"I'm agnostic on the cause. The warming is real"
I was neutral on the cause with a strong bias to man-made until late last year, when ,in particular, this article really swayed me:
Message 24125576
since then, after being exposed to the fantastic new ocean data, and mostly by the simplest data of all to understand, the temperature vs. CO2 plots since 1998, I had to go with where it looks to me like the data points.
I am always ready to change that view should something pop up that says I should. Who knows, maybe somebody will come up with some kind of strange quantum effect that causes cyclic lags of temperature behind C02 buildup. But until something like that happens, it looks like the mainstream models for warming are pretty much shot.
It always helps me to keep things in perspective by referring back to the record of cyclic warming and cooling over the last 450,000 years to remind me that there are likely much more powerful forces at work here than man. Below is the graph of temperature from ice cores for the last 450,000 years. In the worst case scenario we are near the peak of the latest- intra-glacial warming, and are due for a temperature crash soon. Who knows, maybe our measly contribution to warming (heat islands) is simply helping to delay the next ice age.
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