No, the alternate position is that solar activity causes global warming and cooling, and that C02 levels are an effect of warming, not a cause of it.
Not at all. I correctly stated the problem. The issue here is not if climatic change also produces CO2 change (it does) but IF climatic change is insensitive to CO2 change. We know without doubt that humans produce a certain excess of CO2 currently, and the question is should one expect this to have an effect. The null hypothesis is: The world climate is invariant to the level of human produced CO2.
If instead you are questioning historical temp/CO2 cycles, then fine, that is a different matter.
One scientist compared it to a car, saying the global-warming activists don't want to look at the engine, which is the sun, or the transmission, which is water-vapor, then would rather concentrate on one lug nut on the right rear tire, which is man-made C02 emissions.
If the system is in approximate equilibrium, one does indeed look for the small perturbations which cause instability. One is not concerned with the relative smallness of the perturbation compared to some DC value. Hence the notion of a lugnut to the entire car is actually useful. That is what you go looking for.
In fact, the null hypothesis was a good theory for a long time. The human component is on the order of a few % of the total source/sink of CO2 per year, and getting good enough data & models to accurately check the small delta is a significant problem. That's science. |
