A new company called Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences recently announced plans to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths through genetic recombination with Asian elephants. Part of the rationale for this kooky experiment is to address climate change. Permafrost — frozen soil rich in organic carbon — is melting in the north, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and threatening to liberate up to twice as much carbon as is already present. Colossal says it wants to halt that process by unleashing beasts to uproot trees and stomp down grass to expose more permafrost to the cold Arctic air... Permafrost was once stable not because mammoths roamed the tundra, but because the climate was very cold and dry, which also allowed the animals to thrive, says Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics in the Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The company’s plan has cause and effect reversed.
It's easy to laugh that one off... isn't it? But what's the next less laughable thing in the line of desperate proposals? And what if something that would work is mixed in and we're just skeptical about everything?
If you're inclined to be skeptical, you're probably taking the easiest route of all and just being skeptical about the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change itself. Who cares how much of scam the proposed solutions are if you don't even believe there's a problem?
Those who believe there's a problem feel desperate for a solution, and funding solutions is political activity that appeals to those who feel desperate. That's worrisome to those of us who just want the very best and most accurate science and technology.
But — oh, look! — elephants! We are babies.
Posts
51 comments:
When I saw the subject line, I thought it would be about some sort of breast-mounted CO2 absorber.
Who cares how much of scam the proposed solutions are if you don't even believe there's a problem?
It's Not that we don't even believe there's a problem...
It's that HOW, do THIS problem compare, to the Worlds REAL Problems...
Problems like
Parents thinking that They should have Some input into their children's education
Critical Race Theory being delayed in its wide spread acceptance
People thinking that there is Such a Thing, as Critical Race Theory
The lasting impacts of the nearly successful overthrow of the country, last Jan 6th
Not Knowing, Which Flavor of Ice Cream our President is eating at this moment
And Most Importantly, RUSSIAN CONCLUSION IN THE 2016 election!
With All These Major Problems... There Just Isn't Time, To Worry About The Planet
AA, this one of those items where I'd love to know what the top-rated comments are.
"...skeptical about the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change itself."
Count me in.
This is the number 1 topic when it comes to the New State Religion. It's all about the science, as long as you ignore the hundreds of scientists who question or disprove 'conventional wisdom'. Or better yet, completely censor them from mainstream media outlets and social media. That'll keep the State Religion safe. From the first hockey stick bullshit to today, this was turned into a multi-billion dollar industry and no one is going to get in it's way. Least of all, the facts.
The climate has always been changing, will always keep changing. It has been both hotter and colder in years past- hundreds or thousands of years before we had cars. And unless we can control the sun, we're probably not going to control our climate. But that said, I will toss out that the Aztecs also had their 'state' scientists and they worried that the sun would not come up again if they did not sacrifice a few dozen people daily. Nothing like ripping the hearts out of living beings to prove how correct your 'science' is. Yes, the sun came up. See? I think that a few human sacrifices, plus the addition of roaming mammophants is as good a plan as any. I'm sure the followers can get behind it all.
And while the Arctic is in a cycle of reduction, Antarctica is in a cycle of deeper freeze and expansion. How did we humans manage that? Was it my car, or my use of our air conditioner? Maybe our plastic grocery bags??
I'm very much an advocate for clean air, clear waterways, reducing our waste of non-degradables. But frankly, our recycling centers cannot handle what's thrown at them today. Our 'renewable' energy sources require rare earth minerals that no one has and will cause an upcoming future crunch of dangerous waste. Not to mention that they are among the least efficient power sources we've yet to invent. And we still have not figured out how to build large storage batteries that can handle loads needed to power a city. Want to see Climate Action in action? Watch what is happening right now in Europe, China, Asia, and parts of the US as fall turns into winter. Already in China and Europe- energy restrictions, 'managed' black-outs. It's not because we don't have the capability, it's because we are choosing the Dark Ages over our actual knowledge.
We can get from fossil fuels to a 'next level' energy source, but it's not going to be solar or wind. And to ramp up the scare machine, threaten us non-followers as apostates to the Planet, is not a great way to prove your science. Remember- we've been told for decades that we have only 10 years left to avoid catastrophe. One day they'll be right, but the catastrophe won't have come from climate change. It'll come from the 'fixes' for climate change.
There is no crisis. The CAGW scam is all about getting money to academics, the Street, the professions and Silicon Valley.
There’s a lawyer here in Omaha who has probably realized $2-3m in revenue for his law firm doing legal work for wind turbines. These wind turbines never should have been built. But the federal government was handing out free money and the libs at OPPD want to save the Planet.
---Who cares how much of scam the proposed solutions are if you don't even believe there's a problem? [AA]
There are reasons to care, because the record of poorly-reasoned do-good campaigns is so full of bad results.
But it is impossible to believe there's a problem as the CAGW advocates maintain unless you can ignore the clear scientific record, not only well established but duplicated by two separate teams of researchers, that the Earth is in one of its regular warming cycles between ice ages, called an interglacial. The temperature data these scientific teams have compiled over decades of work is highly persuasive. This is the science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
I want to know what they mean by "fix" - do they mean it in the sense of "fix climate in place," keep everything exactly as it is now (or was in whatever Golden Age of Climate they're harking back to)? Do they also plan to halt plate tectonics, then? And solar cycles? And how about the magnetic shifts the Earth experiences on a regular basis, with unknown consequences - are we supposed to "fix" those too?
What is it with the Left and the twinned desire to exert iron control and conviction that they can? Lord help the child who discovers the Earth has been entirely ice-free for more time than it's had icecaps... and that mass extinctions events (other than the dinosaur meteor one they know about from fictionalized accounts) have been occurring throughout Earth's history, long before evil humanity came on the scene.
Been saying it for decades. We can't stop climate change. We need to remember that our superpower, as the kids say, is adaptation - first of ourselves to our environment, and only second, in many but not all ways (it's still fricking hot in the Valley of the Sun, for instance), of our environment to our needs.
Climate change is a hoax.
It's amazing to me how selective these people are in looking at what we know about climate change. For instance the planet wobbles on its axis and something like 10,000 years ago, the sun was beating down much harder on the 'permafrost.'
We therefore conclude that for a priod in the Early Holocene, probably for a millenium or more, the Arctic Ocean was free of sea ice at least for shorter periods in the summer. This may serve as an analogue to the predicted "greenhouse situation" expected to appear within our century. - ScienceDirect
So let's use that as an 'analogue' and so we can strongly infer that the sun beating down on the permafrost and melting the ice in the Arctic Ocean didn't lead to extinction then, and assuming (which is what the models do, in large part) that it melts again, it won't happen then either. BTW, the polar bears survived this ice free Arctic Ocean. Is there any genetic evidence of a polar bear genetic bottleneck during this time?
"Those who believe there's a problem feel desperate for a solution, and funding solutions is political activity that appeals to those who feel desperate. "
That's why Nancy Pelosi's son is a "clean energy executive" for a company in Ukraine, because nothing gets the money shovels jumping like politicians who appeal to the desperation they have created in voters. That's why Romney's people were involved in that corruption over there.
Exhelodrvr @ 7:23: “
When I saw the subject line, I thought it would be about some sort of breast-mounted CO2 absorber.”
Wish I’d thought of that.
There is a nice new entry by Judith Curry at her blog, “Climate etc,” in which she takes apart the latest ever-so-dire report (AR6) from the IPCC, and shows how it is very quietly admitting that the much-vaunted computer models have failed. And failed. And failed. She notes that the new projections of rising T have been dialed way down (although she thinks their lower limit needs to be lower still), but what is more important than the incessant tweaking is the acknowledgement by these geniuses that the models simply don’t work. They have never modeled, and probably never will model, key physical processes such as clouds, convection, lapse rate, albedo. Not at global scale and certainly not at regional or local scale. Not next week and certainly not in 2050.
As a result of this modeling failure, the impact models that drive policy —for example, what floods or droughts will hit where and when, and how to prepare for them or mitigate their effects— those models are equally useless.
/rant
“If you're inclined to be skeptical, you're probably taking the easiest route of all and just being skeptical about the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change itself. Who cares how much of scam the proposed solutions are if you don't even believe there's a problem?”
I think that one of the things that keeps me coming back to Althouse, even through this darkest of summers, when commenting was arduous and attempts not successful, is her method of presentation, after 30 or so years of teaching law, presumably using at least some of the Socratic method.
Does anyone here actually believe this Climate Change nonsense? (I can’t really tell with Ann - she does her law professorish best to obscure her real views).
Those using that terminology to refer to what just a couple years ago was called Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CACG) impliedly admit that that theory has been effectively falsified (debunked). They have then switched to an unfalsifiable (and thus, non scientific) theory that, by design, cannot be debunked. More hurricanes, or fewer, bigger hurricanes, or smaller, more Arctic ice or less - they all prove that the climate is changing. Doesn’t matter what happens - any changes to any part of the climate “proves” that the climate is changing. Duh! This isn’t science; It’s religion (there did it - used a semicolon). Cargo cult religion, because it uses Sciencism that sounds like Science, but really isn’t.
If you accept this theory, that Climate Change is religion, based on sciencism, and not real science, then one natural corollary is that many of those pushing it so hard, do it go get rich (like AlGore, the husbands of Sen. Feinstein and Speaker Pelosi, etc) or otherwise benefit financially (like so much of the research money being spent, as well as silly things like this recreation of mammoths, etc). We know that many of its most prominent advocates are doing so opportunistically by their gross hypocrisy. How many of them have given up airplane travel? Worse than AlGore’s buddy Lorrie David preaching about using one square of TP, while jetting between coasts on her private jet - Pelosi no doubt has her personal widebody Air Force jet back, for flying back and forth between her CA home and DC every week.
Another aspect though is that this nonsense is destroying our economy, and the economy of much of the world. We were energy independent just a year or two ago under Trump, and now look forward to brownouts and blackouts, both in summer and winter. We have the technology to solve this, but won’t. It’s as if someone, or sone group, is trying to destroy the world’s economy. Why? Religious fervor? Or is it China (and maybe Russia) trying to destroy their geopolitical enemies?
I'm in favour of developing technological solutions to climate change -- whether climate change is anthropogenic or not is mostly beside the point, since we'd want to mitigate it even it were 100% natural. But I'm skeptical of this particular solution:
Colossal says it wants to halt that process by unleashing beasts to uproot trees and stomp down grass to expose more permafrost to the cold Arctic air.
Doesn't that seem like there's a huge risk that would have the opposite effect? Isn't the problem postulated that permafrost is now getting exposed to Arctic air that is slightly less cold, so more of it is releasing ancient carbon into the atmosphere? Won't churning up the permafrost and uprooting plants expose more of it to the slightly warmer atmosphere and release more carbon?
“ Climate change is a hoax.”
Is it a hoax? Or more a religion? Is Islam (or maybe even Christianity) a hoax? How credible is it that Muhammad walked up a stairway to heaven, etc? After all, all the supernatural aspects of these religions that are used to provide credence to these religions can be, and often have been, taken as hoaxes by their unbelievers. I would posit that the dividing line, the point of distinction here, is that of intent, the mens rea of the participants. There is some evidence that Muhammad was just a fairly successful warlord on the Arabian peninsula[, and his early followers were the ones who turned his exploits into a major religion.
Joni Mitchell:
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Ann Althouse/T-eJ:
We are babies
We're afraid of carbon
And we like elephants
They can turn the tundra
Back into a garden
Tim Blair
We're simply not ready to 'go green'. And all the wishing cannot make it so.
Let's party like it's 1999. Conservatives: shitting in our own nest to fun our lavish lifestyle is God's will.
97% of scientists agree with whoever is funding them.
A similar project, Pleistocene Park, has been going on in Siberia since the 90's. No wooly mammoths though, just bison, horses adopted to the cold and other animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park
alternately, we could bring back T-Rex or Velociraptors and reduce the population, thus carbon footprint
“There is a nice new entry by Judith Curry at her blog, “Climate etc,” in which she takes apart the latest ever-so-dire report (AR6) from the IPCC, and shows how it is very quietly admitting that the much-vaunted computer models have failed. And failed.”
What I found interesting in some of their graphs was the use of the HadCRUT4 (from the Hadley Climate Research center at the University of East Anglia, in the UK) data to show supposed “actual” world temperatures. This database was at the center of the ClimateGate scandal. And the horrendous code that was leaked was used to construct this database. Much of the early raw data used to construct that database had been lost, in a move of the lab, there was often little explanation as to why they were doing what, and much of what they said that they were doing wasn’t true, because the code implementing it was so badly written. The logical alternative to using this highly flawed database to determine how much warming we have seen, would have been to use one of the major satellite based databases. I expect that HadCRUT4 was used by the IPCC, because it can be, and has been fudged. The important thing to keep in mind is that clog all temperature databases like HadCRUT4, utilize high and low daily temperature readings from a couple hundred, fairly concentrated point sources, mostly in the less rural sections of First World countries, and then interpolated to cover the entire world, include the majority of the surface that consists of water. One or two of these point sources are used to interpolate the temperatures over the years for hundreds of thousands of square miles of surface area. Tweak the interpolations a little, and it is easy to turn and actual neutral trend into a warming trend. The advantage of the satellite based databases is that they routinely and automatically sample the entire surface of the world for its temperature, and instead of looking at temperatures recorded once or twice a day from those highly concentrated several hundred point sources, look at the temperatures recorded from millions of points around the world. So, of course, they used HadCRUT4, instead of one of the satellite global temperature databases.
"shows how it is very quietly admitting that the much-vaunted computer models have failed. And failed. And failed. "
That's why they had to give them the Nobel Prize, as a lame attempt to give them some credibility.
Bruce Hayden,
"Does anyone here actually believe this Climate Change nonsense?"
I believe the earth's climate is growing gradually warmer, and that the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere is responsible for part of that. I also think The Science (gad, I hate that phrase) still can't explain warming in earlier periods when there wasn't enough CO2 to blame for it.
I think people who dismiss the idea that a trace gas (410 ppm) can significantly affect atmospheric heat absorption forget that basically all the rest of dry air is infrared-silent. I also think the wild card is water vapor versus clouds, a great big unsolved problem in modeling, so you get reasonable models differing as to whether warming will result in drought or flood. (And every time either one happens, you get stories yelling, You see?!) The alarmists assume warming --> more water vapor --> more warming, and if they were right the earth's climate should have spun out of control, and never recovered, a long time ago.
I believe the strongest feedback loops In climate science are confirmation bias and Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy. I think it's freaky when Portland Oregon hits 118 °F several days running. I also think those who point to that and say that was only possible because the earth averaged 0.02°C warmer this year than last year are not the defenders of Science that they think they are.
I think casual references to "The climate crisis" are stealing a base. This crisis reflects an acceleration in some people's perception that things are getting really bad, not an acceleration in the underlying physical reality.
I don’t understand the argument about melting permafrost. That stuff goes down deep. A whiff of warmer air, or even a long soaking wet hot summer, is not going to do much. Consider the mass of frozen water relative to the modest increment of warming, for a few months, on the upper edge of the mass: like trying to melt the Greenland ice cap, with a pocket lighter.
I think the spectacular stories are produced from small coastal communities suffering from erosion *and* from the long-recognized effect of building directly on permafrost: the building warms the ground and sinks. I used to live in the Yukon and the old miners’ shacks were picturesquely perched at odd angles. Nobody saw it as a widespread condition or caused by climate change.
But what do I know?
For the right price I would buy 6 Cat low ground pressure D8 dozers and have people uprooting all the tundra you want, much better than some non-existent animals. I don’t know how they grow people this stupid. I believe that COVID killed the AGW moral panic and we are just witnessing the dying spasms. The AOC crowd are just in at the death for the last cash in. The global electricity crisis this winter will cause the creation of a fresh new moral panic to enjoy.
First point: how many woolly mammoths would it take to make a difference? How long does it take for the population to grow to that size?
Second point: Forget the science of global warming-the solution contradicts itself.
Permafrost is melting today because it is exposed to the warmer Arctic air. Exposing more of it to this warmer air is just going to accelerate the melting.
Further, the rate of melting is highly dependent on surface area. Seven pounds of ice cubes will melt faster than a seven pound block of ice. Uprooting increases the surface area.
So the only way this could actually work is if the woolly mammoths uproot the permafrost in the winter, causing it to freeze faster & thus deeper.
The surface area decreases over the winter because "frozen in place" is a misnomer. During the summer, the woolly mammoth does not uproot the permafrost for food or even by moving.
And then, back to my original question: how many woolly mammoths would it take to make a difference?
Bruce Hayden @ 9:37: well said. I remember reading the emails revealed by ClimateGate —November 2009– and shaking my head. The deception was epic. I was sure the disclosure would end the game. How wrong I was.
I can only agree with your points: use a very carefully curated set of records cherry-picked for their tendency to run hot (urban heat island, anyone?); “interpolate” their readings across vast distances (1000 km in some cases?); ignore the ARGO buoy readings and pretend that the “missing heat” is actually hiding in the deep ocean; keep retroactively cooling the early readings to create an upward trend over time; ignore the record heat of the 1930s; etc etc. The cooking of books is a capital crime against science, but there is simply way too much money to be made; so here we are.
gilbar @ 10/10/21 7:48
With All These Major Problems... There Just Isn't Time, To Worry About The Planet
Not to mention the total lack of Chief Impact Officers! Who will fund these CIOs? Surely we can tax the American taxpayer to meet this critical need!
(See the Prince Harry post.)
CO2 is not some volume control that makes the temperature go up or down. That job belongs to the Sun for millennial trends, and the Earth's orbit and inclination for even longer trends. It's been warmer during the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period when CO2 was at 1850s levels. The temperature changes with response to the solar activity because that activity changes the cloud formation due to cosmic rays.
The infrared absorption by CO2 is already saturated. Doubling the CO2 concentration will barely change the temperature. The so-called climate scientists have been trying to nail down the relationship between CO2 and temperature for decades and are no closer than when they started. That tells you how complete their models are. The models are crap and couldn't predict when the sun rises let alone the temperature in 2050.
The temperature trend for the last 5 years is down. We are head towards another little ice age because of the Sun is going into an inactive phase. This is shown by the low number of sunspots.
Climate change is a hoax
Whether climate change is a hoax or real, human significantly changing climate change is hubris and grounded in nothing but foolosophy. We could thoroughly primitivize all of civilization and go back to living in caves and all the "green benefits" that would we would get would be wiped out in minutes by changes in sun spot activity and/or a volcanic eruption.
Look how hugely successful humanity has been in trying to control a tiny microscopic virus. In the end, nature controls humanity, not the other way around.
How does melting permafrost release carbon into the atmosphere?
Do they perhaps mean carbon dioxide? If yes, why not just say so instead of showing their scientific ignorance?
John Henry
The climate has been changing since creation. How do arrogant lefties propose to stop that?
Oh, wait, they don’t mean “Climate Change” at all, do they? They mean something else that is harder to prove.
I don't get why we are planting trees here, mourning the lost trees of the Amazon, but cutting down trees in Siberia. Given the complexity of the systems involved, how much confidence is there that this will work?
@ Bruce Hayden, The University of Alabama, Huntsville keeps records of satellite global temperature measurements. A nice graph of the last 42 years can be found here. There's a definite increasing trend.
How goes Michael mann's lawsuit for defamation against Mark Steyn? A decision is supposed to come out this year, only NINE YEARS after it was filed.
@ tim in vermont - It's worth noting that the 2018 Nobel Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore was the Peace Prize--aka the Social Justice Prize--not the Physics Prize.
"AA, this one of those items where I'd love to know what the top-rated comments are."
I looked before I wrote the post and assumed it would be something like: Republicans suck. In fact, it is:
"Sadly, I think most of humanity is too stupid to see the problem and try and fix it with a solution. Look at Red states and vaccines as proof."
You don't have to scroll very far to get to the name "Trump":
"I thought Trump had a great idea when he encouraged 40% of the population to drink bleach. Repeal seatbelt and helmet laws. Encourage people to go to the zoo and pet all the animals. More people should consider taking selfie photos on cliff faces, encourage anyone who wants to, to go winter hiking. Cordless bungee jumping sounds like a really good idea. Free Fentanyl! And take the labels off the Preparation-H that say “Do not take orally.”"
So... basically, kill a lot of people. Maybe these people who like to say Trump is Hitler have a little bit of the Hitler in themselves.
I am more worried about natural global cooling, that is, the last ice age ended about 25,000 years ago and we are due for another one. Now, that will be a problem. Billions may die an early death. As always, socialists are looking in the wrong direction. Global warmi g is a picnic compared to global cooling. They will probably recommend that we all wear masks.
Didn't you write about this a few weeks ago (https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/09/led-by-harvard-medical-school-biologist.html)? And you've blogged about it in the past as well (https://althouse.blogspot.com/2017/02/scientist-leading-de-extinction-effort.html). Each time it's been about this same crazy clown George Church.
The prior posts have included concerns about the ethics of "de-extincting" mammoths.
But focusing on the climate change aspect is useful. The WaPo headline is right. The "crisis" indeed spawns weird ideas.
While there is a consensus that global warming is happening and humans have something to do with it (even Judith Curry and Roy Spencer concur), there is absolutely no consensus on what to do about it, especially if we want any semblance of our present lifestyles. Renewable energy? Sure, but under current technology it can't stand alone. It needs "assistance" from either batteries, fossil fuels, or nukes. Batteries are not yet up to the task, and neither fossil fuels nor nukes are popular. Some other technology? Oh, yeah, maybe "mammophants"!
I expect the de-carbonizing "solution" to drag on for decades, mired in politics and court challenges and one environmental impact report after another. And this is only about the USA. Never mind India, China, and Africa.
Good luck folks, with or without your "mammophants". A few generations will come and go before we know if anything "worked".
they do realize that was miss fredo, whose quack doctor injected her with bleach,
I know it's hard to keep up with the necessary cynicism with which we view the propaganda performances of our 'betters.' Well, here, get it out of the mouth of Lubos Motl:
But so far, the hard scientific prizes, and especially the Nobel Prize in Physics, were largely shielded from this toxic worthless garbage. This is over because the other one-half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was given to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann
"for the physical modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming."
Wow, just wow. You may click at the names to confirm the expectation that these men did some influential early work on climate modeling. And I think that these men aren't even the most radical activists who would love to exaggerate the projections more than others. But don't make a mistake about it. The climate modeling hasn't led to any new yet reliable insights.
https://motls.blogspot.com/2021/10/global-warming-nobel-prize-in-physics.html
This year the 'Peace Prize' went to some CIA funded agitator who is working towards a "color revolution" in the Philippines, I think, and another working on same in Russia. Of course, here in the US where the regime surpasses the opposition press with fascist co-operation of their allies in private industry, people like Glenn Greenwald, or Snowden, are overlooked.
Cynicism will never keep up with the outrages these guys cook up every year at Davos.
"Free Fentanyl!"
The component chemicals come from Biden's paymasters in China and it is manufactured in Mexico, and then carried into the US through an unguarded border, so Biden is already on that.
So in other words, Progressives are assholes and want Trump supporters dead. And those same progressives are the ones crying about protesters "parading" in the Capitol, and call it worse than 9/11 and the Civil war. Yet they want us dead. Who are the nut cases???
Climate change is only a “problem” if you think the present climate is perfect. Personally, I think a warmer world will be a better world. For most of its history Earth has been completely ice-free, and life thrived everywhere.
I just wish it would hurry up. Al Gore promised I’d have pineapple and banana trees growing in my yard by now—what’s taking so long?
“@ Bruce Hayden, The University of Alabama, Huntsville keeps records of satellite global temperature measurements. A nice graph of the last 42 years can be found here. There's a definite increasing trend.”
I trust them a lot more than HadCRUT4. I think that the other one was owned by NASA. but there being NASA facilities in Huntsville, they likely have the same source.
But are you sure that the Huntsville data set is unmodified? When ClimateGate was exposed, it turned out the two satellite data sets were being adjusted by HadCRUT4. Why was never explained.
And, so what if there is an increasing trend? The crisis du jour is now Climate Change.
“CO2 is not some volume control that makes the temperature go up or down. That job belongs to the Sun for millennial trends, and the Earth's orbit and inclination for even longer trends. It's been warmer during the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period when CO2 was at 1850s levels. The temperature changes with response to the solar activity because that activity changes the cloud formation due to cosmic rays.
“The infrared absorption by CO2 is already saturated. Doubling the CO2 concentration will barely change the temperature. The so-called climate scientists have been trying to nail down the relationship between CO2 and temperature for decades and are no closer than when they started. That tells you how complete their models are. The models are crap and couldn't predict when the sun rises let alone the temperature in 2050.”
The problem that you are talking about is why their models don’t explain diddly - because they ignore the major factors determining global temperatures. And even if they did, they would be out there trying to explain the statistical noise.
The adults have all died, survived by the baby boomers and climate change. we're doomed, but not because of climate change.
"There's a definite increasing trend."
If you had the same data going back five centuries and picked two points decades apart at random anytime during the period, you would have increasing trends sometimes, and decreasing trends sometimes, the odds of getting a flat trend would be near zero. There is little doubt that increased CO2 has some effect on temps, but the trend we see is far lower than that predicted by the Nobel Prize wining "physicists."
The satellite era began during the coldest decade of the century.
The governments of Europe went all in on green energy technology, to save the planet.
Now it turns out they are gonna freeze in the dark this winter, because they can't produce enough electricity by these means. They're scrambling to find carbon and petroleum based energy sources, which will both drive up the prices as well as increase CO2 levels to historic levels. One of those unintended consequences...or "bad luck" as Heinlein would have called it.
Idiots. Hubristic idiots.
“There is little doubt that increased CO2 has some effect on temps, but the trend we see is far lower than that predicted by the Nobel Prize wining "physicists."”
Not really. Yes, in a small closed system, CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas. The problem is that the greenhouse effects of CO2 are swamped by other factors, and esp by H2O, which can change phase to/from solid to/from liquid to/from gas at human habitable temperatures. And, in its gaseous phase, it can form clouds that affect the planet’s albedo, and that itself is complex because the color of the clouds (and thus their transmissive/reflective properties) can vary by concentration and altitude. The short story is that there are feedback effects of the CO2 buidup by the H2O in the atmosphere. We really don’t know if it is net positive or negative feedback, but the evidence for negative feedback seems stronger right now. In any case, the entire H2O atmospheric system is far too complex to be adequately modeled, at least so far. So, the climate modelers Make a lot of simplifying assumptions, and that is one reason that those models can’t hindcast and forecast all that well.
The other thing is, that any time a researcher tries to model world climate or temperature, and doesn’t weigh the known primary drivers of global temperature (solar activity/sunspot cycles, tilt and wobble of the planet, distance from sun, etc) heavily, is guaranteeing questionable results. Multivariate correlation with these factors, along with CO2 concentration, show that almost none of the variations in (very questionably calculated) global temperature is due to the CO2 concentration. Over 95% of the temperature variations are explained by these other factors, and because of that, any effects of CO2 are swamped by the overall error terms.
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