What strawman would that be? I was directly quoting you. I don't understand how someone can claim to have read the IPCC report and still come away with statements like:

And then claim other people's reading comprehension is at fault? Come on...

I even linked you earlier to the section of the report entitled Drivers of Climate Change. It answers these things. Specifically. As part of the scientific process it's all well and good for people with the technical chops to look at the evidence and question whether the data was gathered properly, analyzed properly, etc. but you can't say that the current scientific consensus "has no idea" of the effects of CO2.

CO2 gets the focus because it's one of the major drivers but yes, deforestation and agriculture are also factors - among many others - all listed in the IPCC reports.

Perhaps the problem then is that people aren't getting that the atmosphere is only one variable in global temperatures.  CO2 isn't, overall, a significant driver of overall temperature. It is, however, the most significant driver for atmospheric changes due to all the CO2 we've released.

In a previous post, I linked to the same thing. 

I asked a simple question that you just plain ignored. If, in 1825, you could have prevented 200ppm of CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere, what would be the temperature today? 

The IPCC has no idea on this.  What it does know is that of the factors we have control over, our CO2 production is the most significant. But we don't know, for example, what the trend for the 20th century has been. What models have been produced have been wildly wrong.

It's one of the major drivers of what humans are contributing.  And I listed these same very things in this thread. 

I'm not going to respond further until someone posts something that hasn't already been addressed endlessly.. 

Most of my posts are via iPhone.

Ok, here we go!

Agree. If you have sufficient quantities of green house gasses it can trap enough of the sun's energy to cause a significant warming. Similarly, when Cyanobacteria first did their thing and removed CO2 from the atmosphere down to near current levels, we experienced a massive cooling.

However, suggesting that CO2 is a major warming factor because enough of a change can affect the temperature is like saying water is poisonous because if you drink enough of it it is fatal.

Let's be clear here. The primary energy source of our planet is the sun. CO2 can't do anything on its own. Green house gasses act as a modifier on how the sun's energy is used.

Well first off, I don't think I'm in any disagreement with the scientific community on this issue. I am in disagreement with the way politicians and advocates have interpreted the scientific community.

Secondly, enough of a green house gas will have a measurable effect. The question is whether that's a change from 0.3% to 3% or 0.3% to 0.4%.

This is where we part ways. There's no evidence to support this. The IPCC report says it accelerated it. But "significant" is in the eye of the beholder. To me, going from 275ppm to 400ppm would need to cause say a 1 degree increase in global temperatures to be "significant". 

No. What we know is that green house gasses amplify, magnify existing temperature trends. But how much? It doesn't appear that much since global temperatures have plummeted before CO2 has dropped a bit.

Yes, in the same sense that sufficient quantifies of water can be poisonous.

Significant in the sense that if you increase the CO2 in the atmosphere by 25X (like it was 500 million years ago) it will have a significant affect.  

So all that's been established thus far is that if you increase CO2 by over an order of magnitude you will amplify the sun's warming affect sufficiently to have a measurable effect.  That is not the same as saying that going from 0.3% to 0.4% is going to have a noticeable effect.

I take issue that we are comparing non-quaternary CO2 levels with quaternary CO2 levels.  In essence, if you raise the CO2 levels by a factor of 25X is a big deal. Raising it from 0.3 to 0.4 of the atmosphere, not so much. 

The recent CO2 spike isn't having a measurable effect on global temperatures. That's basically my position. Just because I agree that CO2 is a green house gas and if you crank out enough of it that it can have an effect doesn't mean a tiny increase of it (relative to the atmosphere's composition) is going to have an impact.

Your analysis is incorrect.  Greenhouse gasses don't create energy. They trap energy.  The sun is the driver.  CO2 is simply (and literally) and accelerator.  

Pile enough old newspapers and a spark will make it really go up. The spark being an external source of energy in this analogy, the sun.

That is because you are, in essence, suggesting water is a poison because if you drink enough of it you will die.  I agree that if you drink enough water you will eventually die. But that doesn't make water a poison.

During the Pleistocene, we have sufficient data on CO2 and temperature levels to make the conclusion that CO2 is a relatively weak driver of temperature.

That certainly is the hypothesis. Warming temperatures release more carbon which turns into a positive feedback cycle.  However, there is no evidence of this in the record.  We're not even as warm today as we were during the medieval warming period or during the height of the Roman Empire.

As soon as humans start increasing CO2 in the atmosphere above say 1% then I'll worry about it. But right now, we've gone up 0.1% since the start of the industrial revolution. 

It's highly unlikely we'll be relying on carbon a century from now as our primary source of energy (it just doesn't generate enough energy to keep pace with our energy needs).

Here's an article I re-found (i read this originally a couple years ago) that goes through the carbon cycle in detail:

http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~joos/OUTGOING/publications/joos03scope_proofs.pdf

If you only read the first page or two, you would get the impression that CO2's effect on climate is well understood and definitive. But as you read through it, it is clear that that we don't yet understand the carbon cycle very well when it comes to estimating the level of effect different variables have. 

Mind you, that article could basically be described as the argument we're having except described by climatologists.  I also recommend reading it because it's really interesting and well written (it's not full of technical jargon).  This document should be acceptable even to the most rabid AGW alarmists given that it's authored by Fortunat Joos. And to be clear: He does believe CO2 output is going to cause a massive temperature increase.  However, the achilles heel of AGW alarmists is that their predictions don't work out. So even if I agree with him on the science, I don't agree with his analysis and he is on record from 1999 as predicting that it would be over a half degree warmer today than in 1999 - that's surface air temperature btw which we know hasn't remotely happened.

If you would like to try Bern's climate model you can go here: http://www.climate.unibe.ch/jcm/ (Java required)

In essence, CO2 has an effect. The debate is how much. The position I've developed over many years of reading this (as a lay person to be sure) is that CO2's effect is pretty small and only massive changes (like an order of magnitude) would have an effect that would materially affect our climate.  

The IPCC estimates that 2100 CO2 will be between 450ppm and 1100ppm. First, that's an insanely wide margin of error. Second, even at 1100ppm, you're talking about 1% -- which is enough to perk my worry a bit but still not likely to result in some sort of disaster that would justify wholesale state control over our lives.

Thanks for the comment, Sele. Hopefully after reading this you might understand why I have no use for people who would insult my intelligence or claim I've bought into some sort of right-wing conspiracy or haven't "spent 5 seconds on Google".  At the end of the day, the argument is how much effect rising CO2 levels will have on global temperatures. There is no consensus on the specifics. Every climatologist has their own model it seems. You can agree on the science and still disagree with the human analysis of it.

Standard co2 in hothouses for produce is 1000 ppm. Increases yield enormously. Due to logarithmic nature of co2 trapping and the very limited band of infrared it traps any significant effect on climate will be negligible other then changes in local weathersystems due to greening of otherwise not so green places and more greening in already green places.

Overall a very good result for mankind and we can only hope we reach that point soonest.

If it were only CO2, your arguments would be correct. However, it isn't. Everyone here ignores water vapor, and many gasses which trap solar energy.

Also, the relationship does not have to be 1:1. CO2 and H2O will trap other forms of energy such as thermal energy, thus as they are warmed from other sources, that heat accumulates as well.

No one is relating to the heat radiated by he biomass of the planet, either. This heat along with the heat produced by the byproducts of the organisms (people among them) is also being ignored and I believe this to be an error as well.

To illustrate, everyone knows how it cools down after it rains. That's just the latent heat of vaporization being freed as H2) goes from the vapor to the liquid states.

The newspaper example? It's ok on one level to illustrate codependency of factors, but on another it's a bit misleading since newspapers don't exist on their own...they are covered with bacteria which create heat as they metabolize the newspapers. That is what causes the combustion. No biggy as it's a semantic thing on one level as well.

I've read it, but the author of this article ignores historical evidence.

Fact is, ancient history has shown that the earth can enter a hot-house state.

Those hot-house states occur in the presence of very high levels of CO2.

This proves to me that clouds cannot mitigate the effects of very high levels of CO2.

What is A and B here?

Are you talking about some sort of physical process?

If so, which is that process?

CO2 increase and temperature increase.

Think....

First you stub your toe.....AFTER which it hurts.

Not...

First your toe hurts....after which you stub it.

Time-lines indicate what comes before...and what comes after.  Without time travel they are ABSOLUTE.

Good luck with your Prius and solar panels. And the idea a few ants can influence the watervapor in the atmosphere ..... 

CO2 increase is not a physical process, it's the result of a bunch of physical processes ...

So what does such a graph really tell you ?

Let's just sit down and look at the observation in detail... it's about an offset of 1 degree celcius and/or a time offset of 200 years.

Can we agree on this at the very least ??

And if so, what does that tell you about which physical process?

Is it really necessary to invoke some unknow physical process that goes against plenty of other observations and lab measuruments and physical laws that show how CO2 influences the overall temperature on earth ? 

Actually it's more complicated than this. Temperature is measured from the snowflakes and that has a fairly good temporal resolution. The CO2 is measured from gas bubbles, but the top 100 meters of the glaciers are porous to air, so the bubbles give a average of hundreds of years worth of atmospheric change. So CO2 is always younger than the temperature, but they try to correct for this with diffusion models. The accuracy depend on how good the models are. But you never get a good time resolution of course...

Nice summary.

Actually the precipitation was taking place in desertous areas, because it was too hot for trees to survive. Only small shrubs could live there.

The "trigger" is irrelevant in this case.

For example humans are a trigger for rising CO2, which in turn warms the earth.

The important thing is which physical process affects which aspect of the climate.

In some regions, a change in wind pattern or ocean current can make a big difference as well.

I thought that was an event 500 millions years ago or so...

I was talking about an event 50 million years ago (about 3,000 ppm down to 600 ppm, i.e. 0.3% down to 0.06%).

Sure this is an interesting process.

When you see this set of physical processes which control the level of CO2, how do you then proceed to determine how much a certain level of CO2 affects the global temperature on Earth?

If people would take the time to investigate exactly what this "delay" is all about, they would understand that the delay is due to the process of oceanic mixing and vertical heat transport. The ocean acts as a mitigating factor for temperature rise, and that mitigation effects occurs not only linearly but also in occasional bursts where large vertical overturn occurs.

Only if you look doggedly at atmospheric temperatures.

For future temperatures, the oceanic heating is also very important, because a hotter deep ocean means hotter future temperatures, because vertical heat exchange will have less of a cooling effect.

Actually, if you would forget your obsession with an "inexplicable" 1 degree celsius temperature offset in the Antarctic data set for a moment, you may find that other data sets show CO2-temperature correlations of 10 degrees celcius or even more, during several extreme catastrophic periods in the Earth's past.

Methane is negligible in total quantity, it is converted into CO2 within a few decades. To have enough methane in the atmosphere to influence the climate during thousands of years, that would require an impossibly large level of yearly methane production.

It's just not possible.

The only candidate would be a catastrophic methane-hydrate release could be big enough to cause a temperature jump, but it would have to be absolutely massive.

More likely is a gradual release of methane, which is then transformed into CO2, which can then affect climate for many thousands of years.

I think that the release of methane from permafrost will be too slow (not enough methane release / year) to have a noticeable effect, because permafrost melts very very slowly - it takes a long time before 100 meters of soil have melted. I think that the prolonged release of methane during thousands of years of melting will result in higher levels of CO2, which will just keep accumulating (because it's produced much faster than it can be removed by life) and this will be important.

Water vapor is even harder to maintain in the atmosphere. It creates rain and is washed out of the atmosphere within a few days. To maintain an artificial high water vapor level, humans would have to produce hundreds of billions of tons of water vapor every day. That's just no doable, we don't produce enough energy to produce so much water vapor.

Yes the whole point of climate research is to understand exactly how screwed we are.

Well actually it is already pretty important for our climate (for example the poles and the shifitng deserts), but I agree that it takes a while. The ocean still acts as a heat buffer, mitigating heating. China's aerosol polution acts as a mitigating factor too.

We are definitily not in an equilibrium situation yet (for the current levels of CO2) where we can see NOW what the temperatures will be like THEN. That's just not the case, but we've got models for that, to estimate what the future temperatures will be.

Apart from the link to the Antarctic data set, I have seen no evidence to support your point.

There are no lab experiments for example that show that CO2 does not absorb energy.

Or perhaps you're refering to the cloudiness hypothesis ... but that one's been investigated heaviliy by modeling and so far, the dice could go either way: will global warming create extra clouds, or will it just create the same number of clouds which just contain more rain, or will there be fewer clouds?

It's hard to say from a modeling viewpoint, and it surprises me that deniers somehow know this for a "fact".

Especially since ancient data have shown hot-house earths, so I think that clouds are definitely not a fool-proof mechanism to avoid global warming.

Well said.

Because in the end-game (extreme heating) only the polar regions would be habitable and these regions, even without a 100 meter sea level rise, have less land area than the equator and cannot house and feed 7 billion people.

In the early stages it would cost a lot of money to move cities and agriculture.

It will be similar to the rise and fall of civilizations, except that those will occur on a massive scale, all together in a short period of time.

In the end-game it would cost billions of lives.

These things are very very costly.

My country would disappear, it would be almost priceless for me if the Netherlands would somehow be saved... or maybe the future Dutch will have to move elsewhere, as one of the worlds first climate refugees.

You are being DELIBERATELY obtuse.

It's a graph.

It has 2 lines on it.

one is temperature over time

the other is CO2 levels over time.

the temp line's fluctuations are to the LEFT of the CO2 ones.

Time increases to the right.

IT thus tells you temp increase happens BEFORE CO2 increase.

THIS IS ABSOLUTE FACT. It CANNOT be argued.  That is THE specific reason this graph exists.

The graph is a simple linear sequence.

IT DOES NOT APPORTION BLAME.

IT DOES NOT INCLUDE ANYTHING BUT 2 RECORDED NUMBERS - TEMP and CO2.

THE GRAPH IS NOT AN AGW 'DENIALIST' - IT IS ALSO NOT AN AGW 'DEVOTEE'

IT IS A GRAPH.

END OF STORY.

I've read articles about models that try to predict ice ages. Those models have shown that we'll skip the next ice ages because of the current level of CO2. With continued production, we'll skip a lot of ice ages.

If CO2 levels were lower, we would enter another ice age in a few tens of thousands of years or so.

It depends... the warming is still perfectly in agreement with expectations and models, *if* the mitigating effect of the rather chaotic and unpredictable oceanic overturns are taken into account - if they are taken into account, model and observations are very nicely in agreement.

I think you are just being nitpicky about models.

Anyways, models are never perfect. They are limited by observations (for constraints), modeling algorithms, computer power and they can absolutely NOT predict climate 10 years from now. I think I've discussed the statistical nature of climate before ... should I repeat myself ?

CO2 is a very long-term gas. What we produce in 1 year time, will linger around for thousands of years to come and affect climate for thousands of years to come.

The scale at which humanity operates (regarding CO2) exceeds that of the largest tectonic events in Earth's history. Creation of the Atlantic Ocean? We laugh about that kind of petty volcanism, we operate on a far larger scale now.

We excavate carbon at almost 10 billion tons/year, which exceeds the natural capacity to bury carbon hundred-fold or even more.

A coal seam that took nature a hundred thousand years to form, can be completely excavated within 100 years.

And with technology like coal-gasification evolving, the rate of production can still increase significantly.

Just to put things into perspective!

There are 7 billions of those apes, with pretty advanced machinery at their disposal.

The only food for psychologists is how people could be so (self-)destructive.

I think you would agree with me that people are addicts to the consumer society? Can you image a life without a mobile phone or a computer? And worse, we want a model every year and we need a lot of money for that which we don't want to spend on things like "the earth". No, we'll do anything to keep buying them even if we know it is bad for our "future". For us the future is limited to the next phone, the next computer or the next TV.

I would like to see a link to such a record.

You refer to an era half a billion years ago (or more), when the sun was cooler, right ?

And what was this life exactly... tiny bacteria and algae. They can handle a bit of heat. During several huge extinction events, certain heat resistand algae did very well and helped to slowly reduce CO2. However, higher life forms didn't survive under high temperatures. And the presence of the algae (notably their sulfide production) was pretty disastrous for life on land.

How can you take this 1:1 to our present situation ?

Given that the sun is more or less a constant (to within 0.4% on the time scales of 1000 years or so that we are talking about), we can discard the influence of the sun on climate.

It doesn't show that, that's only your interpretation of the data.

It shows a 1 degree celcius offset and/or a 200 year time lag at a sinlge point on the Earth. Nothing else.

To make such a conclusion based on that is pretty damn bold.

When it comes to the art of interpreting data, I think you are pretty narrow-minded.

You are obsessed with a time-lag, but that time-lag is a completely artificial construct.

It is not based on any physical process, it's just taking CO2 and taking T and then assuming some kind of physical process that related those 1:1.

But such a physical process does not exist.

If you want me to believe you, you will have to explain in more detail what this relation is all about...

Just saying "CO2 lags T" is not enough. That's just a description of the data and anybody can see it.

The real issue is how you interpret those data and that requires some kind of assumtion of which physical processes take place on the earth which relate the two.

I'm interested to hear from you, which physical processes relate CO2 to T in that data set ?

(And important to note is also: how does that physical process jive with other observations?)

For example, saying that CO2 is insignificant is a very, very important physical conclusion. It means that CO2 is not important in any physical process regarding temperature.

But it does go against lab observations and many other observations that clearly show a high correlation between CO2 and T under very different circumstances. And not just in extreme situations.

Almost any significant climate change and minor extinction is associated with a fairly rapid change in CO2.

To me it tells me that such a correlation under such diverse sets of circumstances cannot be a coincidence.

By the power of statistics, I invoke a strong relationship between CO2 and T !!

And not suprisingly, that's also what lab experiments and physical laws predict... so I'm safe.

Where are you?

YES.

I know that.

But seeing that T jumps 1 degree in the Antarctic before CO2 rises doesn't mean that CO2 is meaningless.

Even you say that, there's no cause / effect.

I just don't get you get so upset about this, I'm only trying to discuss the interpretation of the data.

The 1 degree jump could be from a different physical process unrelated to CO2. As such this 1 degree offset cannot be used to make conclusions about the physical relation between CO2 and T, unless you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT THERE IS A PHYSICAL PROCESS THAT CONNECTS THEM.

And you've to be certain that THAT'S THE EXACT SAME PHYSICAL PROCESS THAT IS RELEVANT FOR OUR FUTURE.

For example, the 1 degree jump could've been caused by a change in wind pattern, or a change in ocean current. Such a thing (change in current) could be the cause for a rise in CO2. But while a change in the ocean current can have a quick impact on the Antarctic region, it'll take a much longer time before the deep ocean has released a lot of CO2.

Now this is all imaginary, but it could happen right. And that's physical process #1.

For our future, the energy capture effect of CO2 is important. And that's physical process #2.

Now, what does process #1 say about #2? Nothing.

So what does that 1 degree celcius temperature offset have to say about the greenhouse effect of CO2? Absolutely nothing.

This is just crazy, I'm repeating myself again!

But I hope I've made myself clear this time?

The sun's 'influence' on climate can be discarded?

OK, now we're being absurd AND obtuse.  There IS NO climate without the sun.

NO modelling of ANYTHING related to this planet can ignore the Sun.

Nothing

Nada

Zip.

You asked what was 'A' and what was 'B'.

I told you.....so you subsequently went off on yet another tangent.

I look forward to linking back to this thread in 10 years.

Heck, I remember having this debate back in 1998 when I was told that, for certain, that by 2018, we'd be 2 degrees warmer.

Even the link I provided earlier, which includes a climate model (developed in 1999) stated with "high confidence" that by 2014 (15 years later) we would be 1 degree warmer than 1999.  And this was surface land temperature.  Instead, 2013 is going to be looking to be slightly cooler than 1999.

Now we have Geo claiming that soon only the polar icecaps will be habitable. Strangely, Al Gore is buying coastal property. Maybe he knows something we don't.

Remember 1998? The good old days before those evil AGW skeptics started to fact check the graphs and data of the AGW crowd?

Ah good times.

We are talking about climate change here.

If the sun is constant, it doesn't change anything globally, it's just there ...

Of course the sun is not constant on extremely long time scales... but that's not relevant for our human perspective of about 100 years or.

I don't want to go into the issue that the sun will be baking our planet to a crisp in 1 billion years from now.

If we'd do that, we can just as well give up now.

As I have said MORE THAN ONCE...the graph is a graph....a supposedly true representation of data from ice cores.

I happen to believe such data is cute...but very likely not even representational universally across the planet...and maybe even systemically inaccurate.

What is NEEDED [for everyone's sake] is secondary time-line records from more general sources that can demonstrate the ice core accuracy repeated in areas NOT 'under ice'.

If that existed then the SIMPLE TIMELINE can be trusted.

AGAIN

It doesn't determine cause and effect......only, repeat ONLY timeline.

deleted.

But they exist, even for the last ice age. I've shown a link a few pages back. I've shown it several times.

What's wrong with that link?

Here's one for your convenience, although I'll be repeating myself, again ... 

http://www.skepticalscience.com/skakun-co2-temp-lag.html

To be honest I'm still amazed that ancient timelines of millions of year of volcanism, rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures, are discarded because of the Antarctic data set. Because that one data set shows how CO2 lags T and that somehow invalidates all other data sets. That's also a timeline.

The general decrease of CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the last 50 million years, and the subsequent onset of an ice age, I also consider that a significant trend, and strong evidence for a relationship between CO2 and T. That's also a time line, or at least a long-term trend.

Why wouldn't they be considered as evidence?

It isn't 'constant'....not when there are solar flares.

As Frogboy said, the Sun is the energy source.  It powers climate change, no matter whose fault it is. [or what's].

That's causing about a 0.7 degree celcius temperature difference between the highs and the lows, and this averages out to ZERO over 11 years.

For all practical purposes that's a constant when we discuss climate change over a period of 100 years.

It looks like it has its own agenda/bias.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm a firm believer that mankind is screwing his environment.  He has done so since the dawn of [his] time.

I do NOT go to websites-of-mass-hysteria championing whatever 'side' and expect them to tell me ANYTHING of actual value.

The one absolute certainty is both ends of the political spectrum/both sides of this so-called debate are fuelled by agenda.

Oh I wanted to add to my previous post that to be honest I've also read about 200 year periodicity in sun spots, so it may be that on a 100 year period the solar cycles won't average out to zero exaclty, but well ... what difference does half a degree or less make, if we're talking about warming of between 2 and 6 degrees.

I've shown the skepticalscience link, because the original link from nature has only small graphics.

This is the original link.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html

Anyway, they're observations from fossil data.

I don't see what that has to do with politics.