Yes I can actually. Carbon Dioxide(I don't personally consider this a greenhouse gas, but most do) makes plants healthier and grow faster. Yearly measurements have shown that plants are actually growing faster with more CO2 in the air.

http://www.purgit.com/co2ok.html

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001938.html

Yes. But what about deforestation. Living plants may grow faster (providing greater levels of agricultural food products), but will accelerating deforestation impose exponentially accelerating melt-off of glaciers and the ice caps? Remember your physics: White surfaces reflect radiation, dark colors absorb thermal energy. As the ice caps melt there will be less "white surface," so sea water will get warmer; warmer seas will melt more ice, etc. etc. Plus, warmer masses increase the rate of molecule vibrations - basically exciting the molecules, causing more space between molecules. Warmer water means higher sea levels - even if the number of liquid H2O molecules remained constant (and the number of liquid water molecules will increase because of melting solid water / ice). Think about it. (Blow up a balloon and seal it. Check its volume. Put the balloon in the freezer for twenty minutes. Check its volume. You'll find that the balloon had shrunk. Now let the balloon return to room temperature. It will return to something like its original size when you had first inflated it. Try it.)

The earth is a complex system so none of us will be able to predict with any true certainty what may come to pass.

But the other major issue is the carbon recycling capability of corals and other sea plants. Typically, these life forms in the ocean absorb the carbon and, when they die, through the miracle of plate tectonics, the carbon is subsumed back into earth's crust (of course this is a millions of years process). But, within our lifetimes, because of global warming, as the ice caps melt, sea currents will change with unforeseen effects upon marine life and plants. We could disrupt the entire carbon cycle (i.e. massive die-offs of corals and other sea plants). That may cause a runaway increase of CO2 gas within the atmosphere. And if sea currents change, forcing winds and thermals to change, precipitation patterns may change. And then, what good is an abundance of CO2 to the growth cycle of corn and wheat if there's no rainwater (in, say, Kansas).

I'm not saying that it's doomsday. I'm just saying that my children will be adults in a drastically different world (climate wise) than the world in which we grew up.

Hell, I live in Mongolia - far away from the sea. If I was in Bangladesh, I'd be running away as fast as possible. Florida, too, for that matter. I hope Dutch technology is good. Thames River, well, London may get some water damage. I'd start moving Manhattan inland, etc.

No you can't.

Actually, the more CO2 that is in the air will causes plants to grow larger, but contain less nutrients. If you look back at when the dinosaurs roamed, this is the msin reason Dinosaurs grew to be so massive. They needed to eat massive amounts of plant life, which contained very few nutrients; thus requiring Dinosaurs to have huge and complex digestive systems. You will notice that plants that are less nutritious will have a yelllow tint to them, while plants like the ones found today are a healthy green.

Yes you are right plants will grow faster with more C02 in the air, but that really is irrelevant to this topic. Not all greenhouse gases are C02!!!!

The motive would be to instill a sense of critical thinking and rationality to those who have bought into the exceedingly recent idea that mankind is grandious enough or significant enough to actually affect climate change on this planet.

Please make no mistake; I specifically address man-made global warming, not global warming in general, which has been an observed and verified fact, and a nominal repeating occurrance on this planet.



You would not be the only one, which is the distressing part of this thing.



No, I can not, and I do not...however, a little research will show clearly that other major, and much more significant greenhouse gasses, with much higher Global Warming Potentials (GWP), and much longer atmospheric lifetimes have grown at similar rates to CO2 over the same time period (Methane, Nitrous Oxide, and CFCs). Additionally, the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere (which, at present constitutes ~30/1000% of the atmosphere) has always risen at similar levels during all of the observed and highly periodic ice core warming periods...because, increased solar activity produces more CO2. We don't make it, and increase temperature, the sun increases temperature, and produces more CO2...

You may also note that I speak specifically to the need for alternative fuels in our future, as a means to stem the locally intense, health diminishing pollution that we create in high population concentration areas.




I imagine you will. But research is necessary in order to actually understand the mechanics surrounding it, and the political motivations surrounding the nonsense about it that goes on today.

WOW! KUDOS to you for a very educated, informed and correct answer!!
How refreshing!
I am someone who deals with this on a regulatory level everyday.

I can argue anything I want, and if I recall you said greenhouse gasES, as in plural. So as long as I mention just one, then I can disagree with you =p. Since I've never researched potentially positive effects of larger amounts of the other gases you mentioned I can't say anything about them, but I will never accept CO2 as "bad" for the environment.



Did you just say the CO2 is irrelevant to the topic of Man-Made Global Warming? If I recall the entire point of that big scare tactic is the inevitable carbon tax that many countries already have.... Without Carbon Dioxide as the bad guy, there wouldn't be a global warming scare. We'd probably go back a few decades and try a "Global Cooling" scare again. Or go back to the '20's when the first Global Warming scare tried to start up.

Well denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is just ignorant, it being a greenhouse gas is a proven fact.
Oil companies tried to use the argument you have used, it is beyond basic and ignores most of the effects of the gas has on the climate.

I disagree that CO2 is bad in any way. Mainly because if it was the cause we wouldn't have has that global cooling scare a few decades ago when temperatures were dropping as more and more fuels were being burned. As far as I know water vapor is the most influential gas factor in green house conditions. I believe solar activity to be the main cause.

If you think that you are just plain ignorant because it has been shown that in fact it is damaging because it is disruptive to the balance of the atmosphere.
Spend five minutes looking a scientific evidence (real published work in journals, not websites) and your find that there proof of this.

Or you could actually look at the University of East Anglia work that I posted and see the that you have been seriously misinformed on this whole subject.

Actually mate, water vapor is a much greater climate forcer than CO₂ has been or ever will be on this planet.


Water vapor in its various forms accounts for about 90% of observed greenhouse effect on earth.



You can see that the majority of CO2's absorptivity is in the same wavelengths as water. Ergo... CO2's effect is dwarfed by the atmospheric water, and requires a logarithmic growth rate to make a real impact.

While I certainly agree that the earth is getting warmer (though warming has pretty much halted since 2000), I do not believe there is enough supportive evidence to proclaim man is the sole or major cause of such warming.

That is not the point though, it is about change in balance. As I said no one has posted any real scientific work to disprove this.
Wickian was also trying to state that firstly CO2 was not a green house gas (which it factually is) and secondly that increased atmospheric CO2 is good for the atmosphere (which is an nonsense argument which oil companies abandoned years ago).

(Snipped out some of your quote there since it is real long)

Well I guess an interesting problem for your post is the notion that anyone ("climate scientists" that is), that has studied any of the worlds great ice cores, will tell you that CO₂ levels dont directly correlate to temperature. Here I included some citations for that for you.


Petit, J.R., et al, 1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436.


Fischer, H., Wahlen, M., Smith, J., Mastroianni, D. and Deck B. 1999. Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations. Science 283: 1712-1714.

Indeed this study even seems to suggest that much of the CO2 concentration increase we see today could be from the medieval warm period.

Its not just isolated studies with ice cores however,


Yokoyama, Y., Lambeck, K., Deckker, P.D., Johnston, P. and Fifield, L.K. 2000. Timing of the Last Glacial Maximum from observed sea-level minima. Nature 406: 713-716.


Nicolas Caillon, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Jean Jouzel, Jean-Marc Barnola, Jiancheng Kang, Volodya Y. Lipenkov .Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III. Science, 14 March 2003:Vol. 299. no. 5613, pp. 1728 - 1731

I think some of you may find this interesting it is questions/corrections/rebuttals to some points of the IPCC's 4th assessment report by some friends over at the Center for Science and Public policy. The IPCC's text to policy makers is italicized while, rebuttal/corrections etc are in boldfaced.



Source

If your friends with that **** I feel sorry for you.

You want scientific observations against AGW? I'll respond with THIS.

And here is nice rebuttal of that (unpublished, unreviewed) paper by the Woods-Hole Research Center. One of Americas leading indpendent research institutes. WHRC

Then you certainly know what I'm talking about!


May thanks for the kind response, stump...


How most people don't seem to (or don't want to) understand this stuff is a mind-bender to me!

I will agree with this 100% (including the fact that warming as a trend has indeed halted in the past several years....). Water vapor is much more contributory than CO2 is, or ever will be...

Alright, reviewed papers are a fair request. Here you are. A list of several papers intened to show that there are many other possible causes of the current temperatures, although I'm pretty sure the global temperatures have remained stable since 2001.

I'm not sure he may have read all those papers.
Also 2005 was along with 1998 are the hottest years on record.

I must say I do like your answers I love realism, and facts!!!

The record is only a hundred years old...or so. Microscopic samplings of a warming trend that's over 10 millennia old now.
2007 was one of the coldest years...and even that's pretty meaningless. This past winter rivals the coldest on record world-wide.

So?

In the UK it was above normal (with significantly higher rainfall - 122% above the average) (source - UK Met Office) as was New Zealand (though it is there summer (Source - Scoop with NIWA press release)
The record is 128 years old, but there not much we can do about that is there?

Actually, Hajime, trying to prevent the warming can absolutely do wrong. Many of the taxes and regulations proposed are expressly designed to increase costs of doing business vis fossil fuels 9i.e. do wrong to their users) in order to change their behavior. have heard politicians speak of carbon reduction requirements, world wide, of 40% to 80%. In the absence of alternatives (and no viable ones are yet in sight) such reductions would do immense harm. In the US, gas going to $4.00 is threating to trigger a recession. What the near absence of any fossil fuels, or the energy derived form them do?

we would be looking a a world where only the rich would have energy and transportation. The lack of modern farming, manufacturing, and transportation networks would mean many millions who would no longer receive manufactured goods, medicine, or food. And in such a world, research into truly useful alternative energy might never happen: there will be less funds available, and every cent will be needed for base survival. And this dose not even begin to get into the tremendous opportunity cost of lost future development and discovery that might have happened before the lights went out.

Leaving aside (for now) the question of weather there is global warming, it is possible for the cure to be worse than the disease. We should be continuing climatological research: more knowledge of our environment can help us. We should be sensibly conserving energy. We should be developing real, useful energy alternatives.

1) It should not be rising however except when it erupts and the should be a sharp spike not a long gradual rise, making you point irrelevant.
2) Actually there are good records - CRU at University of East Anglia and Northern and Southern Hemisphere comparisons. as regards to satellite temperatures

This is a graph comparing the global average temperature from the University of Alabama and Remote Sensing Systems who are the two people looking at lower atmosphere climate from satellite. There is in fact there a clear rise in the average.
3) The world temperature has often changed yes, but unlike other peaks, this is sustained for a longer period as shown by those very same ice cores. So that argument does not stand up, especially with the effects of global dimming as well.

Global dimming.
4) Actually the 20th century saw about a 20cm rise in sea level, which is in fact rather significant. Nasa data on sea level changes in the 20th century.
And a longer growing season and more rain can do a lot of damage, it is not a positive Source - Science Daily
5) Not showing sources for your information is against the site rules (and against the law).

Mr Stoecker is not one for realism; look at some of previous posts (or this for example Mr Stoecker showing a lack of realism).
I also think I just showed he is still lacking.

What about all those photos taken of the same places over a period of 100 years? Don't you notice a visual difference between then and now? Or do you think the modern photos have been photoshopped to further an insidious liberal conspiracy? Don't look now but a huge hunk of Antarctica fell off a few months ago.

Given the fact that there are people out there who believe in fairies, werewolves and ufo abductions, it comes as no surprise that some people also believe the climate isn't changing.

That shows the fallacy involved in this matter. Frankly, it was a warmer winter where I am to. However, 50 miles west, it was significantly colder. In many areas of the United States, it was the coldest and snowiest on record. Balanced out, the colds outnumbered the warms. Of course, there will always be variances from the norm...

This of course makes all the hoo ha rather pointless.




No, there's not.
Nor is there too much we can derive from it, nor any reason to do so.

The real fallacy here is to say the "colds outnumbered the warms"... what kind of unscientific, qualitative, subjective comment is that to make??

What is your sample size, which regions are covered in your samples, what are their elevations, which countries etc etc.... That comment is not worthy of you MID

I don't deny climate change, I would have to be r******ed to deny it. What I deny is people saying that if humans weren't making carbon dioxide our climate wouldn't be changing..... It would be the same today as it was in the 1900's. The fact is the climate has always changed and will continue to do so whether we're here or not.

Given the choice between global warming(the first case was in the 1920's I believe) and global cooling(that was the big hype a few decades ago), warmer temperatures would be a much better choice.

That depends, it is very much not the case if you live in Florida or the Carolinas and Georgia or the gulf coast since you'll be underwater. It would almost certainly mean destruction of the gulf stream too which would be extremely problematic for Iceland and the UK. The mid-west would complete its journey into becoming a desert.

Keithsco:

I do not maintain climatologic data. I merely read it when it comes out, from several sources, for curiosity's sake as much as anything else. This past winter, globally, in the northern hemisphere, was one of the coldest and snowiest on record, and in fact dropped the average global temperature in the hemisphere by almost a full degree C (thus wiping out the global waming of the past two decades...and even that is meaningless!).

The data is readily available and I am not in the habit of doing people's homework for them. Frankly, the man-made global warming topic bores me. It's fallacious, completely unsupportable on any basis...it's an hypothesis, certainly, and valid inasmuch as it's worthy of study...and nothing more; but its inflation to fact is beyond my capacity to comprehend, given the lack of concrete and supportable data.

There is more data against it than for it, and the data for it is extrapolation of minimalistic data which holds no validity.

We're observing detailed data for the past couple of decades, and drawing conclusions from a tiny fraction of a period of warming which has been on going for over 10,000 years. It's irrelevant.

Actually there are huge numbers of papers on global warming a lot more than that discredit global warming.
And no 1 winters data does not wipe out 35 years of previous data. It doesn't work like that.
And there is a reason why global warming is scientifically accepted by the vast majority of scientists, especially in my field as the biological effects are obvious when look at animal population migration and changes to range.


Here is a good start for scientific papers for you:Google scholar - Anthropogenic global warming


Your are required by the site to list you sources you know.

Hmmm. Can anyone here give me a clue as to what r******ed used to be?

New Scientist wouldn't lie to us, would it?! WOULD IT!?

Some areas would be hurt from rising temperatures, but as a whole, the world would be better off being warmer than cooler. If the entire planet warmed up, then we can still grow food, even if we have to change locations(which wouldn't be likely). If the whole planet cooled however, we would be facing world-wide starvation due to ever shortening food supplies.

No, that is simply not true. Where do you get this rubbish from?

Here's what I think.

http://www.break.com/index/fck-the-earth-day.html

If you're saying that global cooling won't cause food shortages, it's already happened in the very near past and you're wrong again.



I'm still waiting for you to dispute the last list of links I gave you that give alternative reasons to the natural warming cycle we were in. If you can't prove them wrong, then there's no way to dispute that they may be true.

It says 404 error.
But you want evidence of increased desertification? Loss of land? Loss of wildlife? Loss of plant life?
Increased desertification.
Increased desertification and loss of plant life.
Desertification, soil degradation and loss of habitat and wildlife in Africa.
Global warming = not good for crops - MIT study.

Brilliant (not really). Your opinion is a video, produced by someone else?

You keep posting this graph as if it were some kind of "proof" of something, you are aware that the raw CO₂ data has been adjusted to fit with temperature data, correct?

Maybe you should read Dr. Hansen's paper here, which if you read objectively you will understand it is his justification for why such "smoothing" need occur. The bottom line is, CO₂ spikes tend to lag global temperature trends by 800+ years, they do not match up neatly like your graph shows. For this to occur, the people with the most to gain/lose from the AGW hypothesis are adjusting their own raw data. For someone who consistently makes the claim of being a scientist, surely you would understand why this frowned upon. For instance, medicine we do things like double-blinded studies. In other areas like biology or physics, we have independent verification of the work. We do not tell our colleagues that our data must be adjusted to fit our hypothesis and then give them the parameters for adjustment.





Incidentally the irony here is great. I suppose biologists should now be experts in all fields? That is comedic to me, having seen other scientists dismissed on their critiques of evolution on the grounds they are not biologists.

Hmm, I seem to remember something about a pot and black kettle......




I certainly hope a scientist isn't using "hits on Google scholar" for his scientific backing, you do realize that just because the keywords included by the authors with those papers cause you to get a hit, without actually reading each and everyone of those papers you have no way to know if it is actually supporting your argument.

Look here, I can type Purple Space Monkey in Google scholar and return nearly 15,000 hits. I would think a fellow scientist may spend some time in JSTOR or EBSCOhost rather than parading around Google scholar posting free online abstracts.

2 points -
1)a lag in temperature does not mean the two are unassociated.
2)maybe if the papers where looked at you could see there are plenty of valid papers there, it merely a link for MID to start looking at papers with.

Certainly no one is suggesting this. However, a correlation or association does not mean a forcing. Which I think the majority of the argument has become, that CO2 forces climate. The reality of this is, we have no reliable data to suggest that CO2 is a main forcer of climate, unaltered data sets suggest that CO2 rather acts like a Earth sized thermometer.




I do not doubt that there is valid scientific papers there, there is valid scientific papers brought up when searching for the terms "Purple+Space+Monkey". That fact is because one can find valid papers by searching for words, does not indicate that all such papers support their position.

As I said it was merely a starting point, I was busy and didn't have time.
A correlation does not mean forcing no, but since it is obvious we are increasing atmospheric CO2 we can make such a conclusion.

We can make the conclusion that forcing is not correlated therefore rising CO2 levels makes it a forcer? No we cant make that conclusion, that is why we do science in the first place, so that we simply don't need to entertain every thought that pass through our heads. The only conclusion we can draw currently with CO2 and the data available is....is.... its effects on climate forcing are unknown. Thats an at best statement since raw data indicates temperature forcing CO2 levels and not vise versa.

That is highly debatable since we are factually expelling billions of tons of CO2 each year.

Its debatable is it? You (the biologist) suddenly have evidence that CO2 is a major climate forcer, yet millions of dollars a year are being spent on understanding how CO2 interplays in our climate. Somebody call NASA and let them know they can stop studying CO2 interactions in our climate, as it is clearly a climate forcer because a biologist gives it his ok. Interesting, could you make us lowly people privy to your secrets?

Are you aware of the volume of Earth's atmosphere?

Yes and you are aware that even small changes can make a huge difference.

Oddly enough NASA agree with me, as do other climatological centres such as the East Anglia Universities which is Europe's premier climate research institute.

Also ever considered that climate is a major factor in biology????