Climate Change 1of12: The IPCC and Prior Climate Predictions

@TheMarkNessMonster

"if we covered the entire Earth in a film of saran wrap, we certainly would be getting warmer. We would also all die eventually because there wouldn't be any renewable oxygen resources left to circulate around the globe."

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Even if the Earth was surrounded by a layer of saran wrap, plants would still continue to convert CO2 into O2 for us to breathe.

The Saran Wrap would eventually melt.

@TheMarkNessMonster

"You can't prove global warming by making a snake's tank hotter with a 'simulated sun'"

You're right, this is not even close to a scientific proof. But this isn't a scientific class. If you click on the OP's link, you can find a course description: "The most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events."

In other words, this is an undergraduate-level survey course for people without mathematical backgrounds. And I'm sorry to say, but a strong grounding in mathematics really is necessary to understand the science behind the arguments for (and against!) climate change. Without the math, you must rely on these kinds of weak analogies that the general lay-public is unfortunately always exposed to.

Obviously an open aquarium compared to a closed one will be substantially warmer. In order to be fair, he should cover one with plastic wrap and the other with plastic wrap that is 5% thicker.

Furthermore, if you read up on your political and cultural history of the past 60-80 years, you'll find in Time Magazine in an April 1964 issue(which I found and purchased to validate this argument years ago)that there was the same amount of pandemonium caused by scientists finding 'evidence' of a global 'cooling' that is taking place, and were afraid we were headed to a new ice age. So we're to believe that 50 years later, the globe warmed up that much that quickly? This planet has been ---

---changing climates over it's already 65+billion year old existence, and humans have been on the earth for what, only 100,000 years? Not even that much? How is it, that with all the other animal and plant population, WE are the SOLE cause of global warming when 50-60 years ago we thought we were the SOLE cause of just the exact opposite? Go ask your professor, I'm sure he has some sort of tank experiment to explain his 'scientific' contradictions away.

What is your source for the claim that temperature readings were all taken near undersea volcanoes? I've never heard that. My understanding was that they measured sea surface temperature as well as atmospheric temperature. Back up your claims please.

The reason that our release of CO2 is a plausible cause for warming, is that it took millions of years for the carbon in fossil fuels to accumulate from the CO2 in the air, and we're now releasing much of that back in mere decades.

Regarding the earlier predictions about global cooling, that was at a time when our climate models were more primitive and we had less data. Science gets better as more data comes in so it's inevitably going to be less accurate the further back you go.

You might as well argue that the big bang is wrong because scientists used to accept the steady state theory. Muller discusses this later in the lecture, which I recommend you watch in full before dismissing it out of hand.

What I want to know is, do you dispute the claim that the majority of climate scientists agree on the causes of global warming?

I'm not a climate scientist, and I'm guessing you're not either. Given that, we're not qualified to interpret the vast amounts of data that have been generated.

Call me an elitist if you want, but you don't ask 100 mechanics what's wrong with your car, hear 99 of them tell you the same thing, and then listen to the one guy who says something different.