You're welcome, and you're right (short-term). Taking the long-term view of 1000s and 10,000s of years, global warming will cause sea level to rise.
I have heard it also claimed that global warming can cause wild swings in weather patterns (both hot and cold) or moderate the weather patterns or keep them the same.
I've read similar.
So is there anything that can definitively prove global warming or cooling? It seems to me that even a downturn in all the measured temperatures for a few years could could be explained away as a temporary aberration. I am a professional gambler (day trader) and I look for trends and aberrations all the time and all the data that I have seen looks just like random noise. Furthermore It seems that all the data is well within a normalized range and that trying to predict it is foolish.
One of the nicest "proofs" is stratospheric cooling, which is observed by satellites. The stratosphere warms and cools radiatively. It cools via radiation to space; it warms by receiving longwave radiation from the Earth's surface. If an increasing amount of longwave radiation is being trapped near the Earth's surface by greenhouse gases, the stratosphere should cool. And that is exactly what the satellite data shows (and these are the same satellites that provide a different dataset that is constantly cited as indicating that no significant warming is taking place).
Another example is the freeze/thaw data that is showing trends toward earlier spring and later winter freeze, i.e. shorter winters.
It would be nice if Mankind were actually changing the climate because that means that we can eventually optimize it for our benefit. :)
What is it they say about absolute power?
I had a trap set for you that you deftly walked away from :)
Inadvertently, I assure you.
I went to Idaho over the weekend and talked to some old farmer friends who have been keeping ground and frost temperature records for over 50 years. The consensus was that the growing season is getting shorter, but that the reason was because the water table was getting lower (consequently the ground would get colder in the winter especially with less snow cover). Utah,Wyoming and Idaho are facing drought situations and the Snake river may not flow continuously this year. But they stressed that all of this is normal, if they don’t have enough water then they have too much, or its too hot or too cold, but I digress.
So to sum it all up. All of the predictions I have seen have been wrong or meaningless (like the ocean levels will rise, lower or stay the same :) ) or they are so far in the future that they are again meaningless. Kind of like predicting where an airplane is going to land based on its current heading just after it takes off. So, do you know of any computer model that has accurately predicted the last 150 years with prior data within a tolerance of less than 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit? In fact I would settle for a program that would accurately predict the direction of the temperature change each year based on prior years data.
If you can produce this program I will make a considerable investment in the company or back the University or do whatever it takes to get my hands on the source code. But I have been down this road before, with perpetually energy, fusion, voice recognition (some hope here), fuel cells (they work but gas is too cheap), etc. My internal alarm is screaming SCAM. The reason I want this program is with very little modification it should be able to predict the stock market - the stock market has a lot fewer variables and one of the biggest is the weather :).
Short of having a program with this capability, can you show me the mathematical proof of how you can isolate one variable out of thousands of variables and attribute any meaning to that variable, ie prove that that variable is the most statistically meaningful or even how meaningful it is. All of this without knowing what all the variables are. You seem to like Soot and CO2, my choices are blacktop, clouds and solar radiation ( I used to live in Phoenix and it was always much cooler out in the desert ) other people seem to like deforestation, CFC,s, irrigation, snow cover, dams, solar flares, the earths orbit, black body radiation, volcanoes, butterflies in the Sudan, ocean currents, etc.
I am guessing that you can’t come up with the Computer program or Mathematical proof, so maybe we can simplify it further. Has the amount of cloud coverage world wide increased or decreased over the years? What is it? Does cloud coverage cause an increase or decrease in the temperature? Above or below the clouds? Does an increase in the temperature increase the amount of cloud coverage? Are clouds and water vapor the number one greenhouse gas? How much water vapor is in the atmosphere? Is it constant or is it temperature dependent? It seems to me that any climate study or computer modeling would have to definitively answer these questions before they could possibly progress to anything like aerosols or emissions. When I look, what I find is yes, no and maybe, am I missing anything? Could it be that introducing particulates in the atmosphere helps the water vapor to condense and rain (cloud seeding). Thus soot may help cool the world by pulling out the number one greenhouse gas?
By the way when I fly above a cloud level the temperature is generally higher than flying at the same altitude without the clouds.