hen a regular guy cannot get a straight answer about why human activity has superseded natural causes as reason for climate change, — Merkwurdichliebe

You could get the straight answer if you felt like reading a wikipedia article about it.

Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm?

Interesting read. Gifted article.

Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years, and very likely the past 125,000.

Unyielding heat waves broiled Phoenix and Argentina. Wildfires raged across Canada. Flooding in Libya killed thousands. Wintertime ice cover in the dark seas around Antarctica was at unprecedented lows.

This year’s global temperatures did not just beat prior records. They left them in the dust. From June through November, the mercury spent month after month soaring off the charts. December’s temperatures have largely remained above normal: Much of the Northeastern United States is expecting springlike conditions this week.

That is why scientists are already sifting through evidence — from oceans, volcanic eruptions, even pollution from cargo ships — to see whether this year might reveal something new about the climate and what we are doing to it.

https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-cycles-cant-explain-earths-current-warming/

I always find it interesting when people pretend to be intelligent but cannot find obvious answers to single issue questions. Performative stupidity is boring and doesn't serve any rhetorical point other than another reason to ignore you.

The current trend of climate change fits perfectly into the prehistorical pattern of climate change, so why is it now attributed to human activity as opposed to natural causes as it is in every previous case? — Merkwurdichliebe

Merkwurdichliebe, please try to keep up.

Climate changes over most of the last 800,000 years were always due to natural causes. Humans had little or no influence.

But about 200 years ago natural causes of climate change became extinct (probably due to overhunting). Humans took on the role of controlling the climate and have made a total mess of it.

i want a real answer so i can be readily convinced. I'm willing to ignore the money trail if I can get a solid explanation for why, in the 4.5 billion years of naturally caused climate change, it is only in the past 150 years that human activity has become the overwhelming cause of the current trend. But i get nothing but evasions. I know why. I should follow the money. — Merkwurdichliebe

Over 4.5 billion years there have been many influences on climate. Obit wobbles are one. vulcanism is another continental drift is another, and life is another, The moon has receded from Earth over time so that tides have lessened, asteroids have had strong brief influence, the sun cycles are also important.

Over geological time, the sun's output has increased, however the long term effect of living organisms has been to lock up CO2 in the form of carbonates - limestones and chalk, which are the remains of shelled critters and the like, and oil and coal, the remains of ancient buried vegetation. This stuff has accumulated over the billions of years, some of it being recycled through subduction and vulcanism, and a lot just sitting there buried under layers of sediment.

So the overall effect of life locking carbon into the earths crust, has been enough to negate the increase in insolation. More or less. As i said all these other stuff has been going on as well and I'm not running a full course on climatology here.

The particular human effect has been twofold; firstly by various methods of exploitation pollution, farming fishing etc, to disrupt the ongoing processes of CO2 absorption of the living environment, and secondly and much more significantly, by extracting carbon in the form of coal and oil, and releasing it back into the atmosphere. This has never happened before. It has happened on a huge scale in a very very short time by geological standards. Current CO2 levels are at a level last seen when there was no ice at the N. pole or Greenland, and sea levels were about 50 m. (160 ft) higher than current levels, and global temperatures about 6°C. higher.

We are spending the carbon savings of the planet over billions of years at the rate of about half of the planet's total in a century and a half. And that is why it is humans on this occasion that are having a huge effect on the climate.

Here is the latest research on the CO2 roughly since the dinosaurs, still recent history in geological terms, but going back a lot further that the direct measurements of atmosphere bubbles in Ice cores, that stop at about 800,000 yrs.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5177

The handy graph there shows estimates of atmospheric CO2 for the last 66,000,000 yrs. The current level is about 417 ppm, a 50 % increase from preindustrial levels and last seen some 16 million years ago. This is a change way beyond the cycles shown on the ice core graphs shown many times on this thread. 16M, years ago, there was no ice on Greenland, and sea levels and average temperatures were much higher, as I mentioned above.

But we are headed for higher temperatures than that, because the suddenness of the change is causing a mass extinction and disruption to the environment, and we haven't even begun to reduce the rate of CO2 we are adding.

Straw man. As if some internet rando knows how to do science better than actual climate scientists.

https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-2-1.html

The current trend of climate change fits perfectly into the prehistorical pattern of climate change, so why is it now attributed to human activity as opposed to natural causes as it is in every previous case? — Merkwurdichliebe

This is simply not true. The change in climate over last 150 years or so (since start of industrial age) do not fit into any known previous pattern and cannot be accounted for by any theory or hypothesis that involves natural processes only. When you factor in the additional C02 and CH4 the numbers work out.

This is the answer you were looking for:

The change in climate over last 150 years or so (since start of industrial age) do not fit into any known previous pattern and cannot be accounted for by any theory or hypothesis that involves natural processes only. When you factor in the additional C02 and CH4 the numbers work out. — EricH

Indeed.

How is Today’s Warming Different from the Past?

Using this ancient evidence, scientists have built a record of Earth’s past climates, or “paleoclimates.” The paleoclimate record combined with global models shows past ice ages as well as periods even warmer than today. But the paleoclimate record also reveals that the current climatic warming is occurring much more rapidly than past warming events.

As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

Models predict that Earth will warm between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius in the next century. When global warming has happened at various times in the past two million years, it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 5 degrees. The predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster. This rate of change is extremely unusual.

Regarding climate models.

For decades, people have legitimately wondered how well climate models perform in predicting future climate conditions. Based on solid physics and the best understanding of the Earth system available, they skillfully reproduce observed data. Nevertheless, they have a wide response to increasing carbon dioxide levels, and many uncertainties remain in the details. The hallmark of good science, however, is the ability to make testable predictions, and climate models have been making predictions since the 1970s. How reliable have they been?

Worth reading for the answer (Spoiler alert: they’ve been remarkably accurate in their predictions):

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right.amp

A big volcano in the S Pacific blew up this year. Volcanoes usually cool the climate (like during the 1990s), but this one is making it hotter because it's under water and it's blowing water vapor into the atmosphere.

Did anyone ever wonder why they changed their brand from "global warming" to "climate change"?

Did anyone ever wonder why they changed their brand from "global warming" to "climate change"? — Tzeentch

“They.” Lol.

I’ve got an author right up your alley that can explain it to you:



Let me give you want you want so you can go back to sleep: it’s because “they” want to trip you up! Global warming wasn’t working for them, so they had to change their “brand” — to garner more influence and bring in more money!

Did anyone ever wonder why they changed their brand from "global warming" to "climate change"? — Tzeentch

Did they? I hadn't noticed.

Lol. — Mikie

Lol.

Ohh so it WAS a joke. I should have known you weren’t that stupid — my bad!

Stupid? For noticing the narrative shift and wondering where it came from? Maybe you should cramp a little harder. :lol:

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks.

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

I don't think it changed. The word climate has been central to it the whole time, like from the 1980s onward?

Stupid? For noticing the narrative shift and wondering where it came from? — Tzeentch

Oh…you were serious.

No no, not stupid at all. You’re really on to something. Keep up the investigation.

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

"Global warming" redirects here. For other uses, see Climate change (disambiguation) and Global warming (disambiguation). This article is about contemporary climate change. For historical climate trends, see Climate variability and change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#References


Why not look into your confusions a bit before jumping for the nearest conspiracy theory?

Yes, and it's an unjustified generalization to say that models are always wrong in any case.

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

So, for you it's all a matter of trust or lack of it, not a matter of exercising your critical intelligence?

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

I'm coming around to the whole grift theory. I think you're exactly right.

I'm coming around to the whole grift theory. I think you're exactly right. — frank

I agree, grift is a major part of it. Like all good scams there is a small element of truth involved.

Schmidt says climate models have come a long way from the simple energy balance and general circulation models of the 1960s and early ‘70s to today’s increasingly high-resolution and comprehensive general circulation models

Back then it was mostly statistical studies. Then after that period atmospheric physicists joined in and made it a real science.

Back then it was mostly statistical studies. Then after that period atmospheric physicists joined in and made it a real science. — jgill

I read that in the 1970s, climatology was described as a science of wild guesses. A huge amount of progress has been made, but there are still problems, like the cloud problem:

"In addition, climate models have difficulty incorporating certain information about clouds. Most climate models map features over areas of 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers, though some cloud models may have grids of five kilometers by five kilometers; but even within five kilometers there is a lot of variation in cloud cover. Allegra LeGrande, adjunct associate research scientist at Columbia Climate School’s Center for Climate Systems Research, said, “Sometimes there are processes that are just too small, too complicated, too hard to measure. And you just can’t explicitly include them in the climate models. These tend to be processes like the ephemeral, little wispiness of the clouds. How are you going to translate these tiny ephemeral cloud bits into a climate model of the whole world?”"

I agree, grift is a major part of it. Like all good scams there is a small element of truth involved. — Agree-to-Disagree

I agree.

I agree, grift is a major part of it. — Agree-to-Disagree

A consensus amongst the forum climate-denying geniuses. Cool.