British Parliament heard devastating testimony overturning the global warming hoax

Maybe not but this is how it is peddled in the media and how political leaders talk. They want to sanction people and assume they are contributors who should pay. We already do pay from consuming, now they want you to pay FOR consuming, but the money doesn't go to help diminish what they claim is causing it. Instead they just turn around and pay for more advertisements and talks and speeches to promote the idea that humans are to blame for climate change so they can impose more taxation onto the people. Make them feel guilty enough they will pay. It is the text book snail oil salesman pitch 101 right there.

Like I said, if it wasn't politicians leading the crusade I might be a little more inclined to follow the so called science behind human induced global climate change. But since it is, and they are making millions off of it, becomes a red flag that something doesn't seem quite right.

I'm sorry. I don't see where MJ claimed man was the sole cause.

We are back to, you can't question the science so you question the motives.

It's definitely not the sole cause of climate change. The climate has been warming for the last 100k years and it's been repeating the same warming/cooling cycle for well over 600k years. We are currently in a warming peak and will soon (a few hundred to thousand years) return to a cooling trend.

I'm certain that humans are contributing to climate change, but the question is "relative" contribution compared to other factors, and the answer to that particular question has not been answered to my satisfaction yet.

Our atmosphere is a very complex fluid and lots of things affect it's composition and temperature. It isn't going to be easy to identify the relative contributors to any particular trend, but I think science needs to do a better job of gathering data on the question of relative factors before we can draw any conclusions, and before we can recommend any solutions.

Ultimately I suspect that the only thing humanity can do to reasonably moderate our civilization's effects on the environment is to make alternative energy sources (non-carbon based) more cost effective. Once other technologies become economically feasible everyone will move to them without needing any government push or intrusion. The most environmentally effective solution to the problem is to push our way through carbon-burning energy production and into more cost effective (advanced technology) renewable solutions. Once that happens then the core problem will solve itself. If governments try to force restrictions on existing technology they're just going to delay our transition to better energy sources and ultimately that will make the problem worse by delaying everyone and extending the current pattern of energy use.

No problem. For the record, i think Krumple is off the edge of the map with his "conspiracy theory." If anything, i see the energy industry attempting to deny climate change because they see it as threatening their traditional sources of revenue. If people go to solar, wind power, wave power, geothermal power, they can't control the sources of energy the way they do with petroleum, coal and nuclear.

Whoa, there is so much misinformation going on around here, it's hard to know where to start. Krumple and gungasnake are the main perpetrators. Ros is wrong that no one looks at other factors involved or quantifies them. That's simplest to deal swith. IPCC reports as far back as the Second Assessment Report now more than ten years old, has repeatedly weighed them and assessed them. Please, ros, lyou're generally among the more sane people here--if you still haven't looked at the reports, do. And I must say that the IPCC does not itself do the research, It summarizes and synthesizes the research done by hundreds of scientists in hundreds of institutions around the world. There is a huge mass of scientific evidence on the subject that they put together.
s

I don't see such a claim anywhere in Roswell's post. Perhaps my reading skills are failing me in old age. Could you quote his post and highlight the portion in which he makes such a claim?

Now, let's see, Setanta said:


No, set, what I was talking about was the effect of CO2, not climate change in general. bAnd I stand by what I said about CO2. There are obviously a whole host of things that affect climate and can cause it to change in a number of different ways, as it has often in the past.

A number of posts back now, I cited the evidence that say Krumple's claims about what happened with CO2 millions of years ago (he talks later on about climate change 50K years ago--that was in the middle of the last ice age and there were no great extinctions then--I think he's talking about 50 million years ago, there was more CO2 then, and it was hotter--natural result and what you'd expect), but CO2 declined precipitously then and has not been that high in the 50 (actually more than that) million years since, so that argument has no effect on present conditions. Probably an effect of the appearance of flowering plants which uptake vastly more CO2)have no bearing on what's going on today.

Keumple poopoohs the greenhouse effect. It's a METAPHOR. No one says it's the same process as a glass greenhouse which works by containing convective cooling with glass panes. The atmospheric greenouse effect occurs because IR radiation from the sun is at certain wavelengths which don't interact with atmospheric gases. It's absorbed by the earth and the seas and is them re-emitted at different wavelengths which DO interact with certain gases. The greenhouse gases, notably H20 vapor, CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide absorb that IR and re-emit it in all directions. The re-emitted IR that is emitted upward may not encounter other greenhouse molecules (concentrations are low) and escape to space, or it may meet other molecules and go thru the same process again. AS the concentration of greenhouse gases increase, more and more IR will be reflected back earthward and raise temps. That's why it's called a greenhouse effect. There's no glass panes, because the process is different. But the effect is similar.

Now, setanta, H2O vapor is in fact the main greenhouse gas. No one disputes that. However no one can demonstrate that it's changing much, due to human or other activity (actually water vapor theoretically will increase as temp rises, but it's a dependent variable, not an independent one--the temp has to go up for the water vapor to increase, and then that will amplify the effect, but something has to cause the temp to rise in the first place, and that's what CO2 and the other gases cause). But CO2 acts on wavelengths that H2O does not, and increases the temp. And CO2 is demonstrably changing in the atmosphere, and the science shows that we are the ones changing it.

There are two main lines of evidence. nSimple calculations of how much fossil fuel we use every year indicate how much carbon and carbon dioxide we introduce into the atmosphere every year (Oil and coal industries keep records of how much they produce. Combustion product amounts are simple engineering). We know carbon sinks take up and remove (at least long-time temporarily, sometimes for millions of years) about half of the CO2 we produce. The other half is somewhat more than the amoutn of CO2 increase in the atmosphere every year. No one has been able to show that anything else exists that takes up any significant part of the remaining half except the atmosphewre.

Now that CO2 we produce from fossil fuels is OLD CO2. It's been out of the atmosphere for millions of years--that's what the carbon sinks existing millions of years ago took up--the ancient plants that made up the biota then, which is why it's called fossil fuel. The CO2 naturally occurring in the atmosphere contains three isotopes of carbon, c12, c13, and c14, in essentially stable ratios to each other. But ancient CO2 contains different ratios, C14 is radioactive and decays slowly, but after millions of years underground, it has all decayed to other carbon isotopes. Plants differentially absorb C12 over C13. As a result, CO2 from old plant life has a significantly different isotopic signature from naturally occuring CO2. Scientists have analyzed changing isotopic ratios over the last century, and found they are in fact changing, in line with the increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere being due to fossil fuel burning (and also, as a secondary cause, the significant, tho much smaller, increase in fossil CO2 due to concrete production, which buiklds most of our modern infrastructure and comes from the burning of limestone, which is made up of millions of year old depositions of the shells of marine microorganisms).

And that, Set, is why I, and the science, say that CO2, which is the largest effect causing a warming effect, is mostly anthropogenic. Methane, which also has a large human contributi0n to it, and is indeed stronger in effect than CO2 or H20 but is present in much lower concentrations also has an effect.

There are also other factors that affect temperature, but as the worldwide research the IPCC summarizes indicate, their effect at present is quite a bit less than anthropogenic causes NOW. Solar output has been declining over the last two nominally-11-year cycles, while temperatures have seen their strongest rise. It is estimated to be no more than about a quarter to possibly a third of the total (and the latest research reduced the figure a bit, I believe, after the end of the last solar cycle a couple years ago).Aerosol effects can be either cooling or warming, depending on what and where they are. They can be either anthropogenic or natural. they are, in any case, factored into the results the IPCC summarizes (but is, I reiterate, generated by other sources than the IPCC, which means the IPCC conspiracy theorists are wacked).

To summarize, when ALL the factors affecting climate change are weighed in and balanced, the evidence shows that climate NOW is indeed getting warmer, and human effects are the primary cause. That in no way says human activity is the only cause of climate change, but we weren't doing it 100,000 years ago in the last interglacial, or 50 million years ago. But we are doing it NOW, in this interglacial, and that is the most significant driver this time around.

And, gungasnake, that whole "No warming since 1998" is a totally indefensible right-wing meme, not a valid fact. I suggest, again, that you look at the NOAA graph of global temperature posted above. They have the facts, they have the data. And they say that global average temperature IS increasing, and has increased since 1998. You're flat out wrong.

Set, ros said:


My point is that this has in fact been considered and weighed repeatedly and at great length in the literature. If you are taking exception to the "no one" , so be it. Ros does not seem to have paid much attention to what actually does already exist, and that does say that it is humanity that's having by far the most significant effect on the warming going on.

First of all, let's go back and correct this perception of me being "sane"... I think I need to throw some caveats in there...

I didn't mean to imply that "nobody looks at other factors and quantifies them". I'm sure that people are looking at many factors, but I don't think I've seen any reports that specifically address the RELATIVE contributions of those factors.

I've read a lot of the reports and news over the years, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen anything which addresses even the idea of relative contributions within the known warming trend. If you think you've seen something like this, then maybe you can point me to it. If it's out there and I've missed it, then I'll be glad to consider it and update my opinion of things.

The main point I was trying to make is that discussions like these (and all throughout the media) don't focus on the primary question of relative contributions. Most of these discussions get derailed by people who argue about whether warming is happening or not. And that's a dumb argument. Warming is happening. It's been happening for thousands of years and it's in a very stable cycle right now. That cycle has been happening long before humans had any effect at all, and nothing about that cycle has changed.

Here's the analogy I've used before; if you throw a bucket of water into Niagara Falls, then yes, you've increased the flow of the falls, but it doesn't matter in the scheme of things. If "global warming" is the water fall, then I want someone to tell me how big a bucket of water humanity is throwing in. This is not going to be an easy data point to derive, but it's an important one.

I see absolutely NO evidence that humans are the PRIMARY cause. You'll have to provide links to some source which supports that claim. Thanks.

I apologize for calling you sane, ros. I'm solely responsible for the error

The IPCC's assessment reports, from at least the SAR, thru TAR, and now FAR, do in fact weigh and quantify the various contributions to climate change, along with the citations to the research those assessments are based on. There are a LOT of them, do looke at their results. (Google IPCC assessment reports, naturally).

You say it's mostly anthropogenic. You have not demonstrated that "science" [sic] says so. I see that you have completely avoided addressing the false claim you made about what Roswell has said. You have attributed to Roswell a claim made by Krumple. You can hardly expect to be taken seriously here if you can't even keep the members' posts straight. Perhaps you need a scorecard.

I take exception to you being so muddled that you confuse what Krumple said with what Roswell said, and then have the gall to attempt to defend an unjustified accusation about what Roswell actually wrote. In your earlier to post to me, you made a comment to the effect that ". . . which means the IPCC conspiracy theorists are wacked." Neither Roswell nor i made any such "conspiracy theory" claim, and i have already specifically disavowed such claims. I see no reason to engage in any dialogue or debate with you when you so casually play fast and loose with the truth.

And to repeat, we know from ice cores the composition of the atmosphere and pretty much the temps over about the last six ice age cycles. Co2 never got outside about 280-300 ppm in the interglacials and the temps were similar to the 20th century. That's the natural cycle. CO2 is now between 380 and 390 ppm, and the temps are going up, inevitably (that's the greenhouse effect), and our CO2 production continues to rise. That is unprecedented in the natural record (and what was going on 50 million years ago doesn't count, because the world was a whole lot different then, subject to wholly differentconditions and processes). Humans are also having an effect on some of the other greenhouse gases (and for that matter on aerosols, which can have significant cooling or warming effects).

It's been awhile since I looked at the IPCC stuff (since Massagato in one of his various incarnations was ranting, which gives you an idea of when), but as I remember, the IPCC summary of the research had CO as being responsible for around 64% of the net warming change, other anthropogenic greenhouse gas effects at around 16%, and other causes, anthropogenic aerosols, concrete production, and land use changes making up some more of the total effect.
They also factor in a whole carload of other natural and anthropogenic causes, including but not limited to, off the top of my head solar variability, natural aerosols including volcanics and things like SO2 emissions from sea life (affecting cloud cover),, changes in cloud cover, and changes in albedo.

Really, there's a lot of work that's been done, and the consensus is that the change is in fact largely human-caused.

Set, perhaps you should take a tranquilizer. I attributed to Ros what Ros, not Krumple, in fact said. It was Ros's post 4,911,314. That was what I quoted. Maybe you should look it up before you get even more causelessly irate.

And, set, I was also not talking about you when I was talking about IPCC conspiracy theorists. That would be, obviously, on this thread, Krumple and Gungasnake. Sheesh, Set, it's really not all about you.

Well yes it is important. If there is a potential for financial gain for the party involved in promoting the awareness I am skeptical of the data they are providing. The incentive to lie is there. Now if the situation were different, I might be more inclined to believe the data. It is far to easy to drum up false data to support the claim to get people on board for a cause that isn't an actual problem.

Here is the thing. If global climate change is a natural occurrence (which it is you can't argue it's not) and the effect humans are having on it is less than marginal. Then no matter what we do to circumvent it, could in fact be null and void. This means that any attempt to change our behavior will probably have little to no impact on reversing or changing the effect we are having. It is a possibility yet so many refuse to acknowledge that it is.

They immediately assume that it is human induced and not a natural occurrence that would be happening regardless of human activity.

So imposing a tax onto the people with out actually knowing the degree of human involvement into the effect of climate change, is criminal.