There is a large elephant in the room...

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No, the question isn't whether CO2 reflects certain wavelengths of light. This is very empirically demonstrable. The question is whether a system as complex as the global climate necessarily responds in a 1:1 fashion to increased CO2 concentrations with measurably increasing temperatures. And we know for a fact that it does not.

And this makes sense when you consider that CO2 has an exponentially declining effectiveness in trapping IR radiation with increasing concentration. It is technically true that increasing the concentration of CO2 results in more heat trapped, but unless we're talking orders of magnitude higher concentrations--like Venusian scales of atmospheric concentration--it has no measurable impact.



It continues to blow my mind how such elementary level reasoning seems to escape even people in the scientific community on this subject.

And just another "sanity check" point of interest, even though it is being only indirectly discussed. There isn't even any evidence that humans are having a measurable impact on animal extinctions, despite constant claims in certain circles that humans are causing a "Sixth Extinction." Let's look at the data first.

Animal genera are not presently in any kind of downward trend. But let's even consider how you would even measure this to begin with: You count the number of differentiable species fossilized in sedimentary deposits. How do we know that there was a mass extinction event that wiped out half of the Earth's species 65 million years go? Because the number of species in the geologic record decreased by half at this time. So how do you state that there is a "mass extinction event" happening currently when you don't have a fossil record to verify this?

You don't.

It's a complete and utter lie.

Last edited by StickyVicky on 05 Aug 2018, 4:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I just took a look at the article below:
http://www.bitsofscience.org/do-the-mat ... -ppm-7237/

There's no reason to deny that a lot of people are trying to bake this data one way or the other for their own political gains. It's so bad that most people generally just go with whatever their political alignment is and stick with it. That's part of why I tend to stay out of this topic usually as well because it seems to be as much a can of worms as debating cosmology or the implications of abortion - just I sometimes think even the abortion issue is argued in better faith because you can only strong arm so much in the way of politics with that whereas you could try hijacking and centrally planning the entire thing (and wrecking it) if you could sell people on the idea that global warming necessitated the destruction of grass-roots markets.

As a rule when people come to topics like this, with even controversy, and proclaim a sort of gnostic attunement on the matter I typically don't think I'll gain much insight from what they have to say because they've drank their own Koolaid. Someone can be arguing in good faith and be quite sure of themselves but their emotional and social engagement looks a lot different than watching DK in motion. If I do see DK in motion the best I can hope is that the person offering all the exceptions, or all the crisis charts, is somewhere in there showing me something I haven't heard before and that it's yet another thing I can get my head around to figure out what to make of the topic.

That said I don't think we're headed for earth becoming Mars, nor do I think the climate change issue will lead us to NWO out of Brussells, the three 'cities within cities', or any of that. If the freemarket can take care of the problem then the weight of the political panic is off of our shoulders and we can just enjoy the progress as well as voting with our dollars for those who are bringing said progress. As far as I can tell it's neither whole-cloth, nor is the planet going to eat us, it's just another priority we have that also falls rather well in line with finding more renewable replacements for oil and improving other energy technologies.

Another side note - for as much as I think VICE sucks on a lot of things political I found their coverage of the coral breeders interesting. The bleaching problem is getting bad enough that they're trying to breed coral to engineer more robust strains that can handle the warmer waters without going white. Very cool and innovative strategy, sounds like they're able to get it done on nearly a shoestring budget, it would be awesome if they were getting more funding for this sort of work (patrons, grants, etc.) because they're down in the trenches getting things done. It sort of reinforces the concern though - ie. that we're dealing with a whole amalgam of problems that fit together into a larger one and that's wise of us to do what we can to abate them wherever possible.

I haven't looked into this in any major depth. Can you share data that specifically demonstrates that coral reefs are experiencing a larger dieoff now than they have in the geologic record? If it's just due to "warmer waters," as you state, then it's likely that there is no such data.

I saw probably ten or twelve abstracts behind paywalls. A couple that weren't log-in or pay protected:

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr ... re&f=false

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467- ... rigin=ppub

Coral don't suffer directly because of the warmer waters. Most of the harmful effects global warming are side effects of the warming. The warming is not all that bad by itself, but it comes with a myriad of harmful side effects.

Coal suffers because the sea level is rising. Coral has a symbiotic relationship with algae. Algae can only survive near the surface of water, as it is photosynthetic.

Neither one of those links demonstrates what I asked for. They need to be able to demonstrate a higher die-off rate presently occurring than in past warm-water scenarios that I described in earlier posts. We have geologic records of coral reefs from those time periods, so we should be able to establish a baseline from, say, 38 "warm periods" from the past several million years to determine whether what is happening now is unusual.

Got that data?

I didn't take much time with it. I'd say sate your own curiosity - Google's wide open to your fingertips.

You're citing data by Richard Lindzen??

Thanks for the laugh.

The temperatures has raised, there is more than enough proofs about that; and it would continue to rise even if we stopped our emissions now, as it take time to go through the atmosphere thermal inertia.


That graph is misleading, as the further we go back in time, the more rare are fossils of that time. Also, the sixth mass extinction begun, or at least intensified, in the last two centuries, a scale of time way bellow that what the graph is showing.

Humans have modified their environment way back in time, before even any historical reccords; that it didn't cause extinctions, or don't today with our massive capabilities in engineering and exploitations, is simply ludicrous.


It's not only heat that destroy corals, it's also, and mostly, ocean acidification, as ocean absord large parts of atmosphere CO2.


Climatologists know what they talking about, and I'm pretty sure they have take that in account.
Beside, if you stack the blue bars then it become signifiant; only a small part of the warming, but enough for signifiant change in climates.

I've already addressed every single point you've tried to make here. Scroll up.


Am I?

Rather than attempting to discredit the data by attacking the source, why don't you produce some contrary data?

Why stop them? They're only a fraction of a percent of the population.

No, the point is that:
(a) scientific consensus is that current warming is both above baseline and occurring at a faster rate than in the past, refuting your statement (I don't know how to attach images but can provide references if you are interested) and

(b) even if you were correct on that point, you are making two unsupported conclusions to suit your point of view:
(1) Because current warming falls within the range of past variation, it cannot be due to human factors such as emissions
(2) Because current warming falls within the range of past variation, it is not a problem that we need to study and address

Stick your head in the sand if you will, but please don't force your conspiracy theories on the rest of us.

As I tried to explain above, concerns about climate change are not just about asking whether something similar has occurred "within the geological record". The earth's been around for, what, about a thousand times longer than humans? We've evolved to live in certain climatic conditions, and it's not going to be much comfort when we're killing each other off over water supplies to know that similar conditions have occurred in the "geological past".

"Scientific consensus" argument lets your opponents simply point out all the times "scientific consensus" was wrong.

My grandfather use to get "electro-shock" therapy back when "scientific consensus" thought it was helpful. LGBT people were declared "mentally ill" back when "scientific consensus" told us so.

The major problem with "global warming" is that these researchers don't publish their temperature measurement data. You can't go to a website, find their historical GPS latitude/longitude temperature measurements. That would make this research transparent, verifiable, and reduce skepticism.

However, they don't do that. Instead, they hide the data, and give us statistical models. These statistical models use unknown assumptions, unknown statistical methodology, and probably many don't have the math background to understand statistics.

So, it's to be expected that people would think these people are fraudsters.

Next time you meet a global warming scientist ask, "If this so important, why hide the data"?