[ExI] cure for global warming is working

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
>>>> >>  And most climate
>>>> >>  scientists will hem and haw when asked privately rather than
>>>> >> honestly
>>>> >>  look you in the eye and say they know there is detectable
>>>> >>  anthropogenic carbon dioxide impact on current climate.
>
>>>> >>  ### Thanks to CO2 fertilization existing plant varieties are now
>>>> >> able
>>>> >>  to function better under dry and hot conditions which explains the
>>>> >>  shrinking of deserts observed especially in the last 30 years.
>
>>> >  I'm confused, Rafal. You mean the fertilization by the extra CO2 that
>>> >  doesn't exist? Or it does exist but can't possibly affect the climate?
>
>> ### Is there anything in what I wrote that would justify your
>> questions?
>
> Obviously I thought so, or I wouldn't have asked.
>
>> Did you get the impression that I think CO2 concentration
>> is stable or that it is not a greenhouse gas?
>
> Yes. If not, why do climate scientists avoid your eye and hem and haw when
> you ask if CO2 is increasing and acting as a greenhouse gas by impacting
> climate?

### I tend to be very precise in my statements on this subject but I
notice people project a whole host of assumptions and new meanings
into what they read. See what I wrote previously: "And most climate
scientists will hem and haw when asked privately rather than honestly
look you in the eye and say they know there is detectable
anthropogenic carbon dioxide impact on current climate." Notice that I
there is absolutely no claim, even an implication, that CO2 is stable
(And in a post just a few minutes later I mention it did go up, so why
ask?). Notice the qualifiers "detectable", "anthropogenic", and
"current" in reference to the effect of CO2 on climate. Of course I
know that CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" (i.e. it absorbs some frequencies
of electromagnetic radiation, transforming its energy into heat and
thus generating a positive temperature forcing). No, you won't find
anything directly to the contrary in what I wrote. As a side note, I
know that in the geological past and also on other planets, large
amounts of CO2 definitely did or do have a major impact on
temperatures. The issue I specifically restrict myself to is whether
the CO2 forcing from known change in CO2 levels in the last 100 years
had a detectable and precisely known (as opposed to merely
hypothesized about) effect on climate. I actually did talk to a couple
of junior climate scientists and well, yes, they were hemming and
hawing about that specific issue, once they noticed I wasn't as
ignorant as 99% of laypersons they meet (the 99% includes most
believers and many of the skeptics). The fact is that a forcing by
itself, although it can be somewhat reasonably calculated from first
principles, is completely insufficient to calculate a delta T caused
by the forcing - you also need a feedback coefficient, or rather a
whole matrix of coefficients, that are currently unknown. Anybody who
claims otherwise is either a fool or a crook, and most climate
scientists are neither, so in private if properly questioned they will
admit there is no scientific basis for the global warming/climate
change scare.

Just to make myself technically clear - a forcing is measured in W/m2
(usually, at least for radiative forcings e.g. from the sun), and
describes the extra heat energy delivered to an object due to a change
of a physical factor in the system. If you deliver 1 W/m2 to the
bottom of an atmosphere made of pure CO2 it will have a different
effect on equilibrium temperature than the same forcing delivered to
an atmosphere made of H2 or other gases, or delivered to a surface
exposed to vacuum. Just imagine the temperature of a glass house
versus a rammed earth house heated with the same furnace. A lot of
factors - composition of atmosphere, albedo of surface, atmospheric
pressure, composition of incident radiation, will modify the feedback
between the forcing and the eventual delta T. We do not know the
majority of the quantitative coefficients relevant to our atmosphere
and CO2 - and that is not even talking about secondary effects (change
in e.g. H20 concentration caused directly by delta T from forcing) and
tertiary effects (change in surface albedo caused by a combination of
H20, delta T and CO2 effect on plant growth). The nonlinear equations
governing the relationships between these quantities are both
indispensable for prediction of delta T and almost completely unknown.
As a result, the actual CO2-delta T feedback could range from negative
(i.e. CO2 causes cooling) to various positive values. Yes, the
uncertainty is so extreme that even a mild cooling effect of CO2 under
present conditions cannot be excluded, not even looking at
paleoclimatological data. The only thing we know is that the feedback
cannot be very high, since there is very poor correlation between
recent CO2 change and recent global temperatures - the feedback is
manifestly small enough that the effect is swamped by other factors,
such as changes in albedo due to aerosols, or cyclic processes in the
atmosphere.

To summarize, you can't make assumptions about my statements based on
a template of what you may think that a warming skeptic is supposed to
believe in.

Rafal