For the record, the AGW business goes back at least 30 years. I remember reading journal entries on the hypothesis rising CO2 levels from burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures in 1979 in the Marshall University library.
Actually, awareness of the possibility goes back over a hundred years, but who's counting? The notion that it could really happen didn't start percolating until the 1950s or 1960s, but it was mostly either ignored or dismissed. When a Russian climatologist presented his belief that it was happening at a meeting of climatologists in 1972, he was dismissed by the vast majority of attending scientists. By the end of the 70s, it was being taken more seriously, and by the mid to late 80s, it was taken seriously enough that the IPCC was created to investigate the possibility even more closely.
Also for the record, ice core data contradicts the premise that CO2 is a driver of global climate.
Sigh. We will never agree about that. You'll post your stuff from wattsup, I'll post my stuff from realclimate or Weart. Goody. You listen to watts, I listen to my guys. Watts seems to me to full of FUD and partial truths.
The absence of the fingerprint of manmade warming identified by the IPCC is also a major problem for the AGW hypothesis.
I still don't get what this is about. However, I posted awhile ago someone who claimed to answer the objection. I didn't really get either the objection or the answer, so be it. If the scientists themselves pointed out the problem, and if it really is a serious problem that puts into doubt the vast amount of evidence that the research has uncovered over the past 20-30 years, then they wouldn't be saying that they are more than 95% certain about their findings. Some scientists still believe in the steady state theory of the universe. |
