I don’t actually agree with the cooling trend. As I stated before, the cooling trend was just manipulating data (see my comment #35).

This climate is ideal because otherwise we will potentially see famine, fires, floods, droughts, disease, and basically problems on a massive scale. Developing nations just do not have the infrastructure to handle the affects of climate change that we have seen so far.

Personally, I don’t want to see that happen any more than it already has.

Anyway, I obviously cannot convince you of the science, so I hoped you watched Bill Gates’ presentation and are at least supportive of cleaner and more efficient energy production methods.

Science indicates mankind is causing some climate change, and therefore we need government action to force a stop to it.

Andrew, this is the exact type of logic that brings us all big government initiatives.

In the healthcare debate, how many times to we hear a story of someone who didn’t receive free healthcare and died… with the natural conclusion being, we need a big government program to prevent that from ever happening again, to anyone.

Or, a child finds a handgun in his home and accidentally shoots his friend with it. Well, obviously, that means we need strict gun control legislation.

What I was trying to get you to think about is the nature of mankind, and the total impact we make on our environment. If the other factors that affect climate, and we agree there are many, are trending cooler short-term (from 2003 through today) and graphs indicate we’re between ice ages, so we’ll be trending cooler long-term as well, then if we impact the climate ever so slightly in the direction of warming, isn’t that impact in a positive direction?

Obviously we can’t prevent the next ice age. I would argue that our impact on doing that would be about as much as throwing a ping pong ball at the windshield of a semi moving at 60 miles per hour. The law of physics indicates that ping pong ball must’ve slowed the truck some, but for all intents and purposes the impact was negligible.

Anyway, what I’m asking you about now is the coupling of believing human impact on climate is in the direction of warming rather than cooling, and your conclusion that this is bad and must be stopped.

Again, why is the climate, as we know it today, considered ideal?

And when natural forces again cause the climate to change, towards warming or cooling, as natural forces have been continually doing since forever, why will this natural evolution from now on be seen as bad?

It’s as though you want creatures 100 million years from now to look at the earth’s climate graph and see all the ups and downs, all the ice ages and so on, right up until 2010, and then see a steady flat line, with zero deviation, not even a degree, for the next 100 million years.

Anyway, you’re obviously a very intelligent guy, that’s why I enjoy our conversation, and I’d really like to explore this angle of the subject with you. I want to better understand how the logic of the man-made global warming advocates holds together, in context of the big picture.

Thanks,
Mark

Here’s my point: Why is all the naturally-occuring warming/cooling history of earth over the last hundreds of millions of years okay, but this next degree is going to cause disaster?

It all boils down to the data. The reason is that the data shows it is dramatically different from the climate change the Earth has experienced before. I know that you are not convinced it is significant, but the majority of scientists are and they are a lot more qualified to make that call.

Regarding beavers(!): Other animals have not even come close to developing the type of technology that we have. We are intelligent. We can measure other animals’ impact and our own impact on the environment. Sometimes we do have to step into mother nature carefully and alter things for the good of the environment (e.g. when invasive plants or fish try to take over).

There is no debate that other natural factors are also in play. I haven’t done much research into sunspots and ocean currents, but I know the sunspot argument was debunked.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/sunspots-do-not-cause-climate-change-say-scientists-1839867.html

1. At this point, I’m not sure if you can be convinced unless a real climate scientist stepped in. This is an issue that’s important to me, so I hope I gave it my best shot.

2. As I said before, CO2′s impact at trace levels has been known since the mid-19th century.

3. Yes, according to most climate scientists.

4. Ok, so I read more about the “cooling trend”. It turns out that if you take the data from 1998-2007 you get a 0.3 cooling trend. If you take the data from 1997-2006, there is a 0.6 warming trend. Over the long term, we are warming. This article explains how climate skeptics are cherry picking the data to make it look like climate change isn’t a big deal:
http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_14472650

Unfortunately, we can’t control how much we warm the planet. We can’t just pull the plug right now and say “well, we aren’t going to put any more CO2 in the air because the planet is at a good temperature.” If we pull the plug today, there will still be enough greenhouse gases from previous years to keep the planet warming.

We should be arrogant. We are highly evolved beings. Big corporations are throwing money around trying to kill off green policies and are ignoring scientific data so that they can make more profits.

I want to leave you with today a TED presentation by Bill Gates. Toward the end of the video, Bill has a message toward climate skeptics that basically says even if you don’t believe in man-made climate change, you should believe that it’s important to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions because it will be good for our economy and the world.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates.html

Think of a wooded area with lakes, rivers, streams. Beavers live there and take down trees, altering the course of some of the waterways. That makes there environment “different”, and I suppose some people could debate that it might be for the better and some might say its overall for the worse. In a hypothetical situation like that, would you tend to be in favor of putting some sort of skirts on the base of the trees, perhaps sheet metal, to prevent the beavers from living their lives as they had been?

Now look at mankind. Are we part of nature too? If the fact there are about 7,000,000,000 of us will cause the planet to warm maybe one degree celsius over the next 100 years, does that mean, first, that the change is “bad”? Would our activity causing the planet to cool one degree over the next 100 years likewise be “bad”?

Andrew, we agree natural climate change has been happening since forever and the planet has not only survived nicely, the glaciers have given us wonderful lakes and interesting topography.

Here’s my point: Why is all the naturally-occuring warming/cooling history of earth over the last hundreds of millions of years okay, but this next degree is going to cause disaster?

If beavers can alter their environment and that’s okay, it’s nature, then suppose you are right and 7 billion of us are also altering our environment slightly. Why do you and others leap to the conclusion that we must be completely neutral in our environment?

Another thought. Since the temperature hasn’t been rising the past 10 years, can we at least agree that CO2 and other “greenhouse gasses” aren’t the only factor at play here? I would argue the sun (and sunspots) is almost infinitely more important to climate than the trace amount of those gasses and in addition we hear scientists talk about ocean currents, prevailing winds, and on and on.

So, suppose there are 50 different factors in climate change, 49 are natural and out of our control, and one small one, CO2, is something we are partially (at most, one-tenth) responsible for. Isn’t there about a 50-50 chance that the natural forces are trending cooler, and that our impact is actually to very slightly moderate that shift? In other words, when you see that the planet has cooled slightly in the past 10 years, if our impact on climate is in the warming direction, haven’t we actually moderated that change, and in fact, aren’t we actually responsible for LESS cooling (LESS climate change?)

Now, I have not in any way conceded any of the fundamental points:

1. I’m not convinced we can be said to be in a significant warming trend. It all depends what timeframe we’re looking at.

2. I’m not convinced of the effect of CO2 in our atmosphere at trace levels. Hopefully the links you provided will enlighten me on this point.

Now, IF the man-made warming effect is in fact true, then I move on to these questions:

3. Is it a significant enough impact to outweigh all the other factors that we have no control over?

4. If the factors we have no control over are trending cooler, then isn’t our contribution to the equation actually a good thing, in that it would be providing moderation to the cooling trend?

Andrew, I live in Minnesota. I won’t live to see it, but the next ice age will destroy everything in my community and everything north of me all the way to Canada and beyond. The last one was just 10,000 years ago. If you want to think about catastrophe, imagine the northern 2/3 of Minnesota completely wiped out. If mankind’s activity is a force that is very minutely, but steadily, keeping the next ice age that much further off, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Your position seems to be that if mankind’s activity has any impact on the climate whatsoever, it is a bad thing and must be reduced or stopped. I see us as part of nature.

We will probably agree that reasonable pollution control is a good thing (wishing China and India would focus on their efforts a little more… I’m sure in time they will improve in that area.) But I cannot get to the point where I see CO2 as a pollutant. I also don’t see how the cooling of the past 10 years fits into the Mann hockey stick model, and eventually I come to the big one:

Sarah Palin calls it “the arrogance of man.” Andrew, why is the climate as it is in our lifetimes somehow deemed the ideal, from which we must never again deviate? Is it simply because we walk the earth now, and therefore we just assume this is how it should always be?

Or is this just another excuse for people inclined towards big government to grab more control over people who just want to heat their homes and have a mobile lifestyle?

@Mark
Greenhouses and cars don’t have an atmosphere and thus can’t replicate our atmosphere. The solar energy is absorbed by the contents of the greenhouse or car, and converted to heat energy. The heat energy can’t escape the greenhouse or car because of the glass. The glass works similar to the greenhouse gases in the real greenhouse effect:
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/FAQ/wg1_faq-1.1.html

Well, I’m not quite ready to stop looking beyound that.

We now agree the plants in a greenhouse reduce the levels of CO2 relative to the atmosphere in general. Yet greenhouses are hotter than the atmosphere. The correlation I’m seeing here is LOWER CO2 levels “causing” greenhouses to be warmer.

Here’s another one (call it a “mini-greenhouse” experiment.) Take your nice, average summer day when it’s about 80 degrees outside. Now, put your car in direct sunlight, close all the windows and doors, wait a couple hours, and see which is warmer- inside the car, or just outside it? And again, nothing to do with CO2.

I appreciate that you guys are being respectful and civil. Keep it up.

Now, back to the original question of creating a physical model. NOAA has simple one that can be performed in class, but this is simply to prove that trapping radiation increases surface temperatures:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/education/lesson_plans/Modeling%20the%20Greenhouse%20Effect.pdf

To really measure the radiative effects of gases, you need a spectrophotometer. Back in 1861, Tyndall published “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connection of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction”. He measured different gases and found that CO2 in trace amounts acts similar to a sheet of paper. The analogy provided from the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm) is that a sheet of paper is much more effective than a pool of water in blocking light.

The article also cites other research and experiments, but I didn’t have time to go through it.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

Does that help?