Man Made Climate Change

[Rbstr]

Firefly....and really...half the country that has no idea what they're "debating" about:
Ahem.

GLOBAL CLIMATE DOES NOT MEAN THE SAME THING AS LOCAL WEATHER.

Thank you,
Person who has environmental chemistry and modeling experience.

The snow in Texas or Florida or where-the-fuck-ever does not in any way provide evidence against global warming.

Global average temperature doesn't mean you can't have some extremely cold, as long as there's more extremely hot elsewhere. Do remember the southern hemisphere is in the middle of summer now....and the northern hemisphere just had a very hot summer.
Though, we actually have a theory about the current spat of severe winters in development: The jet stream typically provides a barrier to the arctic air attempting to come south from the pole. But the jet stream is weakening, presumably because of different surface temperature differentials (which have bearing on pressure differentials that drive the winds). This allows arctic air to move south more readily. Yes, that's just a theory, but it makes sense. There's no real way to test on systems like the earths except for extremely complicated computer models, and those require much more funding that we're often willing to give (though recently things have been better).


Asides from that bit:
There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that we, human beings, have significantly impacted the atmospheric concentrations of CO2. We've more than doubled them in a century. The source of the "new" CO2 is us, not natural processes, we've got good records.
Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow it would be on the order of centuries before atmospheric CO2 went back to pre-industrial levels, and even longer for oceanic concentrations.

We also know for a fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. More of it means less heat escapes our atmosphere.

Additionally, we know for a fact that the earth is currently warming, without any attention paid to the cause.

The debate on climate change, in scientist circles, mostly has to do with two things:
How much warmer a given amount of CO2 makes things.
What the warming will do to global weather patterns.
NOT if it's happening or not.

This should be very concerning because there are a number of situations where we hit CO2 runaway. That is at certain, fuzzily-known CO2 concentrations the ability for the Earth to sequester it naturally gets FUBARed. For instance, higher CO2 means more acidic oceans. At a certain pH shellfish can no longer make shells (this already happens in some places). Shells are make of calcium carbonate, which makes them one of the largest sinks of CO2 that exist. So once we reach that point, CO2 concentrations will go up even faster.

The fun is that when you look at the dynamics, its very possible we're beyond that point of no return, and nothing we do will keep us from hitting the "oh shit we done goofed" CO2 threshold.

I can post a couple of book chapters on climate modeling if you guys really want to see it. Unfortunately none of the modeling programs will work because I can't distribute the installer. They also require some differential equations knowledge to really understand.

Now, is Global warming "bad"? That's an entirely different question. "Bad" is more likely than not. It could actually expand the amount of arable land. A benefit in the face of a rapidly growing population.

To sum it up in a sentence: People should be extremely concerned about what we're doing to the atmosphere.