The fashion world is likely to get jealous if climate theories can go in and out of style faster than say the mini skirt.
Eric von Schonberg

#25 arhooley: “you personally saw the glaciers receding….did you get videos….?” No videos. I have pictures of Kilimanjaro taken in early 1999 and early 2009; pictures of Caucasus glaciers taken between 1994 and 2007; Mt. Kenya taken in a much shorter time frame; etc. There is very obvious glacier shrinkage.

You can’t say that. The problem is that the proof is less good than they say it is, and doesn’t take into account that OTHER things undoubtably affect average global temperatures.

Why can’t you say there is zero proof? Because their “proof” is a very simple syllogism.

1. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmospher has been rising since about the year 1800 (definitely demonstrated since 1957, proven some other ways too)

2. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas (True, but the size of the effect is actually unknown. There is even some evidence to indicate the effect might be the reverse – warming causes carbon dioxide to appear in the atmosphere. But nobody knows what the effect of a given amoun really is – and nobody knows what proportion of warming might have been caused by CO2 and other “guilty” greenhouse gases – dihydrogen monoxide, a very potent greenhouse gas produced by burning oil and natural gas although not coal, is just simply written off for no particular reason * – that’s how unrigorous this whole “science” is – and what proportion might have been cause by other effects, like variations in what the sun puts out or various other manmade effects like nuclear bomb explosions in the atmosphere or the emission of soot.

Therefore , since 1 and 2 are true, adding Carbon Dioxide to the atmosphere must increase global temperatures. QED.

Then add that global temperatures have in fact gone up as the nail in the coffin.

A problem is that there have been other times temperatures have gone up and down and it is quite clear that THINGS OTHER THAN BURNING COAL etc have to effect the temperature. And when they use the argument about the Twentieth Century. But all that that would mean is that there might be a loose correlation and you have to average things out over 40 years to really see the picture.

* Well, if that took that into account, it would frst of all make calculations imposisble, and second, spoil their whole remedy.

Where they really go wrong is that the “remedy” is among the stupidest things you could do. You have to make about half a dozen errors in logic and arbitary assumptions to get there.

The models are needed for their “remedy” , and for arguing the problem is urgent, more for arguing that carbon dioxide causes global warming. If you pay a little attention you may realize they are actually reduced to arguing there is a tipping point that we might be near. That’s because *changes* in CO2 emissions could only affect the level of CO2 by a small amount.

Actually the whole concept of a tipping point ignores chaos theory. Weather is very much a chaotic system, subject to butterfly effects, and and if we *are* somewhere near a tipping point, logic tells us that the system would almost certainly be one with “strange attractors” so that even if higher CO2 in principle raised the probability of a runaway greenhouse effect, an intervention to lower CO2 slightly might actually cause a runaway greenhouse effect in a situation where it would not have happened without it. That’s probably error number 7 in global warming theory. I think William M. Briggs could probably explain this a little better.

Anyway the point is you have to pile error upon error to get where they are – but the basic idea of human caused global warming is not necessarily an error.

Let me say something about the hockey stick. the hockey stick, if true, would DISPROVE their thesis. Because temperatures went up too fast not in proportion to CO2 in the atmosphere.