re: #528 hopperandadropper

As a scientist, it’s been my experience that valid scientific arguments usually don’t have the political consequences I mentioned. I note that you did not refute my points, just whine about Exxon. They produce a panoply of incredibly useful products, at reasonable cost, but that makes them EVIL, right?

Don’t be ludicrous. Exxon would never ever put it’s own gain above the common good. They are some of the greenest, most philanthropic people on the planet. They would never gouge or pollute or try to use their political influence to the benefit of their bottom line.

But okay, now let’s make the scientific argument. Fact A: The climate of the earth has been both much warmer and much colder than it is now, including episodes of both within recorded human history.

But it has never had these concentrations of greenhouse gasses - not just CO2

Fact B: None of the events mentioned in Fact A could possibly have been caused by human activity.

This is patently false. The ocean algae and the forests were not depleted by natural causes. Methane from industrial agricultural sewage was not naturally caused. Enormous amounts of exhaust from autos and factories was not naturally caused. We are talking billions of tons of gas. What would make you think that there is no effect?

Fact C: it is not necessary to invoke human activity to explain anything that is currently being observed.

False, See the paper I linked above. If you do not like that one, I have others I can link.

Fact D: Even if you ignore Fact C, CO2 is not well correlated with 20th century climate. The climate was cooling for more than two decades in the middle of the century, at a time when fossil fuel production and consumption was expanding markedly. Over the past 9 or ten years, the climate has not changed significantly- if anything there is a slight cooling trend. Yet CO2 continued to rise. The greenhouse effect of CO2 is trivial compared to the effect of water vapor, a far more prevalent atmospheric gas.

False false and false. Nothing you have said there is true.

So what exactly is the actual physical data showing that CO2 drives climate change? Hint: the output from computer models does not constitute data. Physical observations constitute data.

Again, the models have made accurate predictions. See the paper I linked above, or for that matter any of a slew of others. For that matter, if you are not going to use computers to crunch systems of differential equations, what other method of analysis do you propose?

I do not doubt that you are some sort of scientist, but you are clearly not involved with the field.