Making it sound like CO2 rises are unprecedented and leaping to the conclusion that CO2 causes temps to rise is not good logic.
There is no scientific perpetual motion machine error. The whole system runs for now, while the sun shines. When the sunshine stops, the weather stops, the earth freezes, and it’s game over.
For now, water vapor, CO2, methane, and some other compounds are greenhouse gases. All else equal, an increase in CO2 will just automatically make for an increase in temperature. A 50% increase in CO2 from the time before the industrial revolution is significant. Heaping ridicule on the idea that it might cause a half-degree increase in world average temperature is not good logic. It’s also a mistake to say that we just cannot measure temperatures that accurately. The science of thermometers is very well understood, and the mathematics of taking the average of a lot of data points is understood too. In fact, taking averages tends to average out whatever errors there may be in the data.
Making it sound like CO2 rises are unprecedented and leaping to the conclusion that CO2 causes temps to rise is not good logic.
You can't use info from "an inconvenient truth" here. This isn't du or the nyt. Please enlighten us as to the science behind this claim. There are counter claims that warming releases co2 from the oceans and that the increase in co2 trails the warming.
Also did you miss the correction that NOAA did on temperature data recently? Seems 1934 was the warmest year on record, not 1995. You also must have missed the gentleman who was posting pictures of NOAA's temperature recording stations, on jet runways, near incinerators, in blacktop parking lots.
"All else equal" = false assumption, as many factors are interrelated and interdependent, and "all else" is NEVER equal in climatology.
A 50% increase in CO2 from the time before the industrial revolution is significant. Heaping ridicule on the idea that it might cause a half-degree increase in world average temperature is not good logic.
False premise = false conclusion.
It’s also a mistake to say that we just cannot measure temperatures that accurately. The science of thermometers is very well understood, and the mathematics of taking the average of a lot of data points is understood too. In fact, taking averages tends to average out whatever errors there may be in the data.
Errors do not "average out" when the instruments themselves are rarely checked or calibrated, and where collecting errors have been ascertained through actual verification measurement, almost invariably have been skewing the temperatures in only one direction - upwards.
Welcome, newbie, if you're genuinely exploring the science of global climatology - but no welcome extended if you're here simply to spout half-baked notions you've picked up from the Gore-acle. You will find that FR is one place where you won't get to spew crap unchallenged.
A look at a little longer period of earth's history sort of breaks down any simplistic assumptions
about a correlation between CO2 levels and temperature.
Late Carboniferous to Early Permian time (315 mya -- 270 mya) is the only time period in the last 600 million
years when both atmospheric CO2 and temperatures were as low as they are today (Quaternary Period ).
I agree. I don't know what this writer is thinking of by invoking the concept. The criticism seems incoherent.
Heaping ridicule on the idea that it might cause a half-degree increase in world average temperature is not good logic.
Of course, ridicule is never good logic, but it is powerful rhetoric, and irresistibly attractive to many.
It’s also a mistake to say that we just cannot measure temperatures that accurately.
I think there is merit in the criticism of the average temperature concept, which has problems even aside from instrumental and operational issues. What are we taking an average temperature of? Just the air? Just the troposphere? ... the lower troposphere? What about the oceans?
All these temperatures are discussed, but it's not clear to me how they can all contribute to a single "average temperature".
Another point, if we can take a time average temperature of "the earth" or "the atmosphere", we ought to be able to take a global space average which would vary as a function of time. Does the "average temperature" rise at perihelion? What is the time variation, on a scale of hours or days, of the space average? I think this would be scientifically interesting if you did have a scientifically coherent definition of an "average temperature".
The problem is that it's easy to define an average over whatever data is at hand, but a lot harder to establish the physical significance of this kind of heterogeneous data.
Usually, but not necessarily, and not if the errors are systematic rather than random.
Weather stations have been, and still are, located in cities and at airports. The airports were originally located away from their cities because that's where the vacant land was. As these cities have grown larger, and particularly as the cities with airports have grown out to and around those airports, "heat islands" have been created due to more paved surfaces, more concrete, more buildings (which are heated) and fewer trees and vegetation to absorb solar radiation. You know what I mean. The weatherman on the TV says the low tonight will be 40 degrees, down to 36 in the outlying areas. That's because of this "heat island" effect. So the recorded temperatures for those locations are going to rise, but that will be a local phenomenon, not necessarily "global warming." It may happen systematically in many cities though, for the same reason.
Of course, GW may still be happening on top of the "heat island" effect, but teasing the data apart becomes difficult. I have seen this problem addressed only once in an article, and that was only in passing.