Friday, January 26, 2024

The Evidence for CO2 Global Warming

Sabine Hossenfelder posts:
How do we know climate change is caused by humans?

In this video I summarize the main pieces of evidence that we have which show that climate change is caused by humans. This is most important that we know in which frequency range carbon dioxide absorbs light, we know that the carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere has been increasing, we know that the Ph-value of the oceans has been decreasing, the ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere has been changing, and the stratosphere has been cooling, which was one of the key predictions of climate models from the 1960s.

She says this info is hard to find, but I found the same info as the first link from a search, a 2009 artucke:
How Do We Know that Humans Are the Major Cause of Global Warming?
YouTube also slaps an obnoxious "context" link on the video, with some info. You also get the same info from ChatGPT.

The evidence is that humans burning fossil fuels emit CO2, and the increases in atmospheric CO2 have caused warming. Probably most of the warming observed in recent decades.

My quibble is when they leap from this to saying that humans cause most of the climate change. The climate is changing a lot of different ways, in different places. I do not see anyone even trying to quantify climate change. Just CO2 and temperature.

2 comments:

  1. CO2 and “temperature” (just an average of… something), make for the appropriate headlines to enforce the narrative. Journalists and lawyers are often to too informed about science and math.

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  2. Roger,
    Check out the 'Watts Up With That' website if you want to see what actual scientific debate on various climate change claims looks like. It isn't always pretty, but it is at least a dialogue where you can't just flash some academic pedigree and folks all nod their heads. Real science is often messy, it is not clean consensus.

    Do humans add heat to the environment?
    According to physics, Sure, we do generate heat with both our bodies and our industry, and that heat will effect temperature to some non zero amount since it is going into the environment.

    Can we actually accurately measure the human contributed amount separately from other sources? No. Natural variability on top of an already chaotic system means we can't actually model the world's climate accurately (there are literally hundreds of models, almost all of them run quite hot, and all of them hand tuned to hide their discrepancies).

    Is the human contribution significant compared to other sources? No. Compared to the sun, and geologic sources (Sabine was just talking about volcanos in Iceland, be my guest predicting those ahead of time), humans are very little in their contribution to the system.

    Do we actually have a climate model that accounts for the earth NOT being a flat disk? No. The cell models used to model climate get fiendishly difficult when taking into account they are not on a flat disk, but on a sphere at a twenty three degree angle, and so they are not uniform in size, and since there is also no accurate model of what cloud cover actually does to climate temperature, much less being able to predict it's effect, the entire computer modeling enterprise is mostly crude guess work, mostly relying upon a theory that proposes that carbon dioxide is the primary green house gas that drives the worlds climate... well, according geologic record going back millions of years, it does not. According to physics, carbon dioxide is not a very effective greenhouse gas compared to far more plentiful dihydrogenated oxygen.. you know the mysterious substance that covers over seventy percent of the damn planet...and yet our climate has not run away once despite the stuff being everywhere.

    Context is always king, and in context with other background heat sources, humans add very little to the point it is really a signal to noise issue. Want to challenge this view, go ahead, then provide your data, showing EXACTLY how much the climate has been changed, but to do that you would need high accuracy of historical temperatures we simply don't have with an accurate climate model we don't have to even begin to crunch some numbers.

    If you want to dig into the models and where they go horribly wrong in both prediction and methodology, research Dr. Robert Lindzen. He is remarkably refreshing in how he handles the climate modeling question, and humorously shows the dirty laundry the multi-billion dollar climate alarmism industry does not want known.

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