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Comment by telchar | Hacker News Reader

It's ok to want an answer. You may have to accept though (and it seems you're on your way to this) that the answer isn't simple, can't be broken down to a simple paragraph and can't be digested in a sitting. If you're not content taking the short explanation (e.g. "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming.") then you need to accept that you will have to study the models in depth and try to understand what assumptions/approximations were made, why the scientists consider those valid, what data are used and what biases or errors exist and needed to be corrected for and why those are valid, etc.

And that's all ok. As long as a person doesn't reject the science outright because they can't understand the work or don't want to put in the effort. But those who reject the science or insist that nothing be done about it until they personally understand it need to either put in the effort to understand it or lend faith to the scientific consensus which has been developed through great effort.

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Yes, if you don't understand it and won't study it, then the best bet is to side with the scientists. The trouble is, that's almost everyone. It just seems to be one of those areas that's impenetrable to laymen.

> It just seems to be one of those areas that's impenetrable to laymen.

Bull-hooey.

If you're genuinely interested you only have to understand the difference between climate and weather, the time scales involved (decades, not years), the limitations of models vis-a-vis spot-predictions, and wrap your head around the nuance between "change" and "rate of change" (ie speed vs acceleration).

That is not hard, but 99% of "skeptics" can't be bothered...

If you're mentally flexible enough to get that the problem isn't that pendulums swing, but that a fast swinging pendulum could be Very Bad for our civilization, climate change rests on three straightforward principles and observations:

1) The absorption spectrum of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses: test-able with an aquarium and a UV light

2) That aggregate 24/7 human industrial activity (ie all: cars, boats, planes, construction, smelting, BTC mining, etc), is somehow increasing greenhouse gasses: this is tested by checking the air, if seeing smog clouds or logic isn't proof enough

3) That Venus exists, our telescopes are not lying, and we don't want to take vacations there

Of the 8 planets in this solar system, 1 of them has had its climate go into overdrive and now resembles biblical Hell. Human activity will never push things that far, but we'd talking about the end of mankind well before that point...

Climate change is not impenetrable to laymen. Climate change has been on the end of a 50 year FUD campaign meant to confuse the issue so that laymen only hear the arguing. Totally coincidental: oil company marketing triangulation has pointed out for years that they don't have to convince anyone on climate change, they just have to extend the debate past the point of action. It worked.

> That is not hard, but 99% of "skeptics" can't be bothered...

Actually, most of the "skeptics" that I've seen online are right on top of this kind of stuff! It's the other side that just wants to hand-wave away far too many things.

> 1) The absorption spectrum of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses: test-able with an aquarium and a UV light

If you want to have some "fun", go track down a full spectrum chart of sunlight and how carbon dioxide and water vapor and such absorb that sunlight. Pay particular attention to the infrared band, which is very large. What do you see?

As to your aquarium example, some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a similar experiment - one that was claimed to have been done many times and which clearly showed the greenhouse effect of CO2. Only it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying that the example itself may very well be bogus. Also, IIRC, another group ran a similar experiment sometime later and claimed a positive result. Except that even a layman like myself could clearly see that their experiment was very poorly controlled, and not nearly as cleanly run as the first one. So while they happily claimed a successful replication, in fact they never actually proved nor disproved anything, as far as I could tell.

> 2) That aggregate 24/7 human industrial activity (ie all: cars, boats, planes, construction, smelting, BTC mining, etc), is somehow increasing greenhouse gasses: this is tested by checking the air, if seeing smog clouds or logic isn't proof enough

This includes water vapor, perhaps the most powerful and important of all the greenhouse gases on Earth. Yet for some reason this is almost completely ignored by the anti-CO2 crowd.

> 3) That Venus exists, our telescopes are not lying, and we don't want to take vacations there

If you want to have some more "fun", go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Venus, which is very hot. And while you're at it, go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Mars, which is quite cold - cold enough that the CO2 actually freezes out of the air there on a regular basis. Tell me what you find.

> Climate change has been on the end of a 50 year FUD campaign meant to confuse the issue so that laymen only hear the arguing.

So it's 50 years now, is it? Seems a little long to me but whatever. What's important here is that this is another claim of "FUD", no doubt directed at the fossil-fuel industry. But IMO claims that this are often made less to point out "the truth of the matter" (in their opinion) and are instead usually more of a cheap-shot attempt to convince folks not to listen to the points being made by the other side (or to try and justify their own refusal to listen), which often call out glaring weaknesses in the overall argument.

You are disputing the most basic fact of CO2 being a greenhouse gas. This is why we say "skeptics" can't be bothered to understand the science.

If CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas then go write a paper about it and claim your Nobel.

Note that we put "skeptics" in quotes because cranks aren't skeptics. A skeptic would consider that the one guy who failed to replicate an experiment may be wrong, as well as the possibility that all the other people who ran the experiment were wrong.

No, I clearly said no such thing! (You're putting words into my mouth, which is a form of lying.) In fact what I said was that a particular experiment - one which was apparently falsely claimed to be easily replicable and had been done successfully dozens of times - was in fact not replicable when done in a careful and public way. This is very different from claiming that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.

That phrase though - "greenhouse gas" - is a misnomer. Actual greenhouses don't operate the same way that atmospheric greenhouse gases do, but the phrase has stuck so now we have to live with it.

And yes, there was much discussion among "skeptics" of the actual experiment and the supposed others like it at the time, and of the fact that problems with it may have traced back to what I just said above. But in the end I don't think anyone was convinced that these experiments necessarily proved or disproved anything, much less that they had been successfully replicated dozens of times.

> So it's 50 years now, is it? Seems a little long to me but whatever.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

And before that there was efforts to stimy acedemia as the models are so painfully obvious and unambiguous... Yeah, 50.

> What's important here is that this is another claim of "FUD",

Yeah, because it's a literal campaign of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (see link above). Less a "claim" as an "obvious, proven, well established fact". And the trolls are obvious and everywhere, even here.

> go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Venus ... Mars...

Too bad I didn't say anything that would have any connection to this irrelevent, obtuse, comparison. Did Venus experience a runaway greenhouse effect? Are you seriously implying greenhouse gases don't have greenhouse effects? Also: what does NASA say about terraforming Mars and CO2?

The top minds over there seemingly know something you do not. Climates can get hot from the greenhouse effect -- those who disagree are disagreeing with obvservable reality.

> go track down a full spectrum chart of sunlight and how carbon dioxide and water vapor and such absorb that sunlight

I'm completely befuddled by this attempt at a point. Greenhouse gasses absorb infrared radiation, CO2 is one of them. Are you implying the IPCC and top brains at Oak Ridge has missed something in a straight-forward chart about the absorbtion of sunlight? For decades? Sheesh.

More energy in a system, what could possibly happen. Wow. Hard. I dunno. Only we all do.

The physics of it are crystal clear, even if the predictive models were tricky to make. It makes absurd gesticulating to minor percieved issues look flacid, weak, and hallow.

> some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a [greenhouse gas] similar experiment ... it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying...

... implying very little as the experiments I was referring to are painfully simple and have been carried out repeatedly, not just twice. I'm sure you've alerted the relevant journals and conferences, though, to this travesty of scinece.

I bet they're sweating with this straightforward and easily proven assault on the foundations of their field... Mmmmm Hmmmm. Time to worry about black helicopters, false flags, and you getting disappeared! Or... is this backed by The Deep State? Tinfoil! Tinfoil!

> most of the "skeptics" that I've seen online are right on top of this kind of stuf

No they aren't. This is a(nother) blatant falsehood.

They are dishonest liars with no credibility and an armory of logical fallacies and hostile attitude that they use to export their moronic, uninformed, world-view. A world-view that is blatantly supported by monied interests pushing junk science and FUD.

. -------- .

Here's the thing: as yet another in a lOOooooooooooooooong line of climate trolls on the internet, you gotta step it up. These obvious attempts at spreading debunked factoids was played out in the early 00's. So, yeah: "skeptic", because genuine skeptics would read and learn, instead of regurgitating talking points like a Russian Twitter troll.

2/10, needs more effort.

Dude, obviously I struck a nerve here and you seem to be losing it, so please calm down and try to keep a civil discourse! I will make no further comments to you on these matters until you at least make an attempt to track down some of the info for yourself. (Note that I intentionally didn't spill the beans here just to see if you were in fact up to the challenge.) And if you don't do that, then I can only assume that you simply have no willingness to do so (because it might challenge your current worldview?) or maybe even lack the skills necessary to do so!

And I'm not saying that anyone has "missed" anything here. Rather they have full knowledge of it and simply choose to ignore it (because they want to stay "on message"), or maybe they have dismissed it as being relatively unimportant. Not everybody looks at this stuff and comes to those same conclusions, though.

BTW, "almost 40" in not 50, and the actual timeline here (which I'm probably at least somewhat more familiar with than you are) is not quite what it has been made out to be. In fact, in recent legal proceedings Judge Alsup (I'm sure you will recognize that name) has already called BS on a lot of it, and if I'm not mistaken some other judges in other jurisdictions are headed down this same path.

Since you haven't answered my questions, I will address one of yours: "what does NASA say about terraforming Mars and CO2?" OK, why don't you tell me your interpretation of what NASA says about terraforming Mars and CO2? I have my own take on the whole situation, but I'm interested in hearing yours.

> As to your aquarium example, some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a similar experiment - one that was claimed to have been done many times and which clearly showed the greenhouse effect of CO2. Only it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying that the example itself may very well be bogus.

Assuming it's true, it merely means that a pedagogical science-class-level experiment to demonstrate the effect of global warming doesn't quite work as well as expected. It has very little bearing on the actual effect CO2 has on atmosphere and how much we know about it.

There used to be also a popular middle school physics experiment, where children are asked to roll small stuff (say, a metal marble) down a slope, measure its velocity, and verify the conservation of energy, by computing mgh = 1/2 mv^2.

Only that it does not work---it should not work, because if you roll a metal ball then a big portion of the kinetic energy is in the form of its rotational motion! So, just computing its transitional velocity will never work.

So, now what? Does this show that the Newtonian physics is flawed? Of course not. It just shows that this particular experiment is poorly thought out.

> This includes water vapor, perhaps the most powerful and important of all the greenhouse gases on Earth. Yet for some reason this is almost completely ignored by the anti-CO2 crowd.

That's because water vapor is in equilibrium with 70% of the Earth's surface, so any "addition" or "subtraction" we can do to the water vapor is immaterial. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-...

It's not ignored: it's been thoroughly investigated and understood. It's just that you haven't heard about it.

Yes indeed I have heard about it! The numbers that I've read vary, but (IIRC) the one that sticks in my mind is that there is currently estimated to be something like 15% more water vapor in the air now than in the past (not sure about the timeline here), or some such, and that this is growing, but I don't remember all of the details. So not quite in equilibrium after all, at least no more than CO2 itself is. (If you check my post history you may find more discussion on this matter, but I'm not going to rehash all of that here.) Perhaps you should ask yourself why you haven't heard about that. The reference you provided is from 2005, so maybe it's just well out of date by now or something.

As to that experiment, it was being held up as a simple enough experiment that anyone could do proving basic things related to the greenhouse effect. Only it didn't quite seem to pan out that way.

As to Newtonian physics and such, didn't someone named Einstein once come along and stir up the pot and show that Newton was kind of wrong about some things? And aren't folks today still doing experiments testing Einstein's claims, and still pointing out that some of the things currently believed about gravity might yet need correcting? (No need for me to go into further detail here because I'm sure you will recognize what I'm talking about.) So even in the well-established field of physics it's still OK to question things like long-held beliefs about gravity. But for some reason in the relatively new field of climate science you DARE not question any of the status-quo. No sir!

Newtonian mechanics is the approximation of Einstein's work to the speeds and masses that are accessible on Earth, it is not wrong and usually still sufficient unless you need insane precision or want to research large masses or speeds.

Warmer air can hold more water vapor. This effect is of course included in the research.

The whole thing with Mercury was readily visible and had been observed for a long time, but Newton and others never came up with an acceptable explanation for it while Einstein did. This didn't involve insane precision or high speeds or anything like that. (I guess the Sun counts as a pretty large mass, though.) And the basic rules of Newtonian gravity have been repeatedly questioned lately (beyond Einstein's revisions), but I don't know if any of that has stuck.

> Warmer air can hold more water vapor.

Yes indeed it can, and said water vapor (being a greenhouse gas) can induce more greenhouse gas effects. But this appears to be routinely glossed over, as if it's just a non-issue; not everyone agrees with that assessment, though.

As to the warmer air thing, lots of people make statements to the effect that warmer air holding more water vapor will lead to much heavier rainfall and such. Which certainly MIGHT be true, but it doesn't HAVE to be true. Why? Because there's nothing that says that all of that additional water vapor has to fall out of the sky in one fell swoop; a lot of it may just stick around as higher humidity. Plus it is well-known that rain sometimes falls from the clouds only to evaporate again in the warmer, drier air underneath those clouds, so it never actually makes it to the ground, and generally warmer air may lead to more of that. You almost never hear these facts mentioned, though.

Funny story: Some years back I was listening to a science podcast where a climatologist and an oceanographer were guests, and the subject of sea and air temperatures came up. The climatologist made a statement about "warming temperatures leads to more storms" and such, but the oceanographer corrected him, saying that while that used to be the thinking, further research had shown that if sea and air temperatures would changing more or less in tandem (both warming up together, in this case), then surprisingly the overall effect on storms actually appeared to be pretty inconsequential. And I thought the climatologist was going to blow a gasket over this; I mean, how DARE the oceanographer go "off message" like that!

> Yes indeed it can, and said water vapor (being a greenhouse gas) can induce more greenhouse gas effects. But this appears to be routinely glossed over, as if it's just a non-issue; not everyone agrees with that assessment, though.

You mean as in the models don't include it? I'm very sure they do, I'd have to search for citation though.

> As to the warmer air thing, lots of people make statements to the effect that warmer air holding more water vapor will lead to much heavier rainfall and such. Which certainly MIGHT be true, but it doesn't HAVE to be true.

That's why we use models to try and figure out what the probable truth is. This part is hard though, and only 'medium confidence' is reached for any influence on the water cycle since 1960 at all. (https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_TS_FINA...) I wouldn't rely too much on those precipitations change forecasts yet either, but things will change if we keep going like this.

> Funny story: ..

Haha, I can imagine. The storm thing is complex and hard to predict too. Let me cite the IPCC report:

'Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. However, for the years since the 1970s, it is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of storms in the North Atlantic have increased although the reasons for this increase are debated (see TFE.9). There is low confidence of large-scale trends in storminess over the last century and there is still insufficient evidence to determine whether robust trends exist in small-scale severe weather events such as hail or thunderstorms.' Table 11 here has details on the model runs: https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter... Looks like your oceanographer was right. But I guess your point was the attitude, not the facts. There seems to be a general problem in communication since the beginning.

Concluding, what's your general point?

Do you think that CO2 is not a problem?

Do you want to doubt the specific predictions? (The IPCC reports helps to differentiate between virtually certain and still doubtful points, they're not all the same.)

Do you want to critize the attitude in communication? (I do think these issues need to be communicated and discussed better. Also, at this point it's really in the hands of politicians and society to work with this, not scientists.)

Addendum: There is vivid discussion of the water issue here: https://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas....

I don't have time for a long detailed reply but I will respond to a couple of things here.

> Do you think that CO2 is not a problem?

It's not so much that I think "that CO2 is not a problem", but rather that it's probably not THE problem when it comes to climate change issues - and certainly not the most pressing problem of our age, as it is often made out to be. And I think people who go too far down that path ("We're all doomed!") are maybe a little off-kilter mentally, to put it nicely, but there seems to be quite a few of them out there.

As to skepticalscience.com, some years back I spent many an hour reading through the stuff there, but eventually got to the point where I just no longer took it too seriously. The page you pointed me to "has issues"; the entire web site itself "has issues"; and even the guy who runs the site (John Cook) "has issues". I won't go into the details here because if you are as familiar with the situation as I am then I'm sure you're aware of at least some of those issues.

What do you think our most pressing problems are?

And what to you think the problem is when it comes to climate change issues?

I'm interested in your opinions and ideas since you seem to have given this a lot of thought.

Coal is a problem, end-to-end. The buildup of nuclear waste (at least in the U.S.) is a problem. Sufficient freshwater supplies are a problem. Wildfires are a problem. Pollution (particularly plastics) is a problem. Concentrated overpopulation (too many people crammed into too small a space) is a problem. "Refugeeism" is a problem (note that I didn't say "refugees".) The threat of nuclear war (or at least the threat of rogue nations and such) is still a potential problem. And so on.

But what really disturbs me on a longterm basis is the fact that we have so much of our population and infrastructure located along coastlines. We've built permanent infrastructure on largely impermanent land, which is often perpetually at risk. And I'm not just talking about sea level rise, but rather subsidence (the land is often sinking faster than the sea is rising), constant erosion, hurricanes (common and often devastating), tsunamis (less common but often even more devastating), and so on. As to sea level rise itself, the seas have been rising pretty incessantly ever since the start of the last interglacial period (if I'm using the right terminology here), and AFAIK there is nothing to indicate that this has ever stopped. It has apparently proceeded in fits and starts, though, and by my math it's still occurring at something like half the rate of the historical average. So when some mentions sea level rise in relation to climate change my reaction is more like "So what? Sea level rise is nothing new, but it's less of aa overall global issue now than it was in the past. As for any anthropogenic influences, that's more a matter of rate than anything. But unless the natural part of sea level rise comes to a complete stop, then all of that coastal infrastructure is pretty much doomed in the long run anyway, and it's probably not even particularly safe even if it does stop."

> The whole thing with Mercury was readily visible and had been observed for a long time, but Newton and others never came up with an acceptable explanation for it while Einstein did. This didn't involve insane precision or high speeds or anything like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity

Perihelion of Mercury was observed to advance by 574 seconds per century. That is 0.16 degree per century, or 0.0016 degree per year.

Of this 574 seconds, Newtonian physics could accurately explain 532 seconds as gravitational interactions between planets. That still leaves about 42 seconds as unexplained.

General relativity predicts an additional 43 seconds, which is a near perfect match.

Of course, it's always a matter of opinion whether something is "insane precision"... so feel free to think it is not. (Never mind most people never see Mercury itself in their lifetime: I certainly haven't.)

You misunderstand me. These are all the same type of qualitative arguments that aren't convincing. They do explain the principles, which is a good start, and they can convince someone of the mechanism that it could work by but you can't make predictions from them so they have no value in convincing anyone who isn't already convinced or willing to trust authority once they've got the gist of how it could be possible.

Quick proof that they are unconvincing. Animals have been emitting CO2 since they appeared on Earth but the Earth is still - or even more - suitable for animal life than it ever was. Where's the "obvious" effect of all those millions of years of CO2 production? See, sometimes the effect is too small or it's counteracted by something else that we can't easily predict the effect of.

Of course it's counteracted by the plants.. You can see this signal strongly in the CO2 timeline as seasonal variation since most plants are on the land masses of the northern hemisphere and metabolize less in winter, leading to a temporary CO2 buildup.

Sure, but what about sea organisms turning into limestone and trapping carbon in the ground? What about cloud cover changing the rate of heat absorbed from the sun? What about the plants that created the fossil fuels in the first place? How much time does it take for the effect to appear? The fossil record doesn't have a resolution of 100s of years that's important for us because if change is slow enough, we'll probably be able to reactively adapt through technology. My point is that it's too complicated for the layman to be able to calculate the average temperature change 100 year in the future. Not even to the level of whether it'll be positive or negative, let alone what effect that change might have on the ecosystem. Even the IPCC isn't sure if sea levels will rise in that time frame significantly more than they would have without fossil fuel use. It's right on the edge of uncertainty for even the consensus of climate scientists. So laymen who aren't running their own models and keeping up with all the newly discovered effects have no hope whatsoever.

Here's another way to look at it. If it's so easy to understand, why didn't anyone notice it 50-100 years ago? Well, they did but they weren't able to make predictions accurate enough to scare anyone into change. How can a non-scientist today do better than the best scientists of the last century? Do we have some easy new theory they can apply? Do we have some new data they can plug into their simple formulas to make those predictions?

You're right, it's not simple. I still believe most people can understand all thee things you mention if they.put the time and energy in. Most of the things are complex, not complicated.

They can't make predictions from them. Can you tell me what the temperature in 100 years will be? How do you do the math? Do you need some hand-made closed-source HPC simulation software with no manual that nobody knows how to use except the author?

I can recommend looking into the IPCC report, chapter 9, Evaluation of Climate Models [0], chapter 11, Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability [1] and chapter 12, Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility [2].

The models run on inputs and include uncertainties (how much emissions will there be? How many clouds will really be produced in a warmer climate? ..), thus you get a range of results. The first step is to reproduce historical data, then you run the model into the future. The best prediction is given by the aggregate of a lot of different models with a realistic range of inputs.

For numbers check chapter <11.3.2 Near-term Projected Changes in the Atmosphere and Land Surface> and chapter <12.4.3 - Changes in Temperature and Energy Budget>. Of course we're predicting climate here, not weather, so the exact temperature in exactly 100 years is unknown.

The wikipedia article is good for a start on the math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_models If you have some basic knowledge of math and programming you can create a zero-dimensional model yourself. There are probably a lot of ressources out there to help with this too. The physical knowledge needed is basic radiative things such as the Stephan-Boltzmann law. [3] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law)

(This will inform you about the effects of albedo changes (ice and clouds are bright and the ocean is dark, forest is a lot darker than fields and cities), changes in solar irradation and Earth thermal emissions (changed by e.g. cloud cover, aerosols such as dust and greenhouse gases.)

You can run a full model yourself, but that easily turns into a full-time job. Here's one, for example: [3] If you want to check the ones in the IPCC reports, here's an overview: [4]. Not all of them are available, sadly, but there is a general push to make it all open. (Many scientists are ashamed of their horrible coding practices.. but these things are better than most because they need to be high-performing. FORTRAN is quite popular..)

Whether you need or want HPC really depends on the resolution you want to model at and what to include.

Do you want local and regional resolution? What vertical resolution do you want? How long into the future do you want it to run? How many different parameter inputs do you want to check?

(In the IPCC reports you can find a couple of standard emission timelines for the future, for example. The 'business as usual' one usually leads to pretty horrible results. The 'stop all emissions right now' one seems to lead to manageable results, only the coral reefs and glaciers are in danger then.)

How many feedback loops do you want to include? Do you want to include the full ocean as well? How about other things such as the carbon cycle?

(Naturally CO2 is emitted from volcanoes, changes state during rock weathering and is then eroded into the ocean, sequestrated into the sediment and subducted back into the mantle, then again emitted from volcanoes. This process is really slow though.)

Do you want to check for secondary effects such as sea-level change, ocean acidification, changes in precipitation pattern, changes in cloud cover? (which are feedback for your model) It's best to estimate the largest possible effect of each of these and then start with the main one and keep refining, which is the current process. You can follow this if you read the IPCC reports of different years. Chapter 12 tells you more about the recent refinements.

If you write emails to the authors of the report and papers with questions you might just get an answer btw, as long as you seem willing to understand and listen. It is exhausting to be called a liar when you and your peers do your very best to get it right and it still looks horrible.

[0] https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter...

[1] https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter...

[2] https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter...

The overview is here: https://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ The summary chapters are good as well.

[3] https://opensource.gsfc.nasa.gov/projects/GEOS-5/

[4] http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-c...

Yes, that's pretty much in agreement with how I imagined it would be. I'm not personally trying to model it, though it might be a fun project one-day when I'm not feeling so against fighting a steaming pile of professor-written simulation code. Most of my job was doing just that years ago and I'm glad to be away from it now! But my point is that almost nobody has done climate models! Probably 100% of people on the internet saying "It's definitely caused by people and it's definitely going to destroy civilization unless we all take action now and buy electric cars" are basing it all on trust in authorities and political rhetoric. They didn't even work out the economics of what harmful effects that would have. (eg. we need oil for food, poor people need it to earn money). This isn't like being an anti-flat-earther where you probably can actually look up some data and do some hand calculations and prove it wrong. This is just blind trust in the conclusions.

It depends on how much exactness you want. The fact that more CO2 means more energy coming into the system is easy to work out. What the scientific staff does is more akin to researching the 'potatoeness' of the Earth rather than just figuring out it's round.

The economic impacts are researched as well, IPCC working group 2 I think? It's just not my area of expertise.

> The fact that more CO2 means more energy coming into the system is easy to work out

Not easy to work out that it'll be a problem. We've known that for 100 years haven't we? But people didn't seem to be sure it would be a disaster back then. Hell, even in the early 2000s when I was a science teacher, we'd get the kids to build little greenhouses and demonstrate the effect but the text book emphasized that "This is only a theory, and we're not sure what will happen with Earth.". Knowing the basic principle was obviously not sufficient to be sure of the outcome. If you don't work out the finer details, then you can only trust others with the "It's important, honestly it really is!" message.

I know I sound like an anti-climate change-ist but I'm really an anti-sheep-people-ist, skeptical of things that have signs of religious faith such as appeal to consensus, being certain of their claims, predicting doom on disbelievers, and insulting and silencing people for heretical speech or doubt, and proselytizing.

> I know I sound like an anti-climate change-ist but I'm really an anti-sheep-people-ist, skeptical of things that have signs of religious faith such as appeal to consensus, being certain of their claims, predicting doom on disbelievers, and insulting and silencing people for heretical speech or doubt, and proselytizing.

Bingo! There is so much about the current situation that sounds not at all like science but rather so much like doomsday cultism that it's hard to take a lot of what's being said seriously. Bouts of this warped type of thinking aren't at all new, either, but rather date back throughout much of human history, and they have often been associated with religious dogma.

As to your experiments, I gather what was actually being demonstrated here was just the actual greenhouse effect rather than any greenhouse _gas_ effect, much less one associated with CO2. I mean, unless maybe you actually played around with the CO2 levels during those experiments. Which, given the minuscule CO2 levels that we're talking about - around 410 ppm (0.041%) even today - would have required rather extreme care and precision.

To answer your questions here:

> Sure, but what about sea organisms turning into limestone and trapping carbon in the ground?

Too slow, sadly, and running into problems due to ocean acidification.

> What about cloud cover changing the rate of heat absorbed from the sun?

This is included in the models and one of the largest sources of error bars in the result. Clouds are complicated. We're working on it. (To deal with it one can put the highest and lowest probable value into the model and see what the difference is.)

> What about the plants that created the fossil fuels in the first place?

They lived in a different climate. What about them?

> How much time does it take for the effect to appear?

Which effect exactly are you talking about? Does appear mean measurable or clearly visible to humans? Depending on what you mean it is either very fast, just years, or takes some time, hundreds of years. The ice ages seem to end rather abruptly (hundreds of years, maybe even less! , nothing on geological timescales), but we don't know why yet. The knowledge might not help with the current problem either. This rate, method and numeric range of change is unprecedented in the historic record. (400ppm of CO2 and above like we have now can only be found in the old atmospheres when the climate was very different.) We can easily calculate how much additional energy is entering the Earth system, and that energy has to go somewhere (right now mainly the ocean). System reactions are less certain and can be slow.

> we'll probably be able to reactively adapt through technology

Maybe, if we hurry. This is like technical debt. Any CO2 we add now we have to either get out again, at high energy costs, or get used to the new situation. If you check the numbers it is a lot cheaper to fix it now than to keep going and then adapt/undo.

> Do we have some easy new theory they can apply? Do we have some new data they can plug into their simple formulas to make those predictions?

This has become something you need to do as your full-time job or time-consuming hobby to do. There is just so much going on. There is a lot more data (new methods of finding new data (eg satellites!), longer data records), and a lot more people (not just 2), computers! (you do not want to run all these calculations by hand), and we're all building on each other. The computers allow us to run more and more complex models, increase the resolution, include more effects. The input parameters and states are becoming clearer (we have daily measurements all over the globe now, back then they had what, 1 or 2 research sailing boats that came by every 20 years and didn't even measure much?). We have detailed knowledge about how much ice there is now, for example, and about the cloud cover every day, about storms and about ocean currents, wind patterns, natural emissions, atmospheric chemistry reactions (such as Ozone catalysation which led to the ozone hole, which does have a climate effect, just not very important). Any of these and more has specialized people studying it full-time. How can you keep up as a single person? You probably cannot, not in the detail required by the critical people.

It is interesting that this science has so many people trying to argue it away. Can they predict a moon eclipse accurately themselves? They still do not doubt the prediction. Can they predict the existence of the Higgs Boson, the effects of general relativity on the signal of GPS satellites, the exact path a solar system probe will take? There are so many things science predicts, but not a lot of people try to argue.

It's probably because everyone is asked to change, and fast, or be doomed. Maybe something about the communication went terribly wrong at some point and that is why we will have massive problems. (Interestingly, the ozone hole is a wonderful example of quick and decisive international collaboration in the face of a problem. Did people argue against the science then? The problem was simpler and smaller, but still of a similar nature.)

> It is interesting that this science has so many people trying to argue it away. Can they predict a moon eclipse accurately themselves? They still do not doubt the prediction. Can they predict the existence of the Higgs Boson, the effects of general relativity on the signal of GPS satellites, the exact path a solar system probe will take? There are so many things science predicts, but not a lot of people try to argue.

Oh, there is SO much that could say about this stuff, but I won't because I've already spent too much time around here. I will leave you with this little nugget, though, because I found it quite hilarious at the time.

Some years back I attended a computer conference where one of the folks there was receiving an award for using "actual science" in the production of computer animation. What he'd done was try and take orbital models and other data from NASA and use that to produce animation which correctly showed the path of a spacecraft traveling from Earth to Mars (I think it was), instead of just winging it like most animators would do. Except when he tried to actually use this stuff to generate the animation it didn't work, and in his simulations he ended up missing Mars by a wide margin. After some back and forth with NASA and taking some additional stabs at it, the situation was a bit better but in the end he still ended up having to draw a lot of that orbital path by hand - maybe 1/3 of it. He told some of us that he felt like an imposter because he was receiving an award for something that he felt like he didn't actually do.

And I thought this was kind of funny because it seemed to accurately sum up the state of "science" these days. Here you have an authoritative source sending out models and data and such which doesn't appear to actually work, in large part. But, you know, if you just go ahead and fudge it enough to try and cover up the flaws with it then you can still win accolades for that!

Hm, yes. At least in this case we have proof NASA really knows what they're doing since the probes usually get to Mars. For climate science we will only know in a hundred years or so.

Yes, but they didn't get those probes to Mars without doing a number of midcourse corrections (heck, you can't even get to the Moon without doing midcourse corrections), so it's not like you can just enter a model and run with it. If you try to do that then you're going to end up way off target.

Which brings up an important point about all those climate models. Anybody who actually uses models to solve real-world problems will tell you that you can generally only trust those models so far. For anything long-term (where "long-term" can be remarkably short), you usually have to make the equivalent of midcourse corrections based on actual events. And for the longest time, at least, the climate change folks seemed far too reluctant to do that.

And this may still be a problem, because I'm seeing reports now that "our climate models have been remarkably accurate", while others point out that they haven't necessarily been particularly accurate at all. To add insult to injury, there appear to have been several instances now where, when the data and the models diverged, instead of correcting the models they adjusted the data instead, justifying this by declaring that it had a "cool bias" or whatever.

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