re: #473 iceman1960

Yes CO2 is a green house but like I said our contribution is so minimal it has no effect.

Are you kidding?

Historically, CO2 levels have varied between about 180 and 280 parts per million in the atmosphere, over cycles of about a hundred thousand years:

Image: CO2graph.gif

See that sharp jump right at the end of the graph, taking us up to about 380?

That’s the jump since we started to dump a significant volume of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels - there is a very strong correlation between the two.

We can also verify our contribution to the recent increases with isotopic analyses:

realclimate.org

There is so little doubt in our contribution to CO2 levels that most “skeptics” have accepted it before they move onto other talking points. The true skeptics - those who reserve judgement until they look into the evidence for themselves - quickly realise those talking points are bunk as well, then move on to the next point… ad infinitum. At no point does the denialist rhetoric have much validity, and “skeptics” often reach the same conclusion as the scientists.

Which is why climate change “skeptics” is pretty misleading as a terminology.