Being the biggest cause of global warming?

Question

What are american's doing about it?
Cos in England we seem to be doing a lot, but all i've heard about america is that you wouldn't sign some thing about it and your the biggest cause and that your not doing anything

Answer 1

Those who are used to preaching do not practice. America is aware that signing the Kyoto protocol is dangerous for its economy. Even if it signs and cuts emission by 10 percent, America will be a "developing country" by 2015 - such is the enormity of its dependency on industrial and economic dependency plus, the "big brother attitude". Some day we will call it a big bluff.

Answer 2

England is not doing any more or less than the US about reducing CO2 emissions.

The Kyoto targets leave a lots of room for creative accounting. English companies are patting themselves on the back for creating accreditied 'green' buildings and products, but energy consumption isn't going down, only up.

The US will never sign a treaty like the Kyoto protocol. The US will decide what targets their are going to meet and how they will meet them. They will never hand control of their industries to a foreign regulator. That's just not the kind of thing the US does.

Answer 3

Since I know that cows produce more greenhouse gases (the digestive system of a cow produces large quantities of methane gas which cows release as flatulence) than all the vehicles in the world combined, as an American I'm trying to eat all the cows I can.

Why aren't you concerned with all the heavy pollution being produced by China and India and other "developing countries"? Their governments have few if any environmental controls in place. China is building dozens of coal-fired electrical generating plants with little or no pollution control required.

I hope you understand that replacing your old-fashioned American invented incandescent light bulbs with "energy efficient" fluorescent bulbs is a danger to the environment. Why? Because fluorescent bulbs contain MERCURY - a dangerous heavy metal. If not disposed of properly as a hazardous waste this mercury will end up in your water and food. If you'd like to see what mercury poisoning does get a copy of 'Minamata" by W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Smith.

Learn this: There are no solutions, only trade-offs. If you want more of "A" then you must be satisfied with less of "B".

THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS, ONLY TRADE-OFFS.

Answer 4

That will change when the next President gets elected.

Global warming is real. Proof here:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

"I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.”

Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.)
Former NASA Administrator, Shuttle Astronaut and the first Commander of the Naval Space Command

Here are two summaries of the mountain of peer reviewed data that convinced Admiral Truly and the vast majority of the scientific community, short and long.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
summarized at:
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

There's a lot less controversy about this is the real world than there is on Yahoo answers:

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/412.php?lb=hmpg1&pnt=412&nid=&id=

And vastly less controversy in the scientific community than you might guess from the few skeptics talked about here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know... Global warming is almost a no-brainer at this point. You really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."

Dr. Jerry Mahlman, NOAA

Good websites for more info:

http://profend.com/global-warming/
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/
http://www.realclimate.org
"climate science from climate scientists"

Answer 5

a million circulate of the earth interior the universe. 2.circulate of the earth interior the universe. 3.circulate of the earth interior the universe. the international warming cycle is a organic prevalence, occurs each and every couple of hundred tens of millions of years. See link under.

Answer 6

we could cut down on electricity. Since breathing is the biggest cause of the depleting ozone layer , we should plant more trees to take care of it and own more plants in our homes.
That would be the only real solution.
Or we could all take responsibility and not have so many children so that the population will stop growing (one child per person, two per couple). Get rid of cars, glass, plastic, air conditioners

Answer 7

Proof please!

All the planets in the solar system are heating up right now.
So could it be the sun?

Answer 8

Please, pollution control is a multi billion dollar business.

No pollution was ever reduced because of a signature.

Answer 9

Is man caused Global Warming a Scientific fact?
Dogma is not only the enemy of science, but the enemy of humankind

While some things can be measured (UAH data),
it is my take that the the claim of man caused significant global warming can only be called speculation at this point.

What do the global warming crowd believe?
The global warming folks think that the man's output of CO2 is causing the climate to grow significantly warmer due to a so called "green-house" effect. (The glass in a green-house prevents convection -- obviously CO2 does not limit convection and its effect on global temperature should go by a different name.) This warming is referred to as AGW(Anthropogenic Global Warming). The word 'anthropogenic' meaning 'caused by man'. The warmers think that the slight warming seen in lower troposphere satellite data above is in error and ground station temperature measurements that show a slightly larger warming trend is caused almost entirely by a slight elevation in CO2 levels. The warmers state that solar effects are insignificant.

Is Global warming a scientific theory or a belief?
There are many claiming to be "climate scientists". What does it mean to be a scientist? I think it is agreed that it takes more than a college degree, lab coat, and computer to be a real scientist. Science requires experimental controls - something not found in the statistics about an open system with confounding variables. There is no doubt that increasing the opacity of the air by the added CO2 causes an increase in global temperature. There is also no doubt that changes in solar radiation changes global temperature. The question is if the amount of increase contributed by man's emmisions of CO 2 is significant compared to changes due to the sum of the following variations: natural - solar, evolutionary, negative feedback systems, and man made changes -- humidity, dust, other chemicals etc.

What is an Open System?
In real science, everything that can possibly be done to eliminate confounding causes are eliminated. The earth's atmosphere is an open system - no one knows with any certainty the amount of materials emitted by the earth or even additions from outer space. An open system is one where we can not control for confounding variables. In the global warming saga, the data collected is fed into a computer model along with many estimates and indirectly theorized numbers.

What good are the Collected Statistics?
Statistics often provides a scientist a good idea for a hypothesis, but statistical correlations do not prove cause and effect. Here is an example of this clouded reasoning:

Elephants and Lightning
An engineer is out walking in the park and sees a wild-eyed man hitting a strangely painted block of wood with a stick. The engineer's curiosity gets the better of him, so he asks the wild-eyed man, "Why are you hitting that block?"
The wild-eyed man replies with a bit of a crazed smile, "The sound keeps the elephants away."
The engineer, now fully intrigued, digs deeper, "But why? There are no elephants here."
As the wild-eyed man continues to make his noise with renewed vigor, he says, "See! It's working."
A meaningful correlation has to be more than just two variables trending in the same direction. News reports about science often confuse correlation with cause and effect. The news media acts as if 'correlation' is proof of causality, to the confusion of the lay public. There is especially much muddled thinking in climate news reporting where we are talking about a simple trend with many confounding variables..

So what is real science? What is the Scientific Method?
For something to be considered a scientific fact, it must be testable with the scientific method.

1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Invent a tentative explanation, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.

Real science is humble. Many things are unknowable. It is a human tendency to not to accept the idea that some things are beyond our reach of knowing, but there are things we can't know.

Step 4 of the scientific method requires an experiment. An experiment requires a control. What are the controls in climate science?

Real science publications archive and make available to the public all the input data of papers along with all computer code used to generate any out put. Reputable publication have peer reviewers that are given complete access to the complete data so they can review, audit, and look for problems. This is not the norm for what is being passed off as 'climate science' - see Disclosure and due diligence It is common sense to disregard any papers that have closed data, methods that can not be independently verified.

There are four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics, and computer models.
Climate science is often reported as if a 'run' of a computer model is an experiment (it is not!). A computer model can not discriminate theories into true and false because it is not measuring reality. (Such models may give one an idea where to experiment, but to claim they "prove" anything is pure fiction and should lead one to discount the source. At best you can use a computer model to disprove a theory.) Computer models are sometimes used to simulate electronic circuits for engineers - in an electronics circuit (which is a closed system) - these computer models sometimes predict behavior quite different from the real circuit. If such a model is adjusted until the results give the expected result, it is often to the folly of the engineer. The proof of such a circuit must wait until a real circuit is built: reality must be tested, not a model. (Common electronic circuits can be modeled quite well, and these models are of practical use, yet these models still can mislead engineers at times. Be aware that circuit models, besides being a closed system, are several magnitudes less in complexity and size compared to the simplest climate models.)

Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton has this to say about the computer models:

"... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."

First, you have to prove that the increase in CO2 is caused by humans - the venting of CO2 by volcanoes (including those under the ocean) and geysers and other natural sources (and also the natural absorption or sinking of CO2) is a estimate that defies error analysis. To what error band are we certain of the amount of emission of CO2 by natural causes?
Second, the elevation of CO2 needs to be shown to be historically real, but there were no analytical tools to measure even crudely thousands of years ago - the best work has been done with ice samples, but there is a great problem with how to calibrate such measurements. What size should the error bands be? I believe that man is responsible for a small increase in CO2 - this is supported by a lot of historical data.

Third, there has to be a hypothesis that can predict the past (only then can we start guessing about the future) including the temperatures in the upper atmosphere. Any model that can't fit past data has to be called wrong.
Fourth, as this is an open system where we can't build several earths and vary only one constant, any conclusion at best is still just a theory - a educated guess - it is not scientific fact. Science is more than looking scientific; just because things are measured to several decimal points means naught when there is no control or false logic.
Fifth, to look at the past temperatures honestly, one would have to show no past periods of higher temperature. The idea that we 'know' the inferred data - is simply wrong. We only have accurate records of solar output from the recent past and we are ignorant of the magnitude of long term historic variations that are possible. Explaining the small drift (less than what appears to be the noise in the system) can be accomplished with a solar output theory. It might help to remember that 10,000 years ago Milwaukee was under 40' of ice, so we really do know that temperature can vary on its own. See http://web.dmi.dk/solar-terrestrial/space_weather/ We also have reason to believe that glaciers world wide have been shrinking for the last 300 years - this means that things other than CO2 change our climate

The following list of confounding variables is a work in progress - at the rate that new ones are added it is quite likely that there are other climate drivers that have not yet been identified.


Irrigation (Why is so little in the press about irrigations effect on climate?)(There is no occurrence of the word irrigation in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policymakers and only a few references in the full report - often expressing it as unknowable.) (The argument that the water vapor is only in the air for about a week is strange as some of the water re-evaporate as it hits the ground. There is also the fact that aquifers levels and river flows into the ocean really have gone down!)
Changes in solar output in the IR and visible spectrum space_weather
Changes in cosmic radiation from the sun (provides nucleation sites for condensation of water vapor)
Changes in plant coverage (defoerstation etc)
Ground level Ozone
Changes in particles that come from the sun.
Genetic changes in ocean algae over time http://www.uq.edu.au/news/?article=11433
Changes in earths magnetic field.
Changes in volcanic emissions (CO2 and other substances)
Changes in the amount of pollution particulate (provides nucleation sites for precipitation)
Changes in CO2 absorption and emission due to changes in plant coverage and ocean temperature.
Changes in ozone thickness (secondary to solar cycles?)
Changes in methane emission by plants (genetic evolutionary driven changes).
Changes in ocean salinity due to water use - (causing changes in ocean currents).
Changes in land reflectivity



What would Richard Feynman say about Global warming?
Richard Feynman was a physicist, who was not only closely associated with QED (Quantum Electro Dynamics), but also wrote about the scientific method and scientific rigor. I first ask you to read his bit about cargo cult science. Pay close attention for the part about the oil drop numbers - and realize that it applies here.

When a hypothesis fails to explain the given data, it follows that it must be abandoned. Non of the models I've read about can explain the lack of elevated temperatures at higher elevation. (As of 2006 there is now some hand waving about the ozone hole causing stratospheric cooling).

Feynman also became a bit of an artist on the side. This is important because drawing depends more on being a good honest observer than on talent. If you draw a picture and notice that the chin isn't where it belongs, it is easier to overlook after one starts inking over the pencil lines. What makes art truly art, is the discrepancies between reality and the art. It tells us as much about the artist as it does the subject. The way slight distortions are adjusted and blended in. Being a real scientist means we have to bend over backwards in order to find our human induced distortions of the object we are trying to draw conclusions about. This takes honesty and courage to report all warts and wrinkles in the subject AND the observer.

I am told that, "... meteorologists I know that are skeptical about global warming are weather forecasters (not researchers) and have little expertise in the science of climate change -- their jobs do not require it." Well if changing weather isn't climate change what is it? Meteorologists are trained to look at numbers trends and graphs and form conclusions about the probability of future events. They know that seeing patterns in data can be the playground of fools (are there any fool-proof computer programs that accurately predict the stock market?) More importantly, a meteorologist's experience will have taught them to be very careful about making claims about the future with limited data. Perhaps this experience has given them a better feel for what is knowable than the global climate researchers? The "science of climate change" was quite wrong when they were predicting a "new Ice age". Real science requires something that is beyond the combinations of a bunch of estimates plugged into human choice tainted computer models.

The only way to have real success in science ... is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good about it and what's bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. — Richard Feynman
I truly wish Richard Feynman was alive to day to comment on the scientific vigor in global warming. Research can often look like science, yet fail to be real science in the end. Where is the "whats bad about it" part in the GW papers? Why? Could it be that the GW rhetoric is not real science?

Why is Water Vapor Swept Under the Rug?
One of the biggest confounding issues is that of man caused changes in humidity. Almost the entire flow of the Colorado river now goes across the content by air, rather than flowing into the Gulf of California as it did 100 years ago1. Water vapor is also a green house gas - it differs from CO2 in an important way in that it is limited to the lower part of the atmosphere - if it goes higher it condenses, dumping heat in the upper atmosphere. If the temperature is higher, water vapor rises higher and pumps heat to a higher altitude thus forming a negative feed back system that should tend to stabilize temperatures. On the other hand, water vapor is a potent 'green house' gas that blocks the heat flow from the earths surface even better than CO 2. Further complications are due to the fact that the altitude of condensation are effected by dust and even cosmic rays. Much of the water used in irrigation evaporates and only stays in the air for a number of days befor being rained out - yet this rain evaporates again continuing the elevated humidity. On the other hand, CO2 stays in the atmosphere much longer, but once it is removed from the atmosphere tends to stays out. Water vapor in the form of clouds blocks the warming of the earths surface by the sun. Temperature can effect humidity and humidity can effect temperature. This total process is played out in the clouds, somthing that is not at all well modeled at this time.

Water vapor accounts for about 70% of the greenhouse effect with carbon dioxide somewhere between 4.2% and 8.4%. Water vapor, a potent green house gas, averages 25,000ppm of the lower atmosphere compared to CO2 which is only about 360 ppm. The Atmospheric CO2 change is only about +60 ppm. Realize that we are talking about a change in CO2 from 0.030% to 0.036% or a 0.006% change as a percentage of the atmosphere. The global warmers don't use these numbers instead 'warmers' say it increased 30% (for maximum rhetorical effect?). Over the same periods specific humidity has increased several percent and could be a change of 25,000ppm to 26,250ppm or 2.5% to 2.6% or a 0.1% change. This change in water vapor (probably due to irrigation) is about 16 times larger than the change in CO2 near the ground. (remember in the stratosphere there is cooling and very little water vapor). see:

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/079.htm

Both CO2 and water vapor have similar emissivity so that any change in greenhouse effect due to CO2 would be swamped by changes in water vapor. One could also speculate that this explains the change in global temperatures at lower altitudes with out effecting the upper atmosphere. But lets not draw conclusions based on speculations.

Here is a quote from Reid Bryson, Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorolog (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences)


"Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay? ...: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."
If (and I mean IF) man is causing climate change it seems possible it is due to irrigation - not CO2. (Would banning irrigation be a popular political movement?)

Atmospheric CO2 may have a slight effect, but there is no proof that man's contribution as a source of CO2 (ESTIMATED at about 4% of all sources) is the reason temperature is slowly trending upward. It is entirely possible that CO2 is going up due to natural variations more than mans contribution - probably not - but the point is that even this is not a scientific fact. (BTW I think we should be taxing oil imports (in place of income taxes) for other reasons.)

One other detail - the ice core data shows that increases in CO2 follow warming periods - instead of driving them. This is expected, because sea water holds less CO2 as it warms and absorbs more as it cools (a established testable fact!).

Low altitude warming has not been established as anything historically out of the ordinary. The data just isn't there to do this. At this time and into the foreseeable future it is unknowable. Being unknowable is the heart of the problem of calling climate speculations, "climate science".

Clouds
The great computer models used to predict the dire consequences don't really accurately model clouds, and for good reasons. Clouds are extremely complicated to simulate. Water vapor tends to condense into water droplets at nucleation sites . These sites can be a spec of dust, but are also caused by cosmic rays, nuetrenos, and even agitation of air. Cosmic rays are not constant, they vary with solar storms and the position of solar storms on the sun. (solar weather forecasts exist!) These nucleation sites cause non-linear and chaotic effects. The lack of real cloud simulations in the model reduces this to a political campaign - one that is misleading the public about what is known.

What is the difference between science and beliefs?
The key to separating scientific knowledge from belief is that science can be demonstrated. We may never have good enough error bands on the data about global temperature data; thus it is something that is just not knowable. Opinions on things unknowable are called beliefs. Because of the inapplicability of the scientific method when dealing with open systems, opinions on global warming are beliefs akin to a sort of religious view and not scientific fact.

"Climate science" as reported in the press is not really science. In real sciences the scientists first job is to prove himself wrong - that is to list the numerous way that the results my be in error and how the conclusions are limited. No forthright "bending over backwards" efforts are made by the global warming proponents. Instead, there are efforts to state things in emotional terms and a disturbing pattern of data errors and omissions. When claims are made dealing with an open system using correlations of data without knowable error bands, it fails to be science. There is no way to separate out the increased use of irrigation and the resulting increase of low altitude water vapor (very much a green house gas). Could changes of global low altitude humidity be a plausible competing theory? The correlation of temperature and variations of solar output is ignored.

Open systems, like the stock market are the subject of randomness - and much has been written about the "black swan" effect and the inability of professional stock pickers to come out ahead of amateurs in the long term. To infer a long term trend in what appears to be mostly noise - or randomness is a game of chance at best. All that can possibly be determined are floors of probability in an open system, and even those don't mean that much if one considers "black swan" effects.

I failed to see even an estimate of the amount of error of natural emissions of CO2 in the bandied documentation. Using real science, means you figure the answer and then you do the hard part of calculating the minimum, maximum, and probable errors. It is not possible in this case to even have hard numbers on CO2 venting - thus we are again not looking at science, but only estimates and speculation. Attaching numbers to speculation does not elevate it to science.

We are told that, "Carbon dioxide is measured directly at Mauna Loa in Hawaii", but it is really just a much better estimate of just one place and not really a direct measurement (There is no pipe to install a calibrate-able flow meter.) How much CO2 is emitted from underseas vents? To what accuracy is it known?

Satellite data is extremely important, as it is the best data available and has no micro-climate artifacts. The satellite data is the only data that comes close to measuring anything that could be called global temperature and not effected by micro-climate and would be most difficult to fudge. According to the MSU/NASA UAH data, the atmosphere as a whole seems to be cooling or warming slightly depending on what level of the atmosphere you look at. The data below is the best >> GLOBAL <<< data we have. Ground stataions of various designs and distributions, or combined bucket types and engine intake ship data can not come close to this NOAA satalite data.

But do you know what I see in that data? (And I'm really good at looking at statistics) - Not much that is significant -- mostly some noise - noise that is much higher than any trend. You could pick selected start and end points to show either cooling or warming. There is obviously no hokey stick. Some indirect temperature trends track with solar output with a fairly good correlation. Will the new solar activity change solar output and cause more warming? What are you willing to bet on it? I wouldn't, as I am rather certain that we don't know.

One more reason to take the above graph data seriously - it comes from real scientists who share their data and lean over backwards to show possible errors. This is what real science looks like.

To claim as a "fact" something from a trend who's amplitude (and direction) can be changed by changing end points due to the noise involved not science; it is politics.

Problems with ground station measurements
Turns out there are lots of problems that the satellite is free from -

Locations near developments distorted by purely local warmth from Urban Heat Islands (UHI’s).
White-wash replaced with paint on instrument shelters (AKA Stevenson screens). The difference in emissivity (changes how much IR is absorbed and radiated) distorts temperature readings.
Inconsistent equipment - some sites have heat radiating electronics inside enclosure.
Change from asbestos to “laminate” material of enclosure.

Are the data and/or computer models tainted due to subconscious intentions?
Everyone has an agenda at some level. I am assuming that you, the reader, are not influenced by the popularity of the idea of global warming and you have really looked at the raw data yourself and made sure that no one was hand picking start and endpoints of data sets and that non of these people worried (even subconsciously) that if they failed to show the right result they would fail to get new funding.

Let me illustrate: QED (Quantum Electro Dynamics) is real science. The theory was put in place and then controlled experiments were run against it in closed systems - the theory wasn't changed every time someone came out with a new test. This is what real science is about.

With global warming you have a computer model of the largest physical system on earth, that has several uncontrolled inputs with huge error bands that can interact in non linear ways. The model is simplified in many ways because of the limits of computer power. You have emotional humans that decide on just what compromises to make - and these choices can greatly skew the results. Just the shear number of terms makes the output dubious at best - reminiscent of the drake equation)

More about Elephants
There is a famous saying in physics:

``Give me four parameters and I can fit an elephant. Give me five and I can wag its tail''
(The source of the above quote?? Variants of the statement have been attributed to C.F. Gauss, Niels Bohr, Lord Kelvin, Enrico Fermi.)

When one considers that these models may have parameters that number in the tens to hundreds and are only growing in size, the possibility of generating meaningful global climate computer models is a fantasy.


Are the Global Warmers intellectually honest?
I do believe that there are people writing global warming papers who just don't understand the true nature of scientific induction and deduction and are just honestly wrong. My work with electronic circuits modeled on computers has convinced me that even the most honest scientists are quite susceptible to subconsciously tailoring computer models to provide the results one wants (I've fooled myself), (and electronics models are much simpler and easier to test in the closed system of a test bench). Yet these models are the basis for claims that would completely change the world economy? Where is the "bending over backward" that Feynman talks about in the global warming work? Where is the bending-over-backwards in the IPCC report listing the assumptions made and error band analysis?
I worry that there is a pattern of tweaked data and hyperbolic press releases related to this subject. If this is a real phenomena, so much political polarizing of the issue will prevent any unified action. Were the errors reported in "Energy and Environment" 11/03 the result of fudging the numbers? I hope not, but they very well could have been from a subconscious hope. (The actions of the journals involved is an embarrassment to science) A scientist's first job is to prove himself wrong. That isn't the way much climate research is approached.

Sadly, http://www.climateaudit.org/ has convincingly illuminated something that looks a lot like probably fudged data - ommited data, tampered data and more.

The much hyped report from the EPA was made by people who's income depends on the continued belief of a CO2 caused warming trend. What do people who do not depend on there being a "global warming" problem say? The meteorologists I've met (that don't have a political or economic ax-to-grind), say that the only thing they have seen that is close to a proved theory is that global temperature tracks solar output. As scientists, they should be careful to wait a few more solar cycles before even taking that to heart.

The EPA's reference even lists a 1996 Nature article that used a data set with fudged endpoints.

To make these claims without real science behind it also raises a moral problem, as the unintended consequences may be harsh on the poor people of non developed countries. If CO2 could be shown to cause some global warming, will a carbon ban kill more or less than the perceived problem? If food becomes more expensive with carbon taxes, there will be starvation of the poorest in the world.

More links
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm
A lucid voice from Caltech here.
Interesting link
Climateaudit.org
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/idso98.htm


Beware of Regressions - Polynomial and Otherwise: they can fool you
Back when punch cards ran the world, they called it dynamic programing, You would vary all the coefficients of an equation via nested loops until the equation would produce the data with some amount of accuracy. It is a useful tool to help tease out hypotheses from data.

Once it works on past history and predicts the set of data it is tempting to think it means something. To really test it, you have to run it and make predictions to be tested with experiment. If the prediction is complex (ie. wave forms) and matches we can assign a confidence. Of course if all we have is a trend - there is only a 50:50 chance that it means anything. The idea that once it predicts the past it will also predict the future is just wrong. If on the other hand, they froze the computer model and collected data over several solar cycles and then ran the model, - over several such runs, we could start to attach a probability of the model's output being predictive.


Emistivity and the so called "greenhouse effect"
Emistivity is a problem in the screens that hold ground based thermometers. White paint does not exactly have low emissivity. Picking a best surface is complicated. TiO2 (the stuff that makes white paint white - used to be lead oxides) has an emistivity of 0.77. White paint with :

a = 0.28
e = 0.87
a/e =.32

Obviously does not have an A/e of 1.

It is also important to note that painting the inside of screens can also make a difference.

Other emissivities of interest:
Wood - planed oak 0.90
Snow 0.85
Water 0.96
Dry soil 0.92
Wet soil 0.95
Brick - common 0.93
Concrete 0.92
Aluminum Polished sheet (I would guess aluminum foil would be similar) 0.05

Emissivity changes with temperature a bit. These numbers are from Infrared System Engineering by Richard Hudson JR.

Two things to keep clear when thinking about emissivity, it is commonly under stood that emissivity = absorptance. This is just not true for solar radiation. (Comes close for some materials, but not for others. Polished aluminum has an a/e of over 14!)

Also, the darkness of a color is not a good judge. I quote from Hudson’s fine book:

“We must resist the temptation to estimate the emissivity of a material on the basis of its visual appearance. A good illustration of this point is furnished by snow …”

White Paint a = 0.28 e = 0.87 a/e =.32
Sherwin Williams (A8W11)
Concrete a = 0.60 e = 0.88 a/e =.68
Aluminum foil a = 0.15 e = 0.05 a/e = 3.00 (aluminum foil get very hot in the sun for this reason)
Asphalt a = 0.9 e = 0.95 a/e =0.95 (not sure I believe this number?)

So the best selection of a surface for a screen would be a low e value combined with a/e close to 1. The understanding of emissivity was not so good when the standards for screens was developed - during the space program it became critical to have craft with an a/e close to 1 and low emissivity so as to not cook or freeze the electronics.

It is important to note that solar radiation at the earths surface is not black body radiation!

The confounding issues I've come across are :

1- Negative feed back by the water vapor heat-pump - the moving of the condensation layer to a higher altitudes as temperatures increase - this is further confounded with the strength of convection currents dependent on temperature gradients and has me convinced that clouds would need to be much better modeled to claim any meaningful error band for AGW.

Much of cloud formation and precipitation is nonlinear to the point of chaos - even lightning strikes induce changes in rain rates. Prediction of chaos even on small scale systems is computationally intensive. There are also effects of nucleation triggers such as cosmic rays, dust etc that don't seem to be controlled for.

2- The interplay of irrigation - a spot check on Wichita I found a historic RH increasing about 5% (I would like to see historical graphs of this (and in other locations) - or just a source of raw data). How can I know that changes in water vapor aren't totally confounding the CO2 story? (The argument that the water vapor is only in the air for about a week is strange as water re-evaporate as it hits the ground and aquifers really have gone down.)

3- The interplay of the black body radiation and absorption of CO2 and H2O, spectral emission/absorption, and kinetic transfer.


Relevant Quotes
“Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. (Nikola Telsa, inventor and electrical engineer, 1934.)”

Religion provides the means for the ignorant to declare with absolute certainty that they know the unknowable.

True wisdom is knowing how little we know for certain

"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." Andre Gide:

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. --Galileo Galileo

Inconsistent Truth