Is there Proof that Man iS causing "Global Warming"?

This is about proving Global Warming. Is it possible? This is about scrutinizing the strongest data from the 'pro-Global Warming' view.

I cannot be more clear: This isn't about rhetoric, or opinions, or anything but hard facts. In fact, it's not even about evidence that shows otherwise. It's about intensely scrutinizing the best data that supports it, so that we can truly understand it.

I've started a sibling thread for the data that supports it:
Is there Proof that Man isn't causing "Global Warming"?
I made a poor attempt at starting 'our thread here now' earlier, but it was killed by derailment.

The idea is that we can have straightforward analysis of the best supporting data from each side, in seperate threads, and then synthecize the truth from the results. I can't promise this won't be derailed, as I'm just a member too, but I hope that this can succeed as an "efficient inquiry".

[edit on 12-6-2007 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]

I posted it in the other thread.

CO2 is a GHG, it is just simple basic physics - increasing its concentration in the atmosphere will increase global temperatures. This was known as far back as 1850 with Fourier and shown more explicitly by Arrhenius in 1896.

We can quibble over the exact extent of the effect, but it will have one. Thus if human activity increases CO2, we are responsible for a proportion of climate change.

Therefore anthropogenic global warming is a reality.

Using Ramanathan & Croakley's figures, we can attribute about 4% of the current greenhouse effect to human sourced CO2. Suggesting our effect is significant.

Then we can use the predictions that GHG mediated warming makes. If GHG warming is true, the stratosphere will be cooling and the troposphere warming. Whereas if solar activity is true, warming should be consistent through the atmosphere.

Observation: there is cooling in the stratosphere and warming in the troposphere.

Science 24 November 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5803, pp. 1253 - 1254
DOI: 10.1126/science.1135134
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Perspectives
ATMOSPHERE:
Global Change in the Upper Atmosphere
J. Laštovička,1 R. A. Akmaev,2 G. Beig,3 J. Bremer,4 J. T. Emmert,5

The upper atmosphere is cooling and contracting as a result of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. These changes are likely to affect the orbital lifetimes of satellites.

Abstract
Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming
near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to
challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of humaninduced
global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial
global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde
data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant
discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and
radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets
have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies.

www.climatescience.gov... (also see Fu et al., 2005)

This provides further support for GHG mediated warming theory.

I guess one could argue that the proof comes in the form of observation and computer modelling. If the models and/or mathematical calculations indicate that 'something' will cause warming which then matches observation, and we know that that 'something' has definitely happened, then the logical conclusion is that that 'something' caused the warming.

Of course, it doesn't have to be CO2 to still be down to human activities. And one should always remember that there is much more to climate change than just 'global warming' - massive deforestation leading to changes in regional and global rainfall pattern, for example, are a completely separate issue (and one which neither side of the debate seems too keen to discuss)/

Anyway, back to evidence for anthropogenic global warming:

Using results from a general circulation model simulation of contrails, the cirrus trends
over the United States are estimated to cause a tropospheric warming of 0.28–0.38C decade21, a range that
includes the observed tropospheric temperature trend of 0.278C decade21 between 1975 and 1994.

www-pm.larc.nasa.gov...

Not proof. But theory and observation match.

And that's just aircraft contrails!

Aye, lots of other human culprits apart from CO2. How about human-sourced black carbon:

Dirty Snow May Warm Arctic As Much As Greenhouse Gases
Science Daily — The global warming debate has focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but scientists at UC Irvine have determined that a lesser-known mechanism – dirty snow – can explain one-third or more of the Arctic warming primarily attributed to greenhouse gases.

Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smoke stacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground. Soot-infused snow is darker than natural snow. Dark surfaces absorb sunlight and cause warming, while bright surfaces reflect heat back into space and cause cooling.

www.sciencedaily.com...

Yes, another example of something we know is happening and which all science theory says should result in warming. And what d'yer know? The areas most affected by this are warming the most. In the S Hemisphere there is less industry, less soot to fall on the ice sheets, and less warming.

And, again, nowt to do with CO2.

Till now no one is having solid data that global warming is caused by humans. We all know that there was something called as ice age that happened millions of years ago and no one knows how it happened. And after that period the earth became warm again.
How the earth heated up again we do not know. There was no factories or anything like that during that period that can produce co2 and greenhouse gases. It remains a mystery and i think it will remain as a mystery for ever




[edit on 12-6-2007 by wise_indian]

Melatonin, good post and you explained it with just a few words so that anyone can understand it.
What people tend to forget when they citing what happened millions of years ago, is that 1) life on planet earth was much different then, different life forms, flora and fauna, etc. and 2) that it took a massively long time for these changes to be effected, meaning that many lifeforms could survive because they could adapt. This GW that we presently have is happening way too fast for life forms to adapt and change, i.e. they are dying or already dead. We already have a Great Extinction well underway.
We also know that at least some of the things that humans do are harmful to the environment: fuel fumes weakening ancient structures, "clearcutting" the ocean's floor has greatly lessened the amount of plankton, which many, many forms of sea life eat and therefore cannot sustain themselves without enough plankton, and that pollution from factories and cars creates smog, which makes the horizon yellow and dims the view, while irritating people's eyes and breathing passages.
Look around you and you will see that things are alot different than they were 30 years ago. Less butterflies, honeybees, birds., etc., especially in cities, water that is more polluted, seas that have far less fish.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea.
Ignorance, thanks for reposting this thread, I like your idea of presenting proof instead of just arguing back and forth.

I was reading through this thread and I was resonable impressed. I hadn't visited ATS in a while so I signed in. Lo and behold I see my old friend forestlady. Out the window went reason. The wife of a real scientist. I will make my points and sit back and read. The whole idea that CO2 is somehow higher than in the last , some say, 650,000 years, has been brought into question by Ernst Beck, 90,000 air samples of CO2 in last 180 years and Jaworowsky who showed the phalacy of using ice core CO2 as a proxy for amospheric CO2. I don't have the links handy but anyone can put those names in and find the PEER REVIEWED papers as forest lady is so quick to comment on but slow to furnish herself. Anyway a quick look at these papers show how deceitful the AGW's have been. In the 1940's the CO2 was over 440, same in 1825. In the current solar cycle #24, THE SUN'S electro magnetic fields have protected the earth from cosmic rays from far away supernovae. Begining with solar cycle #25 that will change. Cosmic rays which contain small particles cause increased cloud cover. Temperatures go down. Expect the beginings of that little ice age that was mentioned earlier around 2020. By 2030 there will be no doubt that runaway manmade global warming was a hoax. There will be the proof. Sorry I don't have the URL's handy but I am too busy right now to look but any 6th grader should be able to find what I refer to in a few minutes. GW is a threat to mankind. Threats make large quantities of money available. Scientists need this money, Environmental organizations get the benefits. They in turn give money to politicians. As far as rapidly increasing temperature it is not. It has not. Especially the troposphere which should warm if greenhouse gases were the culprit. As far as the obfuscation expert forest lady goes, yes we should be more efficient, we chould clean up bad stuff wherever it occurs. If forestlady were around 50 years ago, she would know to what degree we have cleaned up our lakes and rivers. More to be done. Don't waste the money on plant food CO2. Oh and check out the effect of carbonnic acid and calcite (calcium carbonate) which is the CO2 regulator and describes how CO2 is released from the oceans when it gets warmer.

STUPID ME> SORRY I put this in the wrong thread My apologies. No wonder the other thread sounded so rational!

Originally posted by melatonin
CO2 is a GHG, it is just simple basic physics - increasing its concentration in the atmosphere will increase global temperatures.

I'm feeling that we need hard data on how much CO2 is in each 'sphere' (tropo/strato/meso), and then how much CO2 rises and/or what causes CO2 to rise from tropo to strato. Then how long it takes it to 'come back down' after it gets up there.

The 384ppm number refers to the percentage where?

This was known as far back as 1850 with Fourier and shown more explicitly by Arrhenius in 1896.

Nevertheless, until about 1960, most scientists dismissed the hot-house / greenhouse effect as implausible for the cause of ice ages as Milutin Milankovitch had presented a mechanism using orbital changes of the earth (Milankovitch cycles), which has proven to be a powerful predictor of most of the millions of past climate changes. Nowadays, the accepted explanation is that orbital forcing sets the timing for ice ages with CO2 acting as an essential amplifying feedback. en.wikipedia.org...

We can quibble over the exact extent of the effect, but it will have one. Thus if human activity increases CO2, we are responsible for a proportion of climate change.

So then wouldn't we need a hard number for how much temp is caused per CO2 PPM... perhaps in each sphere?


[edit on 12-6-2007 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]

Originally posted by melatonin

The upper atmosphere is cooling and contracting as a result of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. These changes are likely to affect the orbital lifetimes of satellites.
www.climatescience.gov...

I gather from the pretty graphs in that there has clearly been stratosphere cooling happening, but I don't see where they explain specifically why we're to insist it's greenhouse gas caused.

Correct me if this is GHG 101, but it seems contradictory to me that those graphs show the upper decrease while all of the lower ones increase. In any case it appears there is a clear inverse relationship between the uppermost with the lower 3. I mean, warm in uppermost during cool in lower 3... Uppermost cools while the lower 3 warm up. I guess it just seems like the upper would have some sort of residual warming effects.

Ignoance isnt bliss,
The neasurements are actually being taken at the top of Mona Loa in Hawaii. That's where the 385ppm is. In the chart of CO2 over the last decade plus, they show ice core data which has been shown to give low readings because the CO2 dissolves in the entrapped water. Water not ice because of the extreme pressure water is liquid at extremely low temperatures. The effect of greenhouse gas is to form a heat cap above the troposphere which is why if greenhouse gas were the cause this is where the heat would be trapped and it isn't. Your questions of where it moves is irrelevent. When the concentration get too high, the ocean absorbs the excess in the form of carbonic acid. When the carbonnic acid gets to high it forms calcite and is stored. There is a limitless storage of calcite in the ocean.

Originally posted by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
Correct me if this is GHG 101, but it seems contradictory to me that those graphs show the upper decrease while all of the lower ones increase. In any case it appears there is a clear inverse relationship between the uppermost with the lower 3. I mean, warm in uppermost during cool in lower 3... Uppermost cools while the lower 3 warm up. I guess it just seems like the upper would have some sort of residual warming effects.

Because of the nature of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is not consistent in its thermodynamics, hence why they are given different names and are affected differently by GHGs.

The troposphere cools with height, the stratosphere warms with height, the mesosphere cools with height etc.

This means that, in the troposphere, the emitted surface longwave radiation is reduced by increasing GHGs, so we get warming. But in the stratosphere, the GHGs essentially act as emitters (cooling at high levels greater than absorption below). So, troposphere warms, stratosphere cools.

This stuff was predicted in 1989 by Roble & Dickenson, using simple climate models, well before we had good data for this trend. It was a confirmed prediction and increases the reliability of the models and theory, just like any good science.

The fact is that if solar irradiation could account for the current warming and GHG effect was minimal, we wouldn't be seeing this effect.

As far as '384ppm where'. It is measured in the troposphere. Mauna Loa is just one of many CO2 measuring climate stations, measurements are taken all around the world, and are used to validate each other.

[edit on 12-6-2007 by melatonin]

Originally posted by CradleoftheNuclides
The measurements are actually being taken at the top of Mona Loa in Hawaii. That's where the 385ppm is.

Then it's Surface / Lower Troposphere then correct? But is there data somewhere that shows different percentages in the different spheres? It seems like one would need that data to be able to understand what is happening in the upper levers, unless it's a uniform percentage top to bottom?

[edit on 12-6-2007 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]

The cant even predict the weather for a 5 day forecast properly how can they tell me the weather in 30 years? People put out info on the entire solar system suffering from a "warming" effect.. The earth has climatic cycles that it naturally goes through. One super volcanic eruption can through us into an ice age..Sorry but i have found no concrete evidence that proves we are responsible for global warming.. Before I get slammed on all these stats and computer models remember you can find just as much info, stats and models for the opposing idea...

Originally posted by HooHaa
Before I get slammed on all these stats and computer models remember you can find just as much info, stats and models for the opposing idea...

I absolutely agree with you here. I think that the problem is that corporations, creationists, etc. have put out so much propaganda and untrue "factoids", that it's difficult to tell the real science from the junk science.

According to my study, the upper troposphere not increasing in temperature demonstrates a counter to the theory of GHG caused global warming. It has been alledged by many as an impediment to a belief in GHG global warming.

As far as the sphere's go, I recall reading that CO2 doesn't go up that far. In the neighborhood of the lower stratosphere. Mostly the data most often discussed is the temperature of the various levels.

As far as concentrations go, I didn't read where anyone covered this but manmade CO2 is only about 40ppm of the atmosphere. If you compare that percentage to the distance between NY and LA 40 millionths would be two soccer fields. Come on now. Who could believe something that small could do anything. That is opinion supported only by common sense.

Here is the presentation Beck made at the Berlin EIKE meeting:

www.biokurs.de...

What this does is make the whole discussion of current CO2 moot. I don't mean to shut off debate. But unless this paper can be refuted, and many have tried, why would we care about the current CO2 levels. The review list included many AGW supporters as well as skeptics. I was included in the reviewers list (by mistake I suspect) and got to see this paper develop. Very interesting.

Originally posted by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
Then it's Surface / Lower Troposphere then correct? But is there data somewhere that shows different percentages in the different spheres? It seems like one would need that data to be able to understand what is happening in the upper levers, unless it's a uniform percentage top to bottom?

Hope you don't mind if I attempt to answer.

Mauna Loa takes measurements at about 3000m. I'm not sure if data on chemical composition in each section of the atmosphere is readily available, not sure. I do know the stratosphere is drier, and also contains more ozone, trace gases and radicals than the troposphere. Thus it is not truly uniform.

I think there is a delay due to mixing rates - i.e. it takes time for increases in the troposphere to make it through to the stratopshere.

....

Originally posted by forestlady
so much propaganda and untrue "factoids", that it's difficult to tell the real science from the junk science.

The easy way is to try and source the data back to the original science. Then you usually find it is either non-existent, cherry-picked, years out of date, or just plain quote-mined. All good science has proper references that are easily sourced and verified. If it takes you to some crappy looking website, the BS detector should start to tweak, and it should be screaming if errors and misinformation are very easily shown (like E.G. Beck).

....

As for E-G Beck, I would be as likely to take climate science from him as I would take evolutionary science from Kent Hovind. His stuff is full of faked graphs, bad maths, unreliable data etc etc. If you are in anyway interested in his approach, try:

www.realclimate.org...

[edit on 12-6-2007 by melatonin]

Originally posted by forestlady
I absolutely agree with you here. I think that the problem is that corporations, creationists, etc. have put out so much propaganda and untrue "factoids", that it's difficult to tell the real science from the junk science.

Thats a bit of a rash generalisation there, this might seem strange to some enviromentalists but the same can be said by the other side of the debate. Peter Sutherland the chairman of British Petroleum has been pushing the man made global warming theory, well exploiting it would be a better term. Mainly because the more they push, the more money the Oil corps can make, reaping more billions from profits. It's just like the peak oil scandal, were just going to end up being taxed for producing carbon. The only people who will make anything from this are the corporations, the people of this world will just end up poorer.

If the whole idea of Man Made Global Warming was as serious as they say, they would be replacing power stations fueled by gas and oil at a much higher rate. Instead they seem to be going at the general public to use less energy, most people won't and it will give energy companies another reason to put the prices up.

Originally posted by forestlady
so much propaganda and untrue "factoids", that it's difficult to tell the real science from the junk science.

Dig. That's why I was hoping we could weed out all the bs and go from there.