E.G.
“The atmosphere’s composition during the Mesozoic was vastly different as well. Carbon dioxide levels were up to 12 times higher than today’s levels, and oxygen formed 32 to 35% of the atmosphere, as compared to 21% today.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs

Basically the Earth is in a icy cold dry cycle that will pretty much continue until Antarctica moves off the South Pole - it’s locking up an awful lot of water as ice which if melted would raise the oceans and the level of water vapor (much more potent factor in warming the air than CO2). The planet is usually in an ice age and once in a great while for a very brief time it warms up - as it is now - before the temperatures drop and the glaciers form again covering much of the N American and Eurasian continents. The prime mover for the oscillation is probably the Sun.

Good source - predating the formation of Gore’s religion:
http://www.amazon.com/Ice-Ages-Solving-John-Imbrie/dp/0674440757/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255905418&sr=1-2

Very interesting. The earth was much warmer until relatively recently - until the Indian subcontinent began crashing back into Asia and started to push up the Himalayas. That mountain range altered the climate more than anything man has ever done. Until about 40 million years ago, even the northern hemisphere was tropical. Then the weathering of the Himalayas apparently altered the chemical makeup of the atmosphere.’

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1281731.html

The cycle of ice ages began and, it is only sheer chance that the rise of human civilization occurred during a rather unusually lengthy interstitial.

ed.

btw - giganticism in dinosaurs may be the result of that large percentage of oxygen - which is why there are no comparable land animals that size today.

Experiments need to be checked and replicated far more often than they are. Such acts are to be supported, not resisted and the AGW community has a clear record of resisting checking efforts and supporting resisters.

This resistance, this unwillingness to share code and share data is not consistent with the scientific method and not consistent with responsible use of the public’s money (most science of this type has at least some public money funding it). The cure is to politically force public science money to adhere to normal scientific practice and let the chips fall where they may.

This is my greatest concern regarding the hypothesis of CAGW. The scientific evidence is very weak. Yes, there has been a global warming trend since ~1750. Yes doubling CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere can theoretically increase surface temperatures by ~1.2 deg C all things being equal (they are not). The IPCC hypothesis depends on a water vapour feedback in the model runs to become “catastrophic”. There is no data that shows this is happening in any significant way. Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist at MIT, has shown the the ERBE satellite’s data is in direct conflict with the IPCC models.

Lindzen has stated that the empirical DATA from ERBE would kill the CAGW hypothesis dead if the climate science community were adhering to the scientific method. They are not - it is not about science anymore.

As Lindzen said (paraphrasing) - the consensus was made before the science was done.

We need to get back to the basics of the scientific method that has served us very well in the past. We need to step back, do good science and let the chips fall where they may.

PS another look at the lack of science in paleoclimate is at climate audit.

I agree

http://wrymouth.com/2009/10/16/holy-smokes-its-blog-action-day-on-global-warming-heres-my-contribution.aspx

Here is a link to an article re climate models written by a physicist who has done modeling.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/10/climate-modelling-nonsense

I’m skeptical about CAGW but then again all people trained in science should be skeptical- even of their own results.

And be careful of the Arctic/Antarctic. Most references regarding the ice extent/thickness are in reference to the satellite era. This era started at close to the greatest extent of the Arctic ice cycle. A reduction was to be expected. Also we have no comparable ice data with the Arctic in the 1930/40 when arctic temperatures were comparable to today’s. The St Roch, a small wooden RCMP ship transversed the NWP several times in the 1940s once by the most northernly route.

Also the global sea ice is normal. The Antarctic sea ice being the highest in 30 years.

It never has be explained to my satisfaction why the warming between ~1910 and 1940s was the same in rate and magnitude to that of ~1976 to 1998. (See climate4you.com for data) Some solar scientists say it could not be the sun. Maybe the current extended solar minimum will throw light on this. I think we will have a much better idea of the magnitude of AGW caused by CO2 in 5 to 10 years. I’m thinking it will be small to insignificant.

However it turns out, the important thing is to follow the scientific method. I will accept any evidence that does that - which is why some evidence is compelling and some is not.

ed.

Angely Lansbury’s monolouge (”you will be given a two-piece Soviet Army sniper rifle . . .”) is still one of the top 5 most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in a movie. I still get chills when I see it (and I can’t watch Murder She Wrote without an ever-present sense she’s about to get medevial on Tom Bosley’s ass). Damn, that woman can act.

“That’s as nonsensical as anything uttered by Al Gore”

Are you sure, Rick, you want to stand by those statements? Anything????

Skepticism is good, but turning a blind eye? Not very practical.

For quite some time we’ve been adding large amounts of chemicals and gasses to our atmosphere without also creating a mechanism to absorb them back into the environment. Just because the trash man takes the trash out every week doesn’t mean that trash is gone forever.

I think if the United States could spend staggering amounts of money and human resources building our defenses around the mere *chance* the (then) Soviet Union might attack us, we ought to equal that effort now with regard to new technologies that reduce CO2 and other emissions, but on the much more plausible chance that one dire prediction or another of the climate models might be right.

Is “attacking capitalist economies” the way to go to change things? No, I don’t think so. However I don’t think equating all forms of significant change as some sort of attack on the economy is valid either. That’s hyperbole, not compelling reasoning.

I agree that it’s important to look very, very closely at who’s driving the debate because there’s certainly money to be made off of this issue. However I’m more concerned about disinformation, pseudoscience and fear getting in the way of good, solid science that needs to be disseminated to the public.

Thank you Rick for taking the time to write about this subject.

As I mention in the post, I support reducing carbon emissions - slowly, sensibly, and incorporating new technologies along the way that will ease the transition to an alternative fuels future. I also think it a matter of national security that we wean ourselves from foreign oil, although it is impossibly stupid to have the policy we have now of not drilling anywhere and everywhere that it is possible. It is entirely compatible to support drilling like mad and working like crazy to develop alternatives.

The problem with proving humans responsible for the rise in CO2 is quite simple; transmutation of carbon molecules into other compounds before they reach the upper atmosphere. The models, as I mention, are way off target because we don’t understand this process very well. We are getting better and I think we will be more accurate in the near future. But what you believe - even though it makes perfect sense - cannot be proven in a scientific sense. Hence, the science is not “settled” on whether man causes climate change, although it is most certainly settled that CO2 levels have gone up dramatically.

ed.

I attended and graduated from a top tier law school in the Eighties. Although quite conservative, I believe(d) environmental conservation to be a consistent with my beliefs. I joined the Environmental Law Society, and in addition to distinguished environmental law professors, climatologists, ecologists, demographers, biologists, and other PhDs were regular participants. My last attendance was after a member challenged the student president with the seeming non-sequitur about the environmental movement’s failure to challenge capitalism. The president responded that the movement was geared that way, and most members, faculty, and visitors nodded in assent. Until that moment, there was no hint that was the direction of this particular organization. Sure, there were cost/benefit disagreements about how to protect the environment, but the subtext never was obvious or even voiced until that day. Remember, this was more than two decades ago.

Excuse the anecdote, but it will tie up.

I also was a global warming and/or climate change agnostic, more prone to belief earlier than I am now. People on both sides claim a certainty that doesn’t exist. I began to grow more skeptical as it emerged some data used to model had been speculative at best, and skewed at worst, to achieve the desired result, i.e., to “prove” the existence of manmade climate change/global warming.

My disbelief grew when I ran into the same student president described above. He now is an attorney and works in the Office of General Counsel for a major federal department and that is as far as I will go in identification. The Kyoto Treaty had just been rejected by the United States Senate by a margin of 98-2, I believe. I asked this man why China and India had been exempted from Kyoto. He responded, and this is not an exaggeration, that poorer countries need the opportunity to achieve the same wealth as Western democracies. His rationale had absolutely nothing to do with the environment. This proves nothing but does indicate motive.

I strongly suspect the United States Senate will not pass Cap and Trade due largely to the number of Democratic members from industrial states that would be absolutely devastated by it. But if it does pass, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind it will have absolutely nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with socialism in the sense of leveling the playing field between the West and the Third World. Greenhouse emissions will continue to rise, the United States will be a second-rate economy, and as a result will have little influence to exert on the new worst offenders.

There’s a lot of weak links in the AGW chain, and where the CO2 came from is one of them.

But even if AGW can’t be scientifically disproven, it can definitely be politically disproven by a few cold winters, which would amount to much the same thing.