| | Jordan:
Posting reams of cargo cult science onto a website is what is called 'a long weekend.' If that is your source for compelling scientific argument, then I'm not convinced.
The site you referenced debunks nothing. It claims to debunk everything. It is in-ter-net noise, and poor argument, not scientific argument. It is a classic example of cargo cult science.
Specifically, the role of water vapor vs CO2. Your own assertion speaks volumes:
"Also, I remember reading this recent article about the cloud coverage variance due to the sun is not significant enough to account for recent temperature trends."
In the solar loading temperature balance equation, albedo is a direct influence, not an indirect influence, just like solar radiance. IOW, a 1% change in albedo would have the same impact as a 1% change in solar radiance, which would be a huge change. This is one reason why the man-made emission of particulates is and can be directly impactful on climate.
But, it has also been observed(and reinforced by your comment above)that the earth's full disk albedo varies over only an incredibly tiny range of values. If it did not, then total solar loading would vary greatly.
This is in spite of the fact that there are significant and observable diurnal variances in earth albedo--changes in local albedo that respond immediately, on the scale of minutes, not decades. You can see this on satellite imagery, and you can experience it as the often realized trend that 'thunderstorms often crop up in the late afternoon and evening.'. But if you average out the diurnal variation in earth albedo, the resulting daily full disk averages are incredibly constant over time.
Remarkably so. Well beyond the random chance of statistical probability so. The only possible conclusion is that there is an incredibly 'stiff' feedback mechanism that regulates the average earth albedo value. We don't wake up and find full disk nearly 100% cloud cover, and we don't wake up and find full disk nearly 0% cloud cover. We always see an incredibly narrow range of diurnally averaged albedo values. This is in spite of the fact that there are significant and daily perturbations to the factors which govern cloud cover.
We also experience incredible step perturbations in particulates, climate scale events from Pinatubo and so on. A thousand active volcanoes. And what we observe is, an incredibly stiff response to these even massive perturbations. Our atmosphere is not 'fragile', it is remarkably resilient and tolerant to natural disturbances of enormous magnitude, from volcanoes. Ie, much higher step-rate loading than mankind could easily muster.
In spite of the years of inculcations from panic voiced British actor-journalist-activists on BBC, Earth's climate is not in a 'delicate balance.' Every indication is that earth's climate is neither balanced, nor constant, nor anything other than random and chaotically driven, primarily by solar variation.
That is not to say, we could not imagine events that would overwhelm the atmosphere. We should not 'shit the nest.' We could do some real damage by distributing Plutonium throughout the atmosphere. Meteor, comet impact, worldwide nuclear war. But, that is exactly the comparison with CO2 and man-made emissions of CO2, and CO2, for sure, is not Plutonium, it is an largely naturally emitted harmless gas, a consequence of 'life' on earth, period.
It's as if there were a hail of meteors regularly falling from the heavens, impacting the earth, and our response was to regulate baseball games. That would be absurd, the few baseballs we hit out of the park and into the street are nowhere near meteor size. The same applies not only to the tiny fraction of all emitted CO2 that is emitted by mankind, but the much tinier fraction of that that we have a prayer of doing anything significant about. In the great hailstorm of CO2 being emitted, man's portion is insignificant, even if CO2 was the controlling factor in our climate-which it is not.
And, there is absolutely no historical evidence that CO2 is or ever was a controlling factor in our thin, buffered atmosphere. Al Gores own ice core data indicates an 800 year lag between the fluctuations in global temperatures and following fluctuations in global CO2 levels. There is every indication that CO2 is an effect, not a cause.
And with the 2005 announced observation by NASA that the Mars polar caps were also noted to be in a period of recession, the cause for recent fluctuations is clearly indicated to be solar, not mankind.
If CO2 were a driver-- THE driver -- then past fluctuations would have dominated the climate record; they don't.
If it was a question of 'step loading rate', then any volcanic eruption would have clearly dominated the 'step loading rate' deliverable by mankind.
If mid altitude predictive trends predicted by the tweaked models do not appear in the observational data -- weather balloons and satellite sounder data(what was that total nonsense about 'drifting' satellite orbits? That was total voodoo nonsense, meant for the kids), then the tweaked model hypothesis are disproved.
I see your background is in jurisprudence. I spent my salad days helping to calibrate atmospheric models at GFDL, at Princeton. I fully understand how computer models of the atmosphere are tweaked and tweakable, I used to tweak them. There are two fundamentally different timescales of prediction: "weather" and "climate." "Weather" modeling is calibratable, because ground truth rolls along every day. And still, state of the predictive art is maybe 240 hrs/ten days. (Ha.) "climate" modeling is not; we don't nearly have the time series data sets available to accurately describe the climate "hundreds of thousands of years ago" to adequately calibrate any 'climate' scale models(scientifically test its predictive accuracy.) So, 'climate' scale models can be tweaked to provide any hypothetical outcome desired, and the more dire the outcome, the more interest they get from political scientists, and the more funding is thrown to generate abusable scientific myths.
Look at the chemical reaction in the vaunted catalytic converter; it was designed to emit 'harmless' CO2.
There is another argument to be made for cap and trade, but it is specious to couch it in terms of Cargo Cult science.
"We want to tax energy consumption, to change the economic dynamics of alternative energy development."
Then, folks should just make that argument, period, and not treat people like complete idiots, selling them on this CO2 nonsense. All it is doing is cementing the paradigm of using Cargo Cult science to sell boob bait to boobs. If that principle can be abused to foist a laudable goal (increased efforts to realize alternative energy sources), then it can also be abused for total political nonsense.
We shouldn't be encouraging the abuse of science for political goals, and Margaret Thatcher might have led the silly parade on this one.
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