No, you can't make a clear statement that todays temperatures are out of "control" and not "within three sigma" and demand me to prove it isn't true! You need to show what the mean is, what the three sigma boundaries are and show that we're outside them now. Lets let the last 10,000 years (basically the holocene, all after the end of the last major ice age) be the base period. Show us what the mean global temperatures are for that period and what the three sigma boundaries are and that the last century or half century or whatever period you choose is outside those boundaries.
If you can't do this with specific numbers, your claim is based simply on your own imagination - iow you're making up your statistic based claim.
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I have seen charts that show the rate of change, in other words acceleration, in CO2 ppm. At no point in the hundreds of thousands of years records we have from ice cores, has atmospheric CO2 content accelerated as fast as it has within the last 50 years. That is an astounding finding.
The issue is temperature. CO2 only matters if it has or will produce a big change in our temperature. If CO2 doubles or triples or goes up by 10 times, if it hasn't produced or we can't prove it will produce a big change in temperature, it doesn't matter.
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Why is it accelerating? Is it because someone has manipulated the data? Maybe. With all the recent press, I wouldn't rule that out. But let's say the ice core data has not been manipulated for a second. What conclusion would you draw if you knew that CO2 content is accelerating faster in the last 50 years than at any time in the last 800 thousand years? Would you still say, nothing different is happening? Or like a real scientist, would you look for causes?
I have little doubt CO2 is going up because we're burning fossil fuels. However, I repeat, CO2 going up only matters if it does something bad. CO2 isn't just something that is evil per se ... If its bad it has to be bad for a reason. |
