The ski is falling...really! (Page 2)

What you aren't reading are the 700+ other articles that show evidence to the contrary of global warming.  The papers that indicate that the antarctic ice shelf is actually growing.  The articles that indicate that current patterns are matching up to previously observed patterns that preceded massive cooling. 

The thing that pisses me off the most about arm chair scientists is that they go spouting off about "papers" and "studies" and try to validate their point with a couple of charts and graphs without an actual understanding of the science.  I've tried to explain to people to problems with having a position on global climate change, but I realized that to actually do that, I would need to fill them in on the last 6 years of my education.

I am a meteorologist.  I read the journals.  I do have understanding of the processes involved.  I have an understanding of the data being used to promote these "findings" and of all the inherrent errors within them that never make it to the media.  The one thing I can tell you is, the scientific community as a whole has not agreed that global warming exists and we are at fault.  What we have decided is that we are undergoing a global climate change and that there may be a correlation between human activities and the observed changes.  There is a BIG difference between those two statements. 

In short, the earth is changing.  Humans are pumping large amounts of CO2 into the air.  There is believed to be a connection, that still remains to be proven, between increasing global mean temperature and increasing CO2 levels.  Right now global climate change is something that deserves the attention of the scientific community and deserves much study, but does not deserve the mass panic we are seeing now.  I'm not saying global "warming" isn't happening.  I'm not saying that it is.  I'm not saying that we as humans are or are not responsible for it.  What I am saying is that we don't know enough to be drawing the kind of conclusions politicians and actors seem to be making.

There is also the study suggesting that increasing temperatures causing the melting of the arctic ice caps is diluting the northern atlantic and pacific, causing the ocean currents to weaken. Weaker currents, means no more transport of warm water northward, meaning the fundamental system driving global circulation shuts down. That leaves the poles getting colder and the tropics heating up.

hindsight is 20/20.  unfortuneately we can't just stop polluting and expect everything to return to normal.  If this climate change is in fact caused by us nudging the atmosphere in a certain direction, it's hard to say that we can nudge it back.  The system evolves and the initial state is gone forever.  So no matter what we decide to do, it's going to take carefull study into the impacts. 

I'm not saying that we should keep on polluting, just that maybe our energies should be focused in other places for the time being.  What about cleaning up water ways, reducing aerosol and particulate air polution, finding sources of clean energy, solving the oil crisis....  In the long run that will do a lot to clean up everything, including the air.  I think we are off to a good start with the trends towards cleaner engines and "greener" sources of power, but I think we are pushing these technologies along way to quickly because of this percieved need.  Especially when the technologies being pushed really are not the primary sources of the pollution they seek to get rid of.  IE, the petro chemical emmits a very large percentage (on the order of 25%) of all CO2 emmissions with flame stacks used to bleed off waste products during refining.  Yet we crack down on SUV's pumping out minimal amounts of CO2?  I just seriously think we are putting the wagon before the horse here and need to stop panicing long enough to step back and take a look at the whole picture.

Although I can't really complain too much because global climate change is ensuring that loads of money are thrown at our tiny little research community...

The only problem with the duck analogy is that we can't see or hear the duck. It's more like, you can see a bill and webbed feet, and hear a faint whisper, so you assume it's a duck quacking. It very well could be a plattypus

quite all right.  I'm not being argumentative either and as a scientist I am willing to accept the fact that the earth is currently undergoing a general warming trend.  I just make no claims to length or cause.

1.  You have to be very carefull making a blanket statement about journal articles like that as the media did.  If you dig into the research, very few articles will come out and explicitly say "causes global warming."  The studies are much more specific.  They might talk about things like increase in tropospheric CO2 concentration and the correlation to mid level warming, or how a specifc region is undergoing climatic change and the researcher is correlating it to a trend such as el nino; then some other paper talks about el nino frequency being linked to warming global mean temperatures.  If you look at the papers individually, not all of them say "global warming"  if you look at them as a whole, then it would appear that they do.  Along those same lines you will find papers similar to what you are saying in your second point.  You observe one thing, which seems to indicate global cooling, but that effect is later tied to global warming.  There are also cases where you would find an effect that would indicate global warming, but further research indicates global cooling as the trigger.  It's just so onion skinned like that, that we can't find the largerst scale at which to definatively say "this is what is happening".

2. As for the increasing ice sheet.  That is a distinct possibility.  Then you read the study indicating that the 2% of the antarctic ice sheet that is melting and shedding glaciers (due to global warming) has been shrinking for the last 2000 years, long before we even industrialized.  But you are right, warming would affect different areas differently, which is why I try and use the term global climate change as much as I can, because it is more of a change in climate then a difinitive warming.  There is also the study suggesting that increasing temperatures causing the melting of the arctic ice caps is diluting the northern atlantic and pacific, causing the ocean currents to weaken.  Weaker currents, means no more transport of warm water northward, meaning the fundamental system driving global circulation shuts down.  That leaves the poles getting colder and the tropics heating up. 

3. The only problem with the duck analogy is that we can't see or hear the duck.  It's more like, you can see a bill and webbed feet, and hear a faint whisper, so you assume it's a duck quacking.  It very well could be a plattypus

global warming. I guess it comes down to whether or not you think it is human caused. If you don't, there is nothing we can do anyway so doing nothing is an option. If you do think it is human caused, then it means there are things we can do to help mitigate it, or at least keep it from getting worse. I guess I'm following Dick Cheney's law. He says if there is a 1% chance that terrorists will strike us with a nuclear bomb then we have to take that as a certainty. I guess I do the same with climate change. Sure there is a chance it might work out ok, but it just seems way to risky to run the experiment of putting all these gasses into the atmosphere and hope it turns out ok. To me it just seems like too much of a coincidence that as humans start pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere we just happen to see temps starting to rise. Achoms razor & all. I hear the quack and see the feathers and the duck is shi*tting on me.

it could be human caused, it could be natural, more likley it's a combination.  We are inputs into the earth system just like any other creature on the planet.  We are also not the only creature that pollutes.  Pine groves can pump out more CO2, NOX and other VOC's (volitile organic compounds) then a small city during the night time.  We just happen to be the only species that really takes notice and cares about what we are doing and what might lie in the future.  I guess if they found evidence that a certain bug found in nature was responsible for changing the climate and that humans had nothing to do with it, would we feel the same way?  In reality it's the same senario, just a different species. 

If it is human caused, it might not be possible to mitigate it.  Even if we are responsible, simply stopping now is not guarenteed to stop anything.  The article in question is evidence that even if we stop, natural mechanisms may continue forward.  What we don't know is how many mechanisms like that are out there and how many are out there that will tend to throw us back the other way.  As for the corelation between temperature and CO2 levels, that is a single study, a single piece of evedence.  I've seen other plots from other locations that show either steady temperatures or declining temperatures over the same time periods.  There really isn't a single graphic that you can look at that sums this issue up.  So feel free to be concerned about it.  We need that to keep money flowing into research to advance out knowledge on the subject.  I just ask that you don't go off the deep end and start proclaiming doomsday