"The deck is full of red deuces, so long as you ignore the black
cards, the picture cards and the numbers bigger than two and a half,
all of which obviously have an agenda." Indeed.
Still, a troll is a troll. No matter how sadly amusing this particular
challenge was, I think we really ought to provide one place where the
conversation has moved on from the "global warming, misguided myth or
vicious conspiracy" question.
mt
If you want something more accessible, then wiki is good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
But if you just want to dismiss all sources you disagree with as
"political", then... there is no hope for you.
-William
--
William M. Connolley | www.wmconnolley.org.uk | 07985 935400
You want data? How many cartons of empty terabyte drives do you have
handy? Cripes, talk about ill-posed questions...
The closing comment "Facts: a.k.a. Science" is a dead giveaway that
there's nothing to be gained from wasting more time on this nonsense.
Ray
A simple grey-atmosphere model may be what you are looking for in the
event you are serious.
Here's a document (in MS Word format unfortunately) from an undergrad
meteorology class that explains the basics.
mt
Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.
"I defy anyone to prove to me that "global warming" is irrefutably a
predominantly anthropogenic process. The scientific method does not
get you there, true facts on A.G.W. are few and far between. Please do
not give me links to environmental activist sites like Real Climate. I
said irrefutable evidence, not politics."
That seems more a provocation than the beginning of an honest inquiry.
You can't effectively determine whether something is fraudulent by
coming in guns blazing and screaming fraud, then seeing whether they
welcome your skeptical inquiry. By this standard everything is
fraudulent!
mt
Regarding the proportion of recent warming due to human activity, it's
**almost certainly the great majority**. To get to that point we
consider multiple streams of evidence. If you are genuinely
interested, do read the IPCC WGI , please. Then maybe we can talk
about parts of the picture that interest you.
More important for practical reasons is that the warming and
associated changes we have already seen are almost certainly much
smaller than those to come.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html (start with the Summary
for Policymakers) is pretty much the best that can be done for you. It
may not be what you are asking for but it does summarize the state of
knowledge and its sources honestly and effectively. If IPCC is not
good enough as a starting place for you we can probably not do better
here; its purpose is specifically to address questions like yours, and
many of the most respected professionals in the field have contributed
time to the process.
At present, though you claim to be interested, you don't seem to have
taken the time to look into it.
mt
Here is another discussion of why the IPCC should not be
dismissed:
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2007/02/02/dessler/index.html
You're Getting Warmer
The scoop on the new IPCC climate-change report
By
<http://www.grist.org/cgi-bin/search.pl?query=gristauthor=%28Andrew%20Dessler%29&reverse=on&sort=gristdate>Andrew
Dessler
02 Feb 2007
[Here are some excerpts:]
What is the IPCC, and what's the deal with its new report?
When climate change emerged as an important environmental issue in
the late 1980s, the world governments' first response was to
establish an international body to produce summaries of scientific
knowledge of climate change. That body is the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change. The IPCC has completed three major reports since
its formation, in 1990, 1995, and 2001, and throughout 2007 will
release its Fourth Assessment Report (hereafter referred to as the AR4).
...
The IPCC reports are widely regarded as the authoritative statements
of scientific knowledge about climate change, and as such they carry
enormous weight in both the scientific and policy communities. The
immense credibility of the IPCC's reports arises from the credible
process that produces it. The reports are based on the peer-reviewed
literature and are written by hundreds of expert climate scientists
from over 100 countries. The reports then go through multiple layers
of review, including expert peer review by thousands of climate
scientists who were not authors of the report.
The IPCC's Third Assessment Report, published in 2001, then went
through review by a blue-ribbon panel convened by the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences, which endorsed its findings. The conclusions of
the IPCC reports have also been endorsed by the American Geophysical
Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, and others.
The resulting IPCC reports are accepted worldwide as the best
summaries of what the scientific community knows about climate change
and how confidently we know it.
[Visit the website for the complete article]
Andrew Dessler is an associate professor in the Department of
Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University; his research focuses on
the physics of climate change, climate feedbacks in particular. He
blogs at <http://gristmill.grist.org/user/Andrew%20Dessler>Gristmill.
What do you mean by "the" scientific method?
Ray
I'm not the OP, but this seems like a reasonable place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inorganic_compounds_by_element#Carbon
James
http://climate.weather.com/blog/9_14587.html
"Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate
"Some of the earliest unequivocal signs of climate change have been the warming of the air
and ocean,
thawing of land and melting of ice in the Arctic. But recent studies are showing that the
tropics are
also changing. Several lines of evidence show that over the past few decades the tropical
belt has
expanded. This expansion has potentially important implications for subtropical societies
and may lead
to profound changes in the global climate system. Most importantly, poleward movement of
largescale
atmospheric circulation systems, such as jet streams and storm tracks, could result in
shifts in
precipitation patterns affecting natural ecosystems, agriculture, and water resources. The
implications
of the expansion for stratospheric circulation and the distribution of ozone in the
atmosphere are
as yet poorly understood. The observed recent rate of expansion is greater than climate
model
projections of expansion over the twenty-first century, which suggests that there is still
much to be
learned about this aspect of global climate change."
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/ss/climate/JournalPDFs/SeidelEtAl.ngeo.2007.38.pdf