More Americans and most Republicans now believe in climate change

As long as the naysayers are in control, nothing will be done to help the situation, while it continues getting worse. For those of us who believe in taking positive action to save the planet & its people, Trump and his minions are a national disgrace and a living tragedy. Trump and his supporters are leaving this massive challenge for our children & grandchildren to deal with & be impacted by. No good leader does that.

 

We are NOT in a cooling phase. That's absolute ignorance.

 

You mean Mann's "hockey stick" graph? That's actually not a prediction. It's an observation. And it's been corroborated by multiple lines of evidence from multiple groups using wildly different techniques. Mann's "hockey stick" conclusion from 1998 has overwhelming acceptance among scientists. It's even been corroborated by groups who specifically set out to refute it.

Also, that site is a fake news conspiracy and denial site. Most of the stuff on there is garbage.

Here's a prediction for you though. In 1896 Nobel prize winning chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted that the Earth would warm due to anthroprogenic release of CO2. He even figured out that the poles would warm faster than the equator and that the ocean would mitigate the warming by scrubbing out some of our emissions. This prediction was made in 1896! His famous radiative forcing equation from the late 1800's is still in widespread us today because of simplicity and accuracy. He was followed by Guy Callendar in 1938, Jule Charney in 1979, and Hansen in 1988. All of these people correctly predicted the warming we observe today desplite each of them underestimating it somewhat. Contrast this with denier prediction which are so bad they can't even get the direction of the temperature change correct.

 

More Americans and most Republicans now believe in climate change
For the sake of this nation and its younger generations, as well as this planet and all life on it, I hope you're right. But ALL Americans need to work together--Republicans & democrats alike--in a cooperative effort to do something to correct global warming while something can still be done. Time is wasting. Our window of opportunity is shrinking at an alarming rate. Our failure to act will fall onto our children & grandchildren, who will look back on us thru the filter of history, and be disgusted by our stupidity and inaction.

 

The US could do whatever it wants to help climate change, but if India and China aren't doing 2X as much, it doesn't matter what we do.

 

The Milankovitch cycle theory (which has wide acceptance by scientists by the way) helps predict glacial/interglacial cycles by means of the net effect of each orbital characteristic. The "beat" of the net effect has a period of between 80,000 and 120,000 years with a recurrence interval of about 400,000 years. Interglacial periods over the last 1 million years have different leaves depending on how the cycle works out. The current "beat" of the cycle puts us in a slight cooling phase of the cycle. In other words, Milankovitch cycles are starting to put an ever so slight downward pressure on global temperatures.

The problem is that Milankovitch cycles only put a small amount of "force" on the climate system over long periods of time. This "force" is being dwarfed by the greenhouse gas effect right now.

And of course, Milankovitch cycles are just piece of the puzzle. There are many climate forcing factors in play. It's always the net effect of all of them that drives the climate. We just happen to live in era where the greenhouse gas effect is the dominating factor right now.

 

Can you show me a "chicken little" prediction in the IPCC AR5 report?

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/

 

Climate change deniers & naysayers should give some thought to the impact they can potentially have on future generations if they are wrong--which I am convinced is the case.

 

That's fake news.

 

GWA should give thought to blindly destroying America's economy for no reason.

 

The climate is changing but how much is it man made vs earth climate cycles. Are we past the point we’re we can successfully reverse the change? We should treat the earth well obviously but unless there is concrete evidence of human caused damage is it worth harming people’s jobs livelihoods? Having said that no that doesn’t give people free reign to pollute and litter.

 

If you have ever seen the way GW activists trash up a place when they have one of their protests, you'll know they aren't there to save the planet.

 

Yea. Using memes about irrelevant bullshit instead of responding to patient and coherent arguments is pretty much the last straw.

Welcome to ignore.

 

I think the evidence supports the notion that humans are responsible for nearly all of the current warming. We can track the current warming trend against a whole host of potential causes, from volcanoes to solar intensity to greenhouse gas emissions to deforestation. Greenhouse gas emissions is the one variable that tracks the warming that we have experienced most closely. I would suggest checking this link for a really excellent demonstration of that point:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/

And this is a solid report on how we know that humans are responsible for the production of that CO2: https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm

As to the policy implications, I would note that reducing CO2 does not necessarily impact livelihoods. In fact, in 2016 when the CO2 emissions stopped increasing, the Global GDP continued to increase.

Now, whether it is still possible for humans to stop the reverse the worst - the answer is a resounding yes, but the problem will get worse regardless of what we do now. As I said, we can only hope to stop some worst case scenarios at this point.

 

Is there any amount of evidence that could convince you that humans are a significant or majority impact on the currently warming climate?

 

What do you have in mind?

Another computer model?

As I said, the lib climate scientists have lost credibility so it wont be easy to convince me now

 

I asked you - is there any amount of evidence? If you answer in the negative, then I see no reason to continue this discussion with you.

 

Do scientists have the ability to measure or track accurately past climate? Genuine question. Depending on actual legislation there is a potential to hamper businesses and we all know business always try to pass costs on to employees or consumers. Again to reiterate having said that common sense measures to help the earth is a no brainer. Appreciate your comments

 

I hate to be this guy, but I posted something in another thread addressing this and I think it applies here. There was an argument about climate change as a policy of control.

"I get that part of it, but I can see his point too. Trying to ensure you have a clean decent place to live is smart and promotes the common good. I am with you so far. So we look around at the environment and we pick out the biggest problems and we set out to fix them for the common good. At some point CO2 becomes a focal point for some reason, but people don't agree. Some people think that CO2 released by human activity is the primary driving force of climate change that will result in a warmer earth and rising sea levels. Some people think that though CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it constitutes so little of the greater atmosphere and its effect in the greater overall climate is unknown, with attempts to predict climate change being wildly inaccurate because of this. I am sure everyone disagrees with how I characterized their side, but it is close enough. So then the debate ends in a stalemate. And then nothing else about the environment is mentioned.

It seems like at some point we would put a pin in CO2 and address SOME other aspect of the environment. There is likely estrogen in your drinking water. Possibly antidepressants as well. There is a giant wad of plastic in the ocean. There is a place along the Mississippi river known as cancer alley. We could fix SOMETHING. But no, the debate has devolved into calling people "deniers" like they were heretics or saying "9/10 scientists believe" like it was a toothpaste ad, and addressing nothing else. It seems very disingenuous, like maybe the environment is not the primary concern.

When you look at the proposed solution to climate change it is diminished industrial capacity and carbon taxes. CO2 seems to be a justification for global governance, as you are governed by the body that can tax you. You don't really need all of the nations of the world to be under one tax entity to clean up a 1 off event like plastic or industrial runoff. CO2 is a building block for life on earth; you can not have life without it. It will always be there and most organic chemical processes will release CO2 as a byproduct of chemical reactions (including respiration). A governing body founded on the regulation of CO2 would never be disbanded, effectively instituting global government. If you look at it through this lens, the climate debate makes sense. Maybe this is incorrect. Even though groups like the Club of Rome wrote in the 1960's about using the environment to bring about global governance, maybe this is unrelated to those ambitions. Maybe everyone involved has only the best intentions. This is absolutely possible. However, the insistence that CO2 is the first and only issue with the environment, the various scandals and "data adjustments"*, the name calling and unscientific level of the debate, and all of the other factors involved don't paint a very good picture. It seems much more ideological than practical.

Maybe a better first goal for the UN environmental agencies would be to ensure that every human being has clean drinking water that is free from lead and estrogen and so on. That is a practical goal, with a set end point, it will not destroy anyone's economy, and it is achievable. Plus it will build some trust that this environmental movement isn't just another cash grab from the government."

* The data adjustments I was referring to were the troposphere measurements that were adjusted to reflect more warming. Also various email scandals that reflect data adjustment and so on:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamest...-rock-the-global-warming-debate/#7ab8dd8727ba
https://www.carbonbrief.org/study-why-troposphere-warming-differs-between-models-and-satellite-data

 

It seems we have both made up our minds

 

Exactly! I agree with this totally, good stuff

 

Too bad you won't know how little I'm upset.

 

UN Climate Summit To Emit More CO2 Than 8,200 American Homes Do In A Year.

https://tiny.iavian.net/pzqv

We could hold off Global Warming by a decade just by stopping GWA summits.

 

How could it be that CO2 released by man is exclusively not used by plants and accumulates indefinitely? Marijuana grow houses pump extra CO2 inside because it increases the crop yield by using more CO2. When the concentration of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, plants around the planet grow more vigorously, and that tends to draw down CO2 levels. And of course every bit of CO2 released by fossil fuels was once in the atmosphere, absorbed by plants and stored in coal & oil deposits. Because when leaves & trees fall, not all the carbon content is released.

The reason I asked about H2O is because CO2 is only a small contributor to GHG and man's contribution is to CO2 is small in comparison to natural levels which are necessary for us to feed ourselves. If you want to cure global warming see what you can do to dry out the atmosphere a little bit. One interesting fact is that the "lighter" fossil fuels light natural gas and gasoline produce a higher fraction of H2O to CO2 compared with "heavy" fuels like coal. So if we switch to all coal, we could reduce GHG. In addition the smoke will reduce the solar heating of the earth's surface.