Replies

Oh what basis is this moron deciding that 550 ppm is "too warm".

If you read the whole thing, Brian Fagan's book and perhaps Diamond's might interest you. The basis for the 180-280 ppm window is the Vostok ice core data going back 640,000 years when CO2 was never out of that range (and it encompassed the full glacial-interglacial climate range).

Climate in prior epochs is not directly comparable to the modern (Pleistocene/Holocene) climate era.

Although I consider myself literate in most of the sciences, I must defer to the experts-without-an-agenda on this.

When were the vostok cores gathered and for what purpose?
Aren't these the ones that were demonstrated to be totally useless because they were not specifically gathered to measure gases with the proper safeguards to prevent almost certain contamination?

As I recall, a rspected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences wrote a comprehensive analysis on this subject.

Cause and effect... you observe a data point and then decide it was the cause.. how do you know that 180-280 window was not an effect of less or more solar energy reaching the surface due to lesser solar activity? Or some other action?

Glacial/interglacial can be blamed just as much on the desalinization of the north atlantic and the slowing of the interoceanic flows than it can on any change in atmospheric gas make up.

I personally fail to see any cause-effect correlation. If anything it seems your observation that 180-280 constant still had wild climate changes from glacial to non glacial... so how can one conclude that any amount out of that range has any direct or indirect effect on global temps?

1 Reason for global temp changes... more or less energy from the sun reaching the earth, pure and simple.

Ice core samples are not global, they are local. And the climatic and atmospheric characteristics of polar regions are very different from temperate and equatorial regions. It's like saying what you find in the air in your freezer you'll also find in your basement.

We simply do not have enough evidence to state demonstrably the overall trend of many thousands of years.

We've been mapping global temperatures for a hundred years. To try to trace and predict global catastrophe based on that is like trying to predict the past ten years of someone's driving only knowing that they took a left turn out of their driveway, and ten trying to predict the next year of their driving.

The entire approach to this article ("Once I believed the other way, now I've changed") is a rhetorical device designed to appeal to a specific audience. Some members of that audience appear to be right here on FR responding to your post. If he considers Al Gore an expert, I highly doubt he was ever a serious skeptic. The bottom line is that if there is global warming, which there may very well be (we're talking fractions) proving that it is caused by man's activities is highly subjective. To alter the course of the post-industrial age based upon debatable evidence and the hysterics it is causing is absurd. To satisfy the Algores of this country, we'd have to adopt a Kyoto protocol on steroids. That would be national suicide for us and any nation that bought into it.

Oh, and for those of you out there who want to read the thoughts of someone who was legitimately on the Eco side of global warming and who made a genuine shifter after honestly studying "the data," read Bjorn Lomberg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

If Algore believes it, I highly doubt it.