1. Climate Change -- the scientific debate

A basic look at how climate scientists infer that man-made carbon gases are changing the climate, and how this view is contradicted by other climate scientists who are skeptics.
I am a former science correspondent with an interest in reporting the facts, not the media hype. My thanks to 9thgate for checking my script for errors.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• climate
• change
• global
• warming
• gore
• carbon
• dioxide
• science

[Bulgroz99]

So how did this exact same change and "runaway" mechanism get triggered and reversed hundreds or thousands of times in the past before humans even existed?

[potholer54]

@Bulgroz99 =So how did this exact same change and "runaway" mechanism get triggered and reversed hundreds or thousands of times in the past before humans even existed?= As jahbabylon says, better to message me rather than pose a question on an old video. Long-term warming in the past was triggered by CO2 (and methane, which breaks down into CO2), and it was reduced when weathering dissolved CO2 and locked it into limestone rocks.

[Bulgroz99]

@potholer54 Look at the stuff I wrote below, it doesn't make sense. 1: It happened many times before in a cyclical fashion. 2: Our contribution to GW is insignificant, it means nothing in the bigger picture. 3: Warming releases CO2, that is the cause of the correlation. If you pee in the ocean you will make it warmer, maybe that is why the polar ice is melting?

[potholer54]

@Bulgroz99 =Frankly I am not sure what causes this= Thanks for the honest answer. I ask, because yours is a commonly-held belief that temperature must be due to something else -- anything but CO2. Even though 100-year-old experiments show a physical reason why CO2 warms the Earth, and a clear correlation between CO2 and temp over the last 500 million years, you are still hoping something else might show up. Why are you so resistant to the CO2 explanation?

[Bulgroz99]

@PeteWatts48 who are all these hypothetical geeky climatologists? Where did they get their data from? You are the creationist here, you are just repeating the same nonsense "50 million flies can't be wrong" you heard from others, instead of looking at the numbers and logic yourself. If you call yourself a scientist, why don't you use your own brain instead of just retelling what others are claiming? Before Kepler and Leonardo, the earth was center of the universe, it was a "fact".

[PeteWatts48]

@Bulgroz99 And my point is, iif these facile observations were so compelling, how come scores of very geeky climatologists dont buyt it? AGW is accerptred by the greeat majhority of *all* climatologists, not just UN ones, who claim only to speak from the data FOr a belief to be rational, there has to be at least hypothetical evidence that would make it change, Youir poliytically paranoid simplistic comments are akin to the crass opinions of creationists parodying evolution.

[Bulgroz99]

@potholer54 Frankly I am not sure what causes this. My guess would be that it is part of a bigger cycle. Perhaps because of our solar-systems path around the milky way, a secondary solar cycle, or two or more of these natural cycles interfering with each other, sometimes canceling out the effects, sometimes enhancing them. I believe CO2 is released into the atmosphere as a result of this natural cycle, it is not causing it.