C02 is found in ice core samples. Clearly, you aren't reading my posts. CO2 and warming go hand in hand. If you see elevated CO2 levels, it means the period was warm. Lower levels of CO2, means a cooling period or ice age.
The thing is that there is a consensus among scientists. So for every 1 scientist that you come up with that says global warming is not a problem, there are 10 other renowned scientists that say it is a problem.
Forget about all those scientists for a second, though. If I showed you data going back 800,000 years and those data points were within a narrow range for the entire time, except for the last 17 years, and if during those last 17 years the data points were all way, way above the upper control limit, what conclusions would you draw?
Any statistician or scientist, including the naysayers, would all agree that a systemic change has occurred and a new, heretofore, unknown trend has been established. Even if they didn't want to speculate on the causes, all would agree that CO2 levels and trends in the last 17 years have broken all records of the last 800,000. Since all scientists agree that CO2 levels and warming goes hand in hand, all scientists would also agree that we can look forward to climate change as a result of this warming. Since we have temperature estimates from the previous mini-ice age during the dark/middle ages, we can estimate what temperatures to expect during this warming period. All of those estimates predicts some pretty gloomy scenarios. Large swathes of land submerged. Mass extinctions. Increases in the number and severity of hurricanes and tornadoes. Marine life ecosystems dying out.
So we can all argue about the root cause of increased CO2 levels, but every intelligent scientist agrees that we have an elevated level of CO2, which has broken all ice core records, and that warming will be a result of that. That is cause and effect according to the greenhouse gas theory, which is accepted by almost all scientists: greenhouse gases (water vapor, C02, methane, nitrous oxide...listed in order of atmospheric volume content) trap the suns heat, which results in surface temperature increases and global warming. Natural earth ecosystems work to dispose of these greenhouse gases through plant and marine life, which results in global cooling. C02 and methane are the major causes of warming, although CO2 is the gas that is produced in most quantities by human industrialized societies.
Now the reasonable man, who likes to use his brain, can look around to what is different between now and the last 800,000 years. What could possibly cause increased C02 levels to increase so dramatically in such a short period of time? The list of causes are remarkably small when you eliminate all of those that are not capable of releasing the massive quantities of C02 into our atmosphere to cause this type of increase. We know what volumes of C02 exist today and in the past going back more than 100 years. In addition, we can estimate fairly precisely how much C02 is added to our atmosphere due to human industry. Those figures combined with ice core studies give us a startling picture. We are causing the bulk of the C02 increases and those increases over the last 50 years have started to break records going back 800,000 years.
The science is irrefutable, except by ostraches. |
