“Climate Change” is the gift that keeps on giving for governments and canny hucksters like Gore, who personally has made untold millions from his backroom carbon-trading investments. Google his personal Ponzi scheme, called Generation Investment Management (GIM) and see how much money he and his wealthy friends are making off of the climate change panic.

And for this they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize! Well, they also gave it to Yasser Arafat, so that tells you something … lol.

What global cooling?

Oh yeah…just because the temperatures have not exceeded 1998 levels since, well, 1998, that means the world is cooling.

Let’s see…http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101419.htm , the top 11 warmest years have been in the last 13 years.

For your assertion to have ANY MERIT, the above would not exist. 1998 would have been a one-off. But it’s not. It appears to be a pattern.

For you assertion to have ANY MERIT, the last 11-13 years should have been significantly cooler…not 11 of the 13 warmest years.

as for
“Why should my tax money continue to be WASTED studying a ‘problem’ that doesn’t exist?”

For the simple fact that you claiming that there is no problem doesn’t stand up to what really appears to be happening.

And also when it does comes to pass, you’ll be one of the first ones griping about how that government should have seen it coming and done something about it.

The basic scientific principle of “Occam’s Razor” should be applied here. When solar activity, represented by sunspots (which have been carefully observed and recorded for centuries), is graphed against global temps, they match up almost perfectly. Higher solar activity equals a warmer earth, and vice versa.

Virtually all the earth’s heat comes from the sun (minus the relatively tiny percentage from volcanoes, geothermal activity, radioactivity, etc.). Clearly solar activity is the first thing we should look at when earth’s temps trend up or down. Yet, as I understand it, the IPCC didn’t control at all for solar activity.

This is crazy. It’s like standing next to a flaming fireplace and saying: “I feel warmer. It can’t have anything to do with this fire next to me. It must be because Mercury is in retrograde …”

As we know now, global warming zealots deliberately left the “Medieval Warm Period” and the “Little Ice Age” off their graphs, falsifying the evidence to make the 20th century warming look anomalous.

What gets really tiresome is the zealots’ accusing anyone who questions their highly questionable theory of being in the pay of the oil companies. What oil companies have paid spokesmen to dispute Climate Change hysteria is peanuts compared to what left-wing sources like billionaire George Soros and the Ford Foundation have paid spokesmen to sound the alarm.

Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist who goes everywhere sounding the climate change alarm, has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars at least to do so, by Soros alone. You can easily find documentation of this by googling his name.

Like another poster said, follow the money. Vastly more money has been spent to push the AGW party line than has been spent to dispute it.

Water vapour is a Green house Gas, but it has a nasty habit of condensing into things called raindrops and snowflakes and thereby leaving the atmosphere as either a liquid/solid. Also, this condensing liberates heat energy. Surely you know what drives hurricanes?

This is called the water cycle. Water vapour content in the atmosphere is a function of the temperature. Higher atmospheric temperature, the more H2O it can hold. More H2O, more heat held in. Combine that with higher CO2 levels and…

This is opposed to CO2, which is pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, fossil fuels that have held that carbon out of the atmosphere for millions of years. CO2 doesn’t condense out. And while water does seem to absorb it, it seems warmer water cannot absorb as much as cooler water (and the ocean waters do seem to be warming up). On top of that it increases water acidity.

CO2 is pulled out by plants and certain shell making sea animals. But we’re cutting down forests and paving over tracts of land at an increasing rate. And water acidification caused by CO2 being absorbed into the ocean lessens the amount of these shell making animals.

Hmm…more CO2 (a greenhouse gas) being pumped into the atmosphere, with less and less mechanisms available to pull it back out…

Hmmm…

“A lot of people are even a bit unsure about this “future catastrophe”. Will we all we killed by this 23 centimetre sea level rise? Considering the Earth’s temperature varies from +60 C in the African desert to -90 C at the south pole, exactly how would being a few degrees warmer destroy the world? It never has before.”

Of course it never destroyed the world. But it could destroy our world. Shifting weather patterns destroying food producing areas. People displaced by rising oceans waters (guess where a lot of Earth’s major cities are located. Not inland). And there’s over 6 billion of us.

Deniers claim it would cost too much to deal with climate change. How much will it cost when a few million (or billion) humans need to migrate just to live. How will they be fed when farmland becomes dust due to shifting weather patterns?

I apologise if that seemed dismissive. My intention was not to say that anyone who didn’t know the physics was some sort of an idiot, or to argue with you personally, it was to complain about the fact that this wrong explanation is so pervasive in the media that even educated and intelligent people aren’t generally aware of it. And further, are not aware that the full argument is enormously more complicated even than that, and that it is mainly in these obscure complications that the sceptical controversy lies. Everyone is aware of the argument you present. Us being unfamiliar with it isn’t the problem.

It might be worth mentioning, since you obviously take such impressions seriously, that to an ungenerous reader phrases like “someone with the least amount of background in physics or chemistry” or “For those of you unfamiliar with the fundamental argument…” followed by a primary-school recounting might be interpreted as being patronising or dismissive of sceptics. No offence taken, mind – I’ve experienced far worse.

A lot of what you say is correct, if incomplete. You mention that “some” visible light hits the ground, but don’t mention all the effects on the input side that affect this: albedo, clouds, orbit ellipticity, the sun, etc. The heat energy is also released from the surface by conduction/convection and evaporation. You don’t mention H2O which is the principle greenhouse gas. While CO2 is transparent to visible light, H2O does absorb some (and the effect of this approximately equals the effect of CO2 on IR, so it’s not negligible). And while the IR is absorbed by CO2 molecules, more of it is absorbed by water vapour.

Where I think you go wrong as such is when you say “In other words, [...] an increase of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere means an increase in the solar energy retained by the atmosphere”. Saying this implies that the amount of IR trapped directly controls the amount of heat trapped, and that this is implied by or equivalent to the mechanism you outline in the earlier “words”, which you are therefore implying is as much greenhouse physics as you need to know to tell what will happen to the temperature.

If you examine the mechanism I outlined, you’ll not that in the hypothetical case that the temperature increased with altitude over the range at which it emits to space, more CO2 would result in cooling. Even though more IR was being absorbed, because it was emitted by a hotter radiator at a higher altitude, the cooling would be more efficient. So it’s not a simple matter of more IR being trapped resulting in heat being retained.
(Temperature inversions commonly occur on windless nights, in the Polar winters, and above the tropopause, so it’s not a fundamentally impossible scenario.)

Secondly, you neglect convection. In the troposphere convection dominates, and any warming of the lower layers simply results in it rising faster, carrying the heat away more efficiently. Convection occurs whenever the temperature gradient exceeds the adiabatic lapse rate, and as a result, over large parts of the atmosphere this feedback maintains the lapse rate quite precisely. In other parts, clouds, and air masses moving in from other areas affect the temperature far more. It’s rare for the pure radiative balance to dominate these other effects.

Thirdly, you neglect feedbacks, which according to consensus AGW theory actually constitute about two thirds of the predicted warming. That is to say, they are at least twice as important to the result we’re all supposedly discussing as the basic CO2 greenhouse physics you mentioned. There are a lot of these, both positive and negative, and they are one of the most poorly understood aspects of the climate system. These are effects that magnify or shrink the raw effect of CO2 changes, and include such things as the effect of ice area on albedo, changes to humidity with temperature, changes to cloud behaviour with humidity, evaporative cooling, large scale circulation changes, and so on. It’s quite possible to be in full agreement with the greenhouse bit, but to disagree with the estimated size of the feedbacks, and so be severely sceptical about the predictions. This probably describes most of the sceptical scientists I know. It’s vaguely annoying to have people constantly insinuating that we’re denying the basic “CO2 traps IR” scheme, as if we were complete flat-Earther idiots, when we’re not at all. If the feedback is small or negative, and there are some indications to suggest it might be, then most of the warming disappears and we’re left with something that would be just about detectable to scientists but not to most people.

And finally, you don’t quantify the effect, or compare it to other natural effects. Without such a quantification, you can’t tell if it might be positive but insignificant; below the noise threshold. Someone might agree with the physics, but disagree about the calculated size of the effect. (And solving the radiative balance equations are a monster of a calculation.) This is a particularly difficult topic because we don’t really have very good information on the level of natural variation. We only went fully global after about the 1920s-1940s, and there are huge gaps even then up until the era of satellites, in 1979. Antarctica, say, or the central Pacific. Trouble is, the monitoring was designed for different purposes, and if you’ve ever seen the Surfacestations website, you’ll know the sensor locations are often poor. As for the time before that, we have a few thousand rather iffy point records, but not sufficient to estimate global averages with any accuracy. History reports various changes in climate, but we don’t really know.

My apologies for the length, but I hope that helps more than my earlier brief description. I appreciate that you took my argument so positively, and once again, it wasn’t my intention to be dismissive of people arguing for AGW honestly based on what they’ve heard. Only for people who are evidently not even listening.

you blather

“So, where did the ancient plants get their carbon from? Pretty obviously, the same place as present day flora, i.e. the atmosphere. Over geological times. CO2 concentrations have decreased by an order of magnitude. Yet, when that CO2 was in the atmosphere, the Earth did not enter a catastrophic run-away warming phase, as AGW zealots warn.

Sometimes it was warmer than present, sometimes cooler. The “Late Ordovician Period was an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today– 4400 ppm” (http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html). ”

However, if you would look at http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/earlyice.htm

it shows that you’re wrong.

When was CO2 high during the Ordovician ice age? When it ended.

When was it low? When it started and during it.

So, from the Ordovician’s point of view, increased CO2 was very catastrophic. It ended the Ordovician Ice Age.