Global Cooling?

CO₂ is thought to be the second single biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect after water vapor. The Wikipedia article on the Greenhouse Effect has a fairly clear explanation of why CO₂ is such an effective greenhouse gas.Man-made production of energy based upon fossil fuels is the single biggest contributor to increases in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere, and that is why there is so much discussion recently about CO₂ artificial sequestration (see the Wikipedia article on Artificial Sequestration).--Percy

Can I assume you conclude this from the same misinformation that led you to conclude that CO² gas has no greenhouse effect? Here's their Figure 3: Here's a set of 5 graphs showing that your source's graph of solar activity is incorrect: This set of graphs is from a research paper by Lockwood and Frohlich (Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature) published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. It clearly shows that solar activity peaked in 1985, not in 1990 as your source's graph erroneously shows, and that solar activity did not begin picking up again in 1997, again as your source's graph erroneously shows. Your source's graph of solar activity doesn't even show the well-established 11-year cycle that correlates with sunspot activity. Your source makes another grave error by arguing that average arctic temperature is indicative of average global temperature.Clearly erroneous data would be one reason why your source's paper is self-published at a website while the Lockwood/Frohlich paper was published in one of the most prestigious journals in the world. Badly erroneous data typically doesn't make it through peer-review.There are anti-global warming sites all over the Internet, it would be senseless to get into a back-and-forth where you're citing these websites and we're siting peer-reviewed technical literature. Find some information that has scientific credibility. Bottom line: whether you're right or wrong about global warming, to have a seat at the table of informed discussion you have to at least start with correct data.--Percy

I repeat, there are anti-global warming sites all over the Internet, in which Biology Cabinet is evidently playing a role, so it would be senseless to get into a back-and-forth where you're citing these websites and we're siting peer-reviewed technical literature. Find some information that has scientific credibility.Look again at your graph from the Internet paper you cited, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. I'll display it a bit larger this time so you can see the scale of solar irradiance on the right hand side of the graph: Notice it has solar irradiance in the year 2000 at about 1370 W/m². Now look at the solar irradiance scale on the graph contained in the LOCKWOOD AND HANSEN ARE WRONG link you just posted: In the year 2000 it has solar irradiance at 1366.6 W/m². This is an enormous disagreement in the data from your two sources, larger than the supposed change in solar irradiance between 1610 and now.How can you base an argument upon two sources that don't even agree with each other? At least the Judith Lean data is somewhat consistent with Lockwood and Frohlich for the period from 1980 onward, since they both have solar irradiance at around 1366 W/m² during this period.If you're going to draw your data from non-peer-reviewed websites then you're going to be plagued by these kinds of spectacular inconsistencies. We can't even have a discussion if your data is going to change from one post to the next.AbE: By the way, apparently Judith Lean herself does not believe the sun is playing a significant role in global warming, see Sun's Role in Climate Change Continues to Spark Controversy. Quoting Lean from the article, "Temperature changes in concert with solar activity are indeed apparent during the past millennium, but are typically of order 0.2 to 0.5 degrees C on time scales of hundreds of years. Since 1885, global warming in response to changes in the Sun's brightness is now thought to have been less than 0.25 degrees C."--PercyEdited by Percy, : Provide a little more info.

You're again citing a claim from a website. Website's aren't peer-reviewed and can say anything. As I've said, there are many anti-global-warming websites out there, it makes no sense to give their claims equal weight to peer-reviewed research. You've misunderstood the point. The solar irradiance figures from your two websites disagree with one another. The numbers that agree with one another post-1980 (Lockwood provided no earlier figures) come from the Lockwood figures that I provided on the one hand and the Lean figures that you provided on the other. So if Lockwood's data is flawed because he excluded minima then why does it agree with the Lean figures that you cited? And both these researchers agree that the sun is not a significant contributor to global warming.So there's no point for you to again cite the already discredited Figure 3 over at http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm. It uses figures that disagree with the figures you cited from Lean, and with the figures I cited from Lockwood. That Figure 3 is odd man out. It's already a pointless exercise to respond to your mining of anti-global-warming websites, and it gets no better if you keep citing the same erroneous material.--Percy

You're getting your sources mixed up. Lean's and Lockwood's graphs have a different amount of "smoothing", but they agree with one another, and Lean said nothing about the Lockwood data being flawed. It is your webpage at Biology Cabinet that uses Lean's data to argue Lockwood was wrong, but go look back at the two graphs I included in my Message 31 - Lean's and Lockwood's graphs agree back to 1980, which is where Lockwood's data begins. It was your Petition Project webpage that had data that was in disagreement with both Lean and Lockwood.You cannot base an argument upon two sources whose data is in disagreement.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Clean up explanation.

Well, geez, don't stop there! At one time scientists thought Newtonian physics was correct, but they replaced it with Einsteinian relativity. Hmmmm...At one time scientists thought the continents were fixed, now they believe they move around on tectonic plates. Hmmmm...At one time scientists thought the expansion of the universe was slowing, now they believe it is accelerating. Hmmmm...On the other hand, you could recognize that science is all about expanding and improving our knowledge. As evidence and insight improve so do our knowledge and understanding. This couldn't happen if scientific knowledge were static and unchanging.You might consider what it would mean if we already knew everything, that there was nothing else to learn. Or what it would mean if some scientific body were given the authority to declare that we already know everything and that no one could add to our knowledge. In either case the scientists could all go home and take up knitting.In other words, you're criticizing science for one of its most important and critical qualities, tentativity.As I've said several times, and as one other person has also noted, there are plenty of anti-global-warming websites out there. What matters isn't the number of those sites you can find to quote here, but the scientific evidence supporting your position. If you restrict yourself to legitimate science you'll find it supports a different conclusion.--Percy

Let's assume that what you're implying is true, that scientists have no reliable way of establishing average annual global temperatures over the past half century or so. Wouldn't that invalidate claims from both sides of the discussion, since we couldn't know if there is any long term trend up or down in global temperatures? For example, your websites' claims that rising temperatures are due to increased solar activity would be invalidated if there was no way to know the trend in global temperatures.The reality is that there is no longer a debate within science about whether global temperatures are rising. Debate now concerns whether the increase is natural or human-caused, and the gathering consensus is that it is us.--Percy

Who are you agreeing with? I certainly never said this, and if you're talking about a scientific consensus, I don't believe such a consensus existed in the 1970's. More accurately, a consensus about the direction of global temperature change began to emerge during the 1990's.As has been noted a number of times now, there are countless anti-global-warming sites out there that you can quote from, just as there are countless anti-vaccine sites people can quote from, and countless conspiracy sites people can quote from, and countless paranormal sites people can quote from. There's no sense responding to people whose posts consist primarily of quotes from such sites, because they could literally go on quoting from them forever. I've pointed this out many times but you haven't stopped, so it's worth noting that according to the Forum Guidelines your posts should consist primarily of your own words, not someone else's.This is a science thread, and the very strong scientific consensus about global warming is that average global temperatures are rising, and the gathering scientific consensus about the cause is that it is due to human activity. A scientific consensus doesn't make something unchallengeable, but it does make it science, and so your arguments should also be based upon science. And they should for the most part be arguments made in your own words, not quotes of someone else's arguments.--Percy