[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]OK...if you choose not to get it after this time around I'm going to stop bothering explaining it to you. The point is simple. Data and analysis do not always lead to an accurate conclusion, but if its in the interests of someone it can be pushed out and greatly exaggerated. In the case of cooling the media took some studies and ran away with them for a bit and convinced a lot of people it was truth. This isn't unusual. If you really think the media doesn't exaggerate or dramatize different studies about global warming then I am disappointed in you.[/citation]
Did the media fool the scientists in that case? No, the scientists seemed to basically ignore the popular attention that "global cooling" was getting and get on with their work, which pointed in the opposite direction by a wide margin. And which one do you think would have been more lucrative to pursue? Warming would be a lot harder to combat than cooling, and cooling would allow more scientists to cash in on fossil fuel industry hand-outs to fund studies that concluded we were in danger of freezing over, so that they could emit as much GHGs as they wanted and be thanked for it. If scientists wanted to follow the money, they probably would have had a better ride going with the "OMG WE GOAN FREEZ!" line that the media was playing up. Hell, since most of the research predicted warming, it would even have appealed to the iconoclastic drive in sciences to tear down popular wisdom and replace it with something new and controversial. Problem is, science generally has to match up with reality in the long term. That's probably why the long term has borne out the anthropogenic factor in climbing climate.
A lot of people have already gotten rich raging against the "establishment" of warming. Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen, for example, both directly received money from ExxonMobil and work closely with think-tanks and pseudo-grassroots organizations which received hundreds of thousands from Exxon. They also both received similar funds from tobacco companies when they tried to claim that the dangers of tobacco were overblown. But people like Singer and Lindzen are in the minority, which happens to be what I would expect of scientists: the ones who are pure bullshitting for money are small in number compared to the ones who really want to find out how stuff works (because most science doesn't pay well, people don't go into it expecting to get rich).
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Granted its not quite as ludicrous as it was 10 years ago because the great disasters and plagues that were supposed to happen by 2010 don't appear to have happened...and we still have california.[/citation]
How many of these great disasters and plagues were being predicted by large numbers of specialists studying them? Did any of these predictions ever reach the level of consensus, as anthropogenic climate change has? Or were some of them perhaps just like "global cooling is gonna bring us into a new ice age," perhaps predicted in a few papers and spun off by the lay press? Did most geologists REALLY expect California to just fall off the map? Perhaps your own impressions are a bit distorted. It happens; after all, a whole lot of people are convinced that science was predicting a new ice age back in the 70s.
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Its not remotely similar. In terms of evolution we not only have historical data points from both fossils and genetic patterns but we have MANY end results of those trajectory lines living and are actively able to study them. Additionally we can manipulate and MASSIVELY accelerate generation cycles to get quick results. In terms of earth we have 1 planet, as opposed to a variety to study, and we can't exactly isolate a part of it and then speed up the climate to assess actual long term results.[/citation]
The only really significant difference you've pointed out is that we can do evolution in the lab or in by closely studying quickly-generating populations. But we don't need either one of those to be reasonably certain about the veracity of evolution (just MORE certain).
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Powerful compared to what? Water vapor makes up by far the lion's share. Enormous amounts of it compared to what?[/citation]
In terms of raw warming power, it's the second most powerful next to water vapor. It's also the second most abundant, behind water vapor again. But water vapor concentration depends on temperature and density and generally cycles out back into liquid or solid water, and does this pretty damn quickly. Water vapor as clouds also helps reflect solar energy back into space, and as ice keeps the land and sea cooler.
CO2 stays in the atmosphere for decades, perhaps even centuries. It does not reflect radiation back out into space, it does not prevent sunlight from reaching the ground or the ocean. It's a problem that accumulates more quickly than water vapor, and sticks around longer than methane.
As to the enormous amounts we're contributing, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 has increased approximately 100 ppm, or about 28%, due to human activities compared to ice core samples from 1832. Despite its low absolute occurrence in the atmosphere, CO2 accounts for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse effect (estimates range from 9 percent to almost thirty). And unlike water vapor, we might actually be able to do something about the CO2 problem.
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Re-balancing the physics how?[/citation]
By increasing the amount of infrared radiation trapped within the atmosphere. More CO2 absorbs more IR from the sun and the Earth and keeps it from escaping into space.
[citation[nom]solymnar[/nom]What is the point of equilibrium where temperature is more or less stabilized and negative feedback balances out?[/citation]
We've already passed that point. Some of the factors that have acted to cool the Earth by preventing solar radiation from reaching the ground (then being re-emitted as IR to the atmosphere), such as particulate pollution, may have been negating some of the upward temperature change for decades, but it's been suggested that they're now overwhelmed by the greenhouse effect, partly because we don't pollute as heavily as we used to and the "global dimming" effect
is diminished.
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Where is the steady state equation that clearly or at least roughly shows us these things? They don't have one and don't know.[/citation]
Arrhenius came up with a simple equation to determine the effect of CO2 on climate some one hundred years ago actually.
Climate models nowadays might be more complex because they consider more and more lines (and quantities) of data, and with the benefit of enormously powerful computers they can provide better resolutions.
Perhaps you'll stop talking out of your ass? I hope so, because I really don't feel like continuing this conversation with somebody so determined to not get it. You seem to be confusing the limits of your own understanding with the limits of climate science state of the art.
[citation][nom]solymnar[nom/]Generating climate equations that predict that the earth will turn into venus isn't practical but that's what most of the ones created so far do.[/citation]
Do those models predict that Earth will turn into Venus?
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]This is my no 1 reason for taking all claims that x group knows what the temperature should be "roughly" in 10 or 50 years.How will changing technology, availability of natural resources, population, etc. effect these derived equations?[/citation]
Generally speaking predictions are made with certain caveats about the initial assumptions and the conditions under which the simulated results can be expected, which might vary from team to team and paper to paper. You're asking me things you can probably find out easily enough by looking at the papers wherein the simulations are published. But if you feel that things like projected fossil fuel use aren't being taken into account, you can always talk to a climate scientist about it, I'm sure.
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]If you read the correct article we should be in the middle of a near apocalyptic situation triggered by disease alone due to global warming. This clearly has not occurred. [/citation]
Which article is that? And has the conclusion of that article reached consensus?
[citation]The coastlines are not submerged, etc. etc. While I won't say that scientists are lying I will say they have very foggy support for many of the claims of the actual impacts...which are often dramatized.[/citation]
See above. Who is making these predictions that we should already be drowned and diseased and so on and so forth?
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]At the end of the day though you have no idea how accurate those techniques are because its very difficult to replicate the scenario you are measuring and account for all variable properly.[/citation]
I think we have a working knowledge of how to reconstruct paleoclimates, since we do check our models against historical and instrumental records. I'm not going to say it's perfect, but it's probably pretty serviceable.
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]And so we get an idea on a geological scale. And try to distill it down to be relevant on a 10 year basis. Which is a bit of a stretch...and why its not surprising that most predictions end up being off. They should slowly get better overtime of course.And you are cetainly entitled to do so. The comparison for me is valid because both involve trying to make a prediction where there are too many variables involved to hope to accurately keep track of them all. ... Granted the focus and techniques of study are vastly different between the two. But perhaps the reason for my comparison makes more sense to you now?[/citation]
You think that by basically repeating the claim I'm just going to roll over and buy it? You're still saying "we can't predict the general climate trend because we can't be 100% certain of rain in the afternoon next Tuesday!"
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Significant compared to what? How significant are we compared to the last major volcano eruption and its following effects?[/citation]
Define "the last major volcanic eruption." We can look at the data on atmospheric conditions for several large volcanic eruptions and draw conclusions from them. We know a lot about
the effects of Mt. Pinatubo, for instance. C'mon, you can find this stuff easily.
[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]I already explained the reasoning for my comparison between predicting weather and climate.[/citation]
And I explained why it's probably faulty. You think this is like shooting targets a few tens of yards apart? Short-term meteorological forecasts and long-term climate models are extremely different from each other. It's like asking a high-energy particle physicist to write up a synthesis reaction for S-Adenosyl methionine. The physicist studies things on one scale and the chemist studies them on another, but that doesn't mean that one can do the other's job based on their own specialties, it doesn't mean that isolating the tau lepton is fundamentally the same process as creating a specific amino acid. Failure to do one does not imply that the other is equally impossible. Basically, your reasoning is shit.
This point was emphasized in the article I posted about the survey of scientists on climate change: [citation][nom]The Article[/nom] "The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists' is very interesting," said Peter Doran associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and one of the survey's authors.
"Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomenon."
However, Doran was not surprised by the near-unanimous agreement by climatologists.
"They're the ones who study and publish on climate science. So I guess the take-home message is, the more you know about the field of climate science, the more you're likely to believe in global warming and humankind's contribution to it.
"The debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes," said Doran.[/citation]
Well, what do you know? Here we have a non-climate scientist, unfamiliar with the field, voicing his apprehension about the conclusions of climate scientists, just as he predicted.