The important question here is whether humanity will destroy itself through global warming, or cause devastating effects that can only be halted by stopping the co2 output. The short answer is no.

Co2 has been higher in the past, and so has the absolute temperature, and life is still around. That was not what caused any other mass extinctions. It did not cause “runaway” global warming in a hockey stick fashion. CO2 levels rising do not alone cause exponential or even linear rises in temperature.

Humanity can “use up” resources, and we must guard against that by setting aside land and resources we do not waste.

But can we get to “runaway global warming” due to other human activity? That is unclear, but the only argument that it must do so is that it is unknown. It’s like looking at a wrapped gift and claiming it must contain a sweater.

Will all the bad effects such as drought and melting ice caps necessarily happen? Maybe, but probably not all.

Over-farming has been around since farming has been. So how can we be sure we aren’t hurting the Earth?

One of the biggest problem is that we are pooping near our tent, there is no other system besides the Earth for humans to depend on and exploit for resources and also to process our society’s waste. If we had an external system that could feed into and take things from the Earth system, we could gain better stability in the system. In other words, if we mined materials from space and exported some wastes and population to space, the Earth could be better balanced by bringing in external resources and removing extra wastes. We could be moving power generation and populations outside of the Earth.

To make those options available, we need to balance economy and environment as best as possible. We’d need a more powerful economy to start moving things off of the earth. We more powerful economy to have the resources to fix other things that are wrong on Earth, using geo-engineering or just being well-off enough to be able to set aside resources.

Right now we only have one test subject, just one patient, just one population. Asking all humans to cut carbon emissions is asking many humans to be uncomfortable and others to die. We cannot kill OURSELVES, as that would not save the planet or anything else… After all without intelligent life, the rest of earth life will be eventually eliminated by natural forces such as the death of the sun.

I guess the question is: How do you want things to end up? Do you want humanity to survive or would you rather force the destruction of the economy and thus humanity’s ability to actually do anything about climate change or anything else?

are pertains to your questions, I think the short answer to all of them is ‘I don’t know’.

As a person with training in physics and statistics it seems to me very hard to find an answer that isn’t ‘I don’t know’ to any of those questions. As far as historic records are concerned, I don’t think there is any physical way to quantify the amount of uncertainty associated with ANY proxy measurements because there is no control measurement one can make. All in all, such a situation would not be acceptable in any other physical science.

What has gotten lost in all of the media reports and glacial visits is that we are talking about a field of research that is really in its infancy. Much of what gets thrown around as truth in many chat rooms and blogs, even on reputable sites, is far from such a notion. If anything of any substance comes out of this ‘Climategate’ situation it should be that things are never as clear-cut as they seem. Newspaper articles and CNN reports on climate research will never tell you the whole story, meaning the inherent uncertainty in all of the conclusions made by researchers or, more importantly, the gross assumptions about the simplicity of the earth’s climate, realistic or not, that must be made in the name of getting an answer at all. I wish that researchers would just level with the public about most of this uncertainty and it’s this lack of transparency and honesty that really bothers me the most.

I think the take home message, from this site at least, is that one is never wrong for being skeptical. From the few things I have read here and sites like ClimateAudit.com no one is ‘denying’ climate change or global warming. What we would like is a more thorough exploration of what can and cannot be said by the climate research community with the certainty necessary to demand political and social change to lives of the people of the planet. If we’re basing changes that will leave billions of people in poverty into the next century on simply grafting data sets together to find an answer that seems plausible I think we’re in trouble. I tend to believe that there should be a straight-forward physical explanation for why unstoppable global warming would happen without curbing the emission of CO2. I have yet to find one and when asked, most ‘experts’ simply shut down or demand I solve their problems for them. Like the justice, I tend to think the burden of proof on the accuser not the defendant.

On a personal note, I find that, as far as science goes, climate research is serving as a proxy for science in general in the public’s eyes right now. If there are highly politicized researchers who are not abiding by the rules set for science and the public finds out, as has happened over the course of the last few weeks, it sheds a bad light on all of us. As a researcher who is funded by the US federal government, I find the whole situation very worrisome. The attitude of people like George Will who are willing to conflate predictions of cooling in the 1970’s with a complete lack of progress in current climate research capture what I fear the most. That science will spend its social and political capital backing a theory that researchers had to cut corners to produce what they deemed the ‘right’ answer.

I’m an interested member of Joe Public, mild-moderately educated, with no training in physics, statistics or climate science. Up til now, I have been a proponent of what you call “alarmist” science. Recently, the political presence of climate skeptics have become more vocal, and I decided I should look up your side of the story.

I must compliment the OP for their thoughtful analysis and relative lack of ad hominem arguments. These make his contribution much easier both to swallow and to respect. When I weigh up the counterarguments, it always comes down to a final bottom line: What are the facts? Really?

Does CO2 cause warming in the effect mentioned, or doesn’t it?
Is the climate historically unstable or not?
What has solar activity done over the last 50 years, or indeed 100000 years?
How accurate are climate models in predicting the past?
Has the earth really cooled over the last 10 years?

What does that even mean?

Here’s a question to you guys – I see articles on the news about how the greenland Ice shelf is thawing far faster than predicted. I see that some previously moderately cautious climate scientist are becoming more and more worried, an more radicalised. I see articles about the break up of the Ross Ice shelf. I see pictures of Glaciers vanishing over the last 30 years, and I have visited one myself. I see the pictures of the snow on top of mounth Kilamanjaro vanish, and I see interviews on TV of andean peoples increasingly worried that their farming practices are becoming untenable to due drought etc.

Now, these can’t be all bunkum. I’ve been to a glacier, that gives credence to all the other reports. It may be that these are caused by natural fluctuations – why does this seem unlikely to me? I suppose because the glacial valley that was dug clearly to millions of years to carve out, yet now that glacier’s gone in a few decades, and we’re the main change in the world’s environment.

I see your graph showing that a 0.6 degree warming happened in 1900 – 1950. You say it cannot be caused by CO2 levels – but the industrial revolution started not long before this, and perhaps more importantly, massive deforestation and disruption of eco systems throughout every continent started around a similar period (I thought – I could be wrong? again the facts vary according to whom you speak). Why couldn’t the 0.6 degree warming have been caused by man as well?

The most convincing work for me with regard to conservation and climate change I ever read was not about climate change at all. It was a book called “Collapse” and it was about civilisations of the past that had caused their own demise, usually as victims of their own success. There was a native american civilisation which wrecked their environment and caused local climatic shifts through deforestation that caused droughts, hunger and the end of their world, before the Europeans arrived. There were the Easter Islanders, who forsook the warring ways of their ancestors and prospered, until their little island was completely overrun by humans who chopped down the very last tree, and again ruined their eco system utterly, and the population went from 300 000 to 3000. There were others, and the analysis was balanced, contrasting failed civilisations with other societies who did survive under similar conditions.

This historical work convinced me that humans were not only capable, but almost psychologically programmed to over-exploit resources until their natural systems which maintain them broke and rendered them helpless, given any geographically closed system which did not allow the natural ecosystem to take up the slack. From then on, the question for me was not if humans would start to render the earth uninhabitable (given a business as usual approach), but rather, how, or in what manner, would we do it? Climate change seemed like the best mechanism to explain it.

But once again, it relies on facts which differ according to who you speak to.

I’m not trying to debunk you guys – you have far more technical knowledge than I do, but I would like an explanation for the facts on the ground from your perspective. I’m sorry if I sound barely literate, alarmist, or like a rabid greenie with an agenda – that’s not my intention. I only want to understand.

Yes, it does.

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2. The climate science terminology itself is changing and confusing to no real point. Is it “Anthropomorphic Global Warming” or “Climate Change”? Those have very different meanings, as “Climate Change” is thought of as a natural process by the public, one humans don’t have much ability to change.

Anthropomorphic means “relating to the idea that an animal, a god, or an object has feelings or characteristics like those of a human being”. Is that the word you meant to use?

3. You cite three decade periods “the decade before this one” and the two before it. What about the current decade? Also, with measurements supposedly improving, we have many data points from cities around the world for data. You can download this data from the internet. Yet we rely on some sparse thermometers and inaccurate satellites? It is clear the earth has cooled since 1998 substantially if you look at the weather data.

“The last decade” means “the most recent decade”. It is clear that the decade since 1998 has been warmer than the decade preceding 1998. In common parlance, the word “cooled” is rarely used to describe such a situation.

4. How quick is the “blink of a geological eye”? Will we see forests on the poles in our lifetimes? What’s the quickest that temperatures have changed that dramatically? Volcanos have errupted (millions of years ago) with enough CO2 to make our current levels seem low.

Try looking up some definitions of “geological time”. No, we will not see forests on the poles in our lifetime. Ice ages end with temperature rises of about 10°C in a few hundred years.

5. What about the logarithmic effect of CO2 increases by Beer’s Law? Even if we had 5 times the CO2 in the air, would that increase the temperature by all that much? How much exactly? Does it match the temperatures from when the earth did have that much CO2?
http://brneurosci.org/co2.html

What about it? Yes. No, because the luminosity of the Sun was lower back then. Do you know why the oceans didn’t freeze when the Sun was 25% dimmer?

6. Realistically, solar radiation has gone down in the last decade, hasn’t it… And that has decreased the earth’s temperature recently, right? So we know what causes some global warming and cooling. The CO2 contribution is not well understood, except that it is logarithmic and not the end of the world as we know it. I’d wager a guess that an earth 2-3 degrees warmer with more CO2 would actually be a slightly better place, as plants would grow more easily, and there would be more livable land.

Solar radiation has declined in accordance with the normal 11 year cycle. Have temperatures decreased accordingly? The ten warmest years in the directly measured surface temperature record are 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. What do you notice about those years? The CO2 contribution to this phenomenon is rather well understood. Your guess is irrelevant and banal; plants do not grow more easily in droughts, coasts do not thrive when sea levels rise, and communities which rely on meltwater from glaciers tend to do badly when those glaciers disappear.

7. Your point of warming at the poles is actually a good point. I’d have to concede that one. But again, that makes the world a better place, as it makes more land livable, and the effect won’t get out of hand just as it didn’t during the mideval warming period.

Are equatorial regions becoming more “livable”? Do more people live in equatorial regions, or at high latitudes? What do you mean by “out of hand”?

8. And anyway, the Kyoto accords and similar measures won’t help the climate in any real way, or stop CO2 emissions. Economic studies have shown existing programs to be ineffective and full of fraud. If we wanted to really stop CO2, we’d move to nuclear power or carbon neutral solutions like algea-fuels, which have their own problems. So live and let live, man. The earth will warm a limited amount and we can all just relax. If you don’t like it, make some space colonies if you believe that earth will become unlivable. Economically, a reasonable space colony would cost a fraction of the cost of the Kyoto accords… (and if it was a mining colony it may well pay for itself).

As you grow up, I presume that you’ll learn how to spell first, and then later how to think. At the moment you clearly can’t do either.

-Carbon dioxide absorbs only in thee areas of the spectrum, amounting to about 8% of radiationin earth;

-the amount absorbed (some of which is radiated , some of which heats the carbon dioxide molecules which then heats the air and ground it comes incontact with) does not increase in direct proportion to the amount of Co2 in the air;

-rather, there is complete absorbtionof the whole 8% at some point;

-as Co2 rises, that total absorption does not increase steadily or exponentially, but rather logarithmically. if you double the amount of C02, you only get a small amount of additional aborption?

Is this summary correct? Is there a dispute between AGW advocates and sceptics on this point?

Dude. Welcome to a gun rights advocate’s hell.

Facts and fact-based arguments never work against those who are ruled by emotion and who let emotion drive their decision-making process. (Cue photo of lone polar bear floating on a slab of melting ice.)

But one would expect better from those who work within the Scientific Method, no?

1. He has his terminology wrong. It is “forcing” not “feedbacks” that are causing warming. Well, so what? If his terminology is used in a way climate scientists don’t use it, does that invalidate his point?

2. The climate science terminology itself is changing and confusing to no real point. Is it “Anthropomorphic Global Warming” or “Climate Change”? Those have very different meanings, as “Climate Change” is thought of as a natural process by the public, one humans don’t have much ability to change.

3. You cite three decade periods “the decade before this one” and the two before it. What about the current decade? Also, with measurements supposedly improving, we have many data points from cities around the world for data. You can download this data from the internet. Yet we rely on some sparse thermometers and inaccurate satellites? It is clear the earth has cooled since 1998 substantially if you look at the weather data.

4. How quick is the “blink of a geological eye”? Will we see forests on the poles in our lifetimes? What’s the quickest that temperatures have changed that dramatically? Volcanos have errupted (millions of years ago) with enough CO2 to make our current levels seem low.

5. What about the logarithmic effect of CO2 increases by Beer’s Law? Even if we had 5 times the CO2 in the air, would that increase the temperature by all that much? How much exactly? Does it match the temperatures from when the earth did have that much CO2?
http://brneurosci.org/co2.html

6. Realistically, solar radiation has gone down in the last decade, hasn’t it… And that has decreased the earth’s temperature recently, right? So we know what causes some global warming and cooling. The CO2 contribution is not well understood, except that it is logarithmic and not the end of the world as we know it. I’d wager a guess that an earth 2-3 degrees warmer with more CO2 would actually be a slightly better place, as plants would grow more easily, and there would be more livable land.

7. Your point of warming at the poles is actually a good point. I’d have to concede that one. But again, that makes the world a better place, as it makes more land livable, and the effect won’t get out of hand just as it didn’t during the mideval warming period.

8. And anyway, the Kyoto accords and similar measures won’t help the climate in any real way, or stop CO2 emissions. Economic studies have shown existing programs to be ineffective and full of fraud. If we wanted to really stop CO2, we’d move to nuclear power or carbon neutral solutions like algea-fuels, which have their own problems. So live and let live, man. The earth will warm a limited amount and we can all just relax. If you don’t like it, make some space colonies if you believe that earth will become unlivable. Economically, a reasonable space colony would cost a fraction of the cost of the Kyoto accords… (and if it was a mining colony it may well pay for itself).