Fact: CO2 is higher than at any point in the last 650,000 years
Fact: Most of the rise from the 280 ppm pre-industrials to the current 380ppm has come in the last 70 years, and unambigulously is due to human activities (as proved by the radiocarbon signature of atmospheric CO2). This rise can in no way be called natural variation.
Fact: CO2 is being dumped into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate (now ~2.8 ppm per year).
Fact: The correlation between temperature and CO2 is incredibly tight.
Fact: Before modern man, CO2 lagged temperature rises by several thousand years because the ice-age cycle was driven by orbital mechanics. However, once orbital mechanics primed the system, increasing CO2 took over as the main driver of temperature increase during the interglacial periods. With the advent of modern man and industrialization, CO2 has preceeded temperature rise. Without man’s activities, we would probably be entering another ice age. However, we are now we are dumping so much CO2 that we are actually raising the temperature very quickly, even when it should be starting to gradually decline (because we are past the inter-glacial maximum). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
Future SDguy, you are doing a great disservice to climate scientists, and to your fellow human beings.
Call up the external relations departments of the best climate research programs in this country such as Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Columbia University, University of Washington, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Ask them if the IPCC accurately reflects their respective institution’s best understanding of climate change. Ask the lead scientists of the climate research programs at NOAA and NASA (despite Bush’s best efforts to silence them). You take the word of a handful oil industry puppets over literally thousands of scientists whose strongest desire is to do good science, stay out of the limelight, and further our understanding of the climate system.
The IPCC does not represent fringe environmental organizations. If anything it has been critisized as being too cautious, too conservative. And your supposition that the media is giving one side of the story side is simple-minded. Of the 15 or so people I know or personally have heard speak who are actively involved in climate change research, not one has said the the IPCC overreaches.
Your understanding of climate science and basic physics and chemistry is deeply flawed, or else your representation of it is deliberately deceitful.
I give you the following analogy. Imagine that 95% of the world astronomers made an anouncement that their models showed that the earth might be hit by an asteroid in 100 years time, and that this asteroid would wipe out half the life on earth. It would cost $300 Billion to stop this from happening. The models gave a 50% probability that this would happen. The window for launching a rocket that would stop the asteroid was only 20 years. You, and others like you, complain that the models were too uncertain, the economic cost too high to justify the program, more study was needed. After 10 years, the astronomers come back and say the models are now saying that the asteroid will hit with 90% probability. Now you say, “Your models are based on assumptions. Besides these experts over here (spotlight on a tiny handful of naysayers) disagree. All the rest of the scientists are just trying to scare us into giving them more funding. We need another 10 years study.” Another 10 years pass, the astronomers, even the naysayers, return and report that there is a 99.9% probability that asteroid will hit, but …. ooops, too late to do anything.
Again, I say that your bullheaded refusal to take the word of thousands of scientists, and instead regurgitate the propaganda of oil companies and the heritage foundation is putting the rest of us in danger. There is real consensus among the vast majority of professional scientists who have spent their entire professional lives studying climate. Climate change is coming, and there will be big consequences.
