More Americans and most Republicans now believe in climate change

So you somehow figure Mommy Erf is at a point of ecological equilibrium which did not exist, say, 100K years ago. On what basis?

Why is it less tragic for an animal eaten alive, as animals often are, than to be the last animal of its species to be eaten alive?

 

The "world leading experts" don't know why. They have only unsupported theories.

Perhaps when the learn the cause of the Mid-Pleistocene Event, they'll know more than they know now.

It's a lagging indicator.

I never said they weren't, but in the end, it will be discovered and admitted that H2O has far greater impact than CO2.

You said it yourself. "Approximate" is the operand here. Glacial Periods used to last about 40,000 years -- which is not 100,000 years -- until the Mid-Pleistocene Event, after which time they started lasting 80,000 to 120,000 years, which is not 100,000 years.

Averaging 80,000 years and 100,000 years to get a 100,000 year average then crow-barring that into Mankovitch Cycles is not scientifically valid.

The most important statement in science is "I don't know." It is the beginning of wisdom. The reality is scientists don't know, and speculative theories doesn't help.

Not significantly.

The IPCC originally claimed that temperatures had increased 0.85°C over the last 140 years, but because their models are all wrong, they've been forced to recant and now claim it has only been 0.7°C over the same period.

It isn't CO2.

Then temperatures will fall within normal ranges for an Inter-Glacial Period.

If temperatures should rise another 10°F, the only scientifically valid statement you can make is that it is normal, and falls within the normal range of temperatures for Inter-Glacial Periods.

The Greenland Ice Sheet and the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, and sometimes even the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheets, always undergo melting during Inter-Glacial Periods. That is perfectly normal, and it does that even when CO2 levels are 287 ppm CO2 or less.

You just have to accept as reality that sea levels and temperatures will rise, no matter what you do. There are no negative consequences of warmer temperatures. In Earth's history, it has never become warmer and drier. Quite the contrary, it is always warmer and wetter.

The humans alive during the previous Inter-Glacial managed to survive just fine, and if you can't, then that speaks highly of them, but rather disparagingly about yourselves.

 

They certainly don't have all of the answers nor are any of the answers perfect. But, that doesn't mean they are clueless.

And we certainly don't know exactly what all of the contributing circumstance were for each and every climatic change event in Earth's history. We don't even have perfect explanations for the exact timing of the timing of the glacial/interglacial events like Mid-Pleistocene event over the last million. But, that doesn't mean we can't know what the significant influencing factors of climate change today are. Science is chalked full of examples where scientists can use the understanding of fundamental physical process to understand the state of the system today without having perfect knowledge of how those same fundamental physical processes played out in the past.

This isn't as simple as you think. It is true that 90% of the time CO2 concentrations trends lag temperature trends in the paleoclimate record. This is expected behavior because the catalyzing effect that initiates temperature changes usually isn't initialing caused by CO2 perturbations. It's something else that first catalyzes the temperature change. However, once the temperature change gets catalyzed CO2 still participates as both a feedback and a forcing mechanism. CO2 will concentrations will lag the temperature if CO2 wasn't the first agent to catalyze the temperature change. That is expected. However, when CO2 is the agent that first catalyzes the temperature than it leads the temperature profile. It works this way because CO2 is both a forcing agent and a feedback agent.

First, if H2O is a greenhouse gas then CO2 must also be a greenhouse gas. They are both polyatomic molecules that get their molecular vibrational modes activated by IR spectrum photons afterall. You can't say that H2O has a significant impact, but then pretend like CO2 doesn't.

Second, scientists are already well aware that in absolute terms H2O has a large greenhouse gas effect than does CO2. It was actually Nobel Prize winning chemist Svante Arrhenius who figured this out in the lates 1800's. So there isn't going to be an epiphany in this regard someday because this has been known for over 100 years.

Third, H20 unlike CO2 cannot catalyze temperature changes on it's own. It does participate in a feedback with the temperature and will amplify temperature changes as long as something else catalyzes the temperature change first. This why scientists say H2O is only a feedback agent while CO2 is both a feedback agent AND a forcing agent. This is actually intuitive if not mind numblingly obvious. Afterall, if H2O were also a forcing agent (meaning that it can catalyze temperature changes on it's own) then something as trivial as a hyperactive hurricane season would have kick started a runaway greenhouse gas effect on Earth long ago, but alas after a billion years of countless hurricanes this never happened. Even the explanation for H2O's self limiting feedback is pretty intuitive. It goes like this...warmer temperatures lead to more evaporation which leads to more clouds which leads to cooling which leads to less evaporation which leads to less clouds which leads to more warming and so on. This why H2O is in a stable equilibrium with the temperature. CO2 has no such fundamental self limiting mechanism to its feedback.

I agree. Milankovitch cycles aren't the one and only explanation for the approximate 100,000 cycle for glacial/interglacial events. But there is a lot of evidence that suggests that it is a significant factor. Ignoring Milankovitch cycles only makes more difficult to explain these cycles.

I agree with you on that. There is no shame in saying "I don't know". But, there is a lot of shame in saying "meh" instead of "hmm...that's interesting". Scientists are working to try and better explain the paleoclimate record because it's worthy of being explained. Theorizing is part of the process. In fact, that's kinda a big deal in science. You kinda need to be doing it.

It has warmed by ~0.9C since 1960. Every single dataset which published a global mean surface temperature agrees. Literally every single one. Likewise multiple datasets confirm that the total heat uptake in the geosphere is over 100e21 joules.

And no, models are not wrong. They aren't perfect, but they definitely aren't wrong.

However, what we can say definitively is that denier predictions of cooling are absolutely wrong because they couldn't even get the direction of the temperature change correct.

Then what is it?

Science has provided an abundance of evidence that is consistent with the fact that CO2 produces a warming effect and the magnitude of this warming effect in the context of all other radiative forcing agents is a close match to reality. If you ignore CO2 you lose the power to explain both past and present global temperature trends. That is a fact.

I agree. If your definition of "normal" is something that has occurred before then there is nothing abnormal about this event.

But, that doesn't mean this warning event is happening absent a cause. Heat does not spontaneously appear and disappear. Everything happens for reason. Saying it is "normal" is in no way providing a reason or cause for the change. That's what is most important to scientists.

By the way, you change your definition of "normal" to be the rate of change in the temperature over the holocene then this particular warning event is probably not normal. These rates of change being on the order of 0.6C/decade in the Arctic region and 0.2C/decade globally do not have wide acceptance among the different lines of evidence until you go back to the Younger-Dryas period and the warming event that brought us out of the last glacial period.

I agree. This has happened before without any anthroprogenic influence. But, there's always a reason. We not be able to catalog all of these reasons in the paleoclimate record but we can definitely catalog the reason for the occurrence of it today.

I completely disagree. Since anthroprogenic agents like CO2, CH4, CFCs, halocarbons, various aerosols, and land use changes are dwarfing the naturally modulated effects by an order of magnitude that necessarily means that we can (at least in principal) do something about it.

You're right. Much of Earth's history was warmer and wetter. This happened with a dimmer Sun. Remember, the Sun brightens at a rate of 1% per 100 million years. 500 MY ago the Earth was much warmer with the Sun being 5% dimmer. How do you think that happened?

 

And if anyone thinks CO2 can't possibly be having an impact on the global mean temperature then all you have to do is convincingly argue for a mechanism that explain the warming troposphere and hydrosphere simultaneous with the cooling stratosphere to falsify the greenhouse gas effect (specifically CO2). Ever since the GHG hypothesis was first developed by Nobel Prize winning Svante Arrhenius back in 1896 no one has been able to successfully come up with an alternative mechanism that can explain this unique observation. The best alternative anyone has come up with is clouds, but unfortunately not even that works out. If anyone is interested I can go over what science has learned about clouds and why clouds can't explain the smoking gun signal.

 

Adit is hotter than Satan’s arse here in Australia so can we ship you some of the heat and drought