Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

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Ask HN: Can anyone point me to an article debunking this particularly insidious climate denier narrative?

This is how it was given to me:

1. CO2 is a green house gas, but a very weak one. Like, homeopathically weak. We could increase CO2 100x in the atmosphere and it wouldn't change a thing temperature- or climate-wise (other than inducing more plant growth).

2. The reason we see CO2 increases associated with warming in the geological record is because the oceans sequester CO2, and the amount they sequester depends on temperature. As the Sun heats up the Earth, the oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere. As the Sun cools the Earth, the oceans re-sequester the CO2 they previously released. That's why CO2 concentrations are linked in the geological record to temperature.

3. Thus, the Sun is what heats and cools the earth, not CO2. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are a bi-product of warming and cooling, not a cause.

> the Sun is what heats and cools the earth

The Sun very obviously heats the Earth. However, in what will come as a complete shock to many, things can have multiple causes - particularly things which occur on a planetary scale. The Sun is a source of heat that everyone is well aware of. If that was all there was to it then the models would be extremely simple. We can measure the Sun, we know what it is doing.

Building a climate model based on a single variable would be fantastic if it was predictive. Definitely important and good start - now add the other 10,000 variables to the model.

I'm not particularly informed on the subject, just using some basic understanding here:

1. Can't CO2's "strength" as a greenhouse gas be measured directly? That seems like a relatively simple physics problem. My understanding is that the direct effect of CO2's "heat trapping" is easy to quantify. What scientists continue to disagree on is how significant the cascading effect is, but of course we do know there is one. But even the most conservative estimate (no cascade effect) shows that as we add CO2 to the atmosphere, the planet will continue warming to life-altering levels.

2. I don't think I understand this argument as long as the denier will acknowledge that the planet is warming (which is directly measurable). If the planet is indeed warming, this 2nd argument seems to indicate that CO2 levels are cyclical based on the sun's behavior, but that's not what's happening now. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the implied timeframe over which this is supposed to happen...but this, again, seems directly disprovable.

Let me know if I missed the point, but it seems like the whole argument falls apart as soon as you show that CO2 has a significant warming effect, which is something scientists are confident about.

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