Aren't you missing a rather larger point that we're also currently polluting the planet in the process, smog, water tables, rivers, ocean trash, deforestation, excess meat consumption linked to chronic disease?
The degree of overconsumism rooted in our system is hardly environmentally friendly. Yet we want to be environmentally friendly by consuming a new generation of Co2 friendly products, which polluted the planet to be manufactured.
Consuming is the problem, not the solution, but who is going to say in a capitalist system backed by fiat money that is only sustainable by an ever increasing debt that we need to have negative growth and lose some comfort to decrease our footprint?
1. It is extremely unlikely that anthropogenic emissions would align so conveniently with the tip of a natural climate cycle. There must be some other factor underlying the correlation, and/or the influence of human emissions is overstated.
2. The argument is that there is an alarming discrepancy between current measured CO2 and historic data derived from cores. However, core data is an estimate based on a number of assumptions regarding capture and diffusion of gasses during and post ice formation, and I have not come across any literature which questions whether ice core derived CO2 values may underestimate historic CO2 levels. Indeed, there are hints from plant data that this may be the case, but publishing such a conclusion would probably be career suicide in the current politicized academic climate.
The first point alone indicates that some natural degree of warming is to be expected at this point in natural climate variations, something which is never mentioned by proponents of climate change. The second point, if true, would mean that the effects of human activity on global climate are over stated and the current evolution of the system is normal, beyond our control, and/or has happened in the past almost exactly as it is happening now.
1. http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-co...
Look at [0] for a more authoritative source and specifically compare the 800 and 400 ky data to the 2000-year (Law Dome, Antarctica) data. This will show you that we are indeed at the top of a very slow CO2 cycle, but that we added about 100 ppm on top of that in the past ~100 y! This is more than the amplitude of the underlying cycles.
[0] https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
In fact, here [1] is a well sourced article which highlights at least one indication that this is the case - historic CO2 estimates derived from plant stomata are much higher and closer to contemporary measured levels than ice core data. Then there is the idea of time averaging smoothing out peaks, and we can only speculate/model the loss of resolution.
It's very easy for a well intentioned group of researchers to reason themselves into a corner, particularly when things like institutional momentum, political biases, and understandable doomsday concerns influence the kinds of questions scientists ask and the paths they are willing to take to find answers. Because this research has broad effects on economic, social, and corporate policy, it is dangerous to close off one side of questioning behind an apparent consensus, not to mention it's simply bad science.
>the time resolution of the ancient ice core data is quite low, while all the anthropogenic action happened in the last 150 y or so
All the more reason to be open to questioning.
1. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/26/co2-ice-cores-vs-plan...
Kouwenberg herself however doesn't believe the crazy 300-700 AD CO2 excursion to around 400 ppm and spends a lot of time looking at alternative explanations, finally concluding on p. 65:
"""
The extremely low number of stomata per mm needle length in the Tsuga heterophylla record at Jay Bath between 300 and 700 AD does not appear to result from extremely high atmospheric CO2 levels at the time, but coincides with the establishment of the species during a period of major disturbance at the site. The open, exposed setting after this disturbance probably provided highly stressed growth conditions for pioneering, early-successional T. heterophylla trees.
"""
Of that, there is of course no mention in the blog post you cited.
Importantly, of course, none of this is really that relevant to the discussion of anthropogenic global warming, since we know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere, and that CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat.
I'm really starting to see a pattern here, where facts that contain some grain of truth are used out of context to sow doubt, and everything just evaporates as soon as you look more closely (and then the next tangentially relevant fact is brought up)... It's probably quite effective - I mean, who is going to read that blog post you linked and then do what I just did and actually dig into the sources? I did that because I took the "advice" I got in this comment section to heart and wanted to give my "opponents" the benefit of the doubt.
[0] PDF available at https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/243/full....
Do you seriously think that we don't consider these things? Seriously?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#Mechanism
And I'm not some snot nosed programmer looking in from outside. I'm a former geoscientist and I saw this pressure firsthand, even at a relatively conservative University.
I was attacking the implied invalid conclusion that rising CO2 levels would therefore not drive temperature.
But, to address the point in more detail, look at the data in [1]. CO2 typically does not lag temperature. If you cherry-pick points in time at the beginning of a Milankovich-induced temperature increase it may, and this is adequately explained by outgassing of CO2 from the oceans, driven by the sun. [2]
> [...] this attitude of unquestionability is absolutely pervasive in both society at large and academia, and gives deniers a justifiable reason for suspicion.
I try to find citations for what I write here, and address specific points, both to teach myself the science and to keep the discussion honest. If everybody here did this there would certainly be no "attitude of unquestionability".
I agree that it can probably seem that way on cursory look. I personally find it hard to always keep cool when faced with a barrage of pseudo-scientific points that don't hold up to scrutiny. More importantly, I find the implicit arrogance really hard to stomach, i.e. thinking that a huge field of scientists is too stupid to understand some "obvious fault" that someone posted on their blog. Maybe that makes me unfair to some participants who are just trying to understand the issue better and / or have an honest discussion. I'm sorry if that was the case.
[0] Lorius et al. 1990, https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/lo03000u.html
[1] Petit et al., 1999, Fig. 3, available from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rx4413n
[2] https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermedia...
We have a what we consider a lot of holes, big import holes, in the theory. These issues are immediately dismissed. The fact that people can say with a straight face that water vapor increases global warming, yet is not the primary cause, even though it's the strongest greenhouse gas, is beyond believe. It defies comprehension, I will never, ever take the CO2 theory serious, and I'll be here encouraging others to think for themselves as well.
Nature retracted their very alarmist paper, 10 months after publishing https://retractionwatch.com/category/by-journal/nature-retra...
Whenever there is an extreme weather event, such as a flood or drought, people ask whether that event was caused by global warming. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer to this question. Weather is highly variable and extreme weather events have always happened.
I’ve worked with global temperature data, and know that you can produce any shaped global temperature graph you want by picking the right set of stations. There are grossly inadequate amounts of both historical and current data to produce a meaningful long term temperature graph for the earth. Much of the data is fake – by their own admission. https://realclimatescience.com/overwhelming-evidence-of-coll...
Climate scientists openly discussed getting rid of the 1940s warmth in the temperature data without understanding the anomaly. An email unveiled by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request said: “It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with why the blip”. http://di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt
One can download the original and altered data directly from the NOAA. ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5 You can see and construct the graphs yourself, first hand, with the data pre-plotted in a Google sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDao... on the “Graphs” tab.
Patrick Moore, Greenpeace co-founder has said: “I can adjust the data to show any trend I like.”
Moore left Greenpeace because he felt they were pushing fear-mongering instead of science and logic. More background on the spat between Mr. Moore and Greenpeace can be found at https://thelibertarianrepublic.com/greenpeace-co-founder-pat...
According to the Toronto Sun, Canada’s Department of the Environment just purged 100 years of data on climate change. Patrick Moore said: “I don’t care why they scrapped the data, that is simply wrong. They could make note of why they don’t trust it but to destroy it is a crime against science and history.” https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560 This seems suspicious as no data set should ever be purged, for posterity. This dataset could have simply been deprecated.
Since the NOAA sensors have been unreliable the US has been building a new network higher-quality sensors called the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) starting in year 2004. The vision of the USCRN program is to maintain a high-quality climate observation network.
It is an error to mis-attribute warming to increased CO2 when many other known causal factors exist. Those other factors are the reason the USCRN was developed, funded, and put in place. The non-CO2 causal factors include increased population density in cities, increased energy use per capita, reduced atmospheric pollution, increased local humidity from human activities (lawn watering, industrial cooling towers), changed site conditions from rural to urban, long-term drought, and wind shadows from buildings in cities. https://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2017/03/us-air-temperatu...
The new USCRN data has shown no significant warming trend in the USA in 12 years: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/08/the-uscrn-revisited/
The USCRN data is rarely mentioned in NOAA’s monthly and annual “State of the Climate” reports to the U.S. public, instead buried in the depths of the NCDC website, one can get access to the data and have it plotted.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t do original research but reports on others’ research, which they call Assessment Reports. There have been 5 thus far.
A scientist working with the IPCC said the IPCC is above Freedom of Information Acts: “One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [Assessment Report 5] would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. … Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden.”
“I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climateg...
Scientists with NOAA view global warming as a political cause rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data. https://observer.com/2017/02/noaa-fake-global-warming-data-p...
The IPCC report relies upon six long-term surface temperature datasets to come up with the 0.2°C per decade rate of increase. The report does not cite the two global temperature datasets derived from satellites: the University of Alabama in Huntsville reports that global average temperatures are rising at a rate of 0.13°C per decade, and Remote Sensing Systems reports the rate of increase at 0.18°C per decade. At the UAH rate of warming, the 1.5°C threshold would not be exceeded until around 2070. https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a...
The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. It’s often said that 97% of scientists agree with the anthropogenic climate-change thesis. However, a 2012 poll of American Meteorological Society members also reported a diversity of opinion. 11% attributed the phenomenon to human activity and natural causes in about equal measure, while 23% said enough is not yet known to make any determination.
Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/10/climate-change-no-its...
The UN has been making the same claim that we only have twelve years to save the planet from global warming, for the past 30 years.
The 12-year deadline is a talking point for politicians. However the IPCC said there is not some “magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate 'fine' from 'catastrophic’”
Source: https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocas... , https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/15/children-strike-school-cl...
Someone at Reason read the UN/IPCC report, said there is no doomsday in it. https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a...
No climate apocalyptic predictions have come true to date, despite 50 years of such predictions.
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyp...