You do know that you just described yourself, right?
3 Likes
You asked for data, I provided data. They you said it was irrelevant. What data could I provide that would be relevant, is it only data that fits your “prejudgement”?
Let’s try another approach. The graph YOU SHOWED included a slight drop in temperatures in the time period 1940 to 1970. Probably caused by all of the stuff from the explosives of war. Here is a link to a paper from 1971 when there were serious concerns about “global cooling” and another ice age. URL: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate on JSTOR
These authors approach the question of whether adding CO2 to the atmosphere would halt the temperature decline. I have pasted in the abstract. Their answer was “not much”. Other measurements, reported here arXiv. Retrieved from [2006.03098] Dependence of Earth's Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases show the same small effect.
The basic science is absorption of radiation and saturation of absorption of radiation. If you shine a flashlight on a wall, there will be a spot of light. If pieces of Kleenex are slowly inserted into the beam, the light will dim and eventually, there will be a point where adding more Kleenex will not change the effect. Namely all of the light has been absorbed. At the current 430 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, all of the radiation that can be absorbed at the wavelengths of importance has been absorbed. Adding more CO2 will have little effect as the radiation is already absorbed.
Witch hunts aren’t relevant data.
3 Likes
Yes, there were a minority of climate scientists in the early 1970’s who thought aerosols might overpower warming affects from carbon dioxide. How is this relevant?
For better or worse, we have come a long way in cleaning up aerosols. Not so much with CO2.
Yet another famous science denier myth.
The atmosphere thins as you go up. At some given altitude, photons and are no longer absorbed by CO2 and escape into space. If this didn’t happen the Earth would be a white hot plasma because no heat would escape.
The question is at what altitude does this escape happen? As we increase CO2 in the atmosphere we increase the altitude at which heat can escape. Initially, the temperature at higher altitudes is cooler, so less heat escapes. It is until the lower altitudes heat up, and thus heating the upper layers, that an equilibrium is found.
Here is an analogy:
At some point, the input of water will equal the output of water. If you restrict the outflow it will require more and more water in the tank in order to build enough pressure to reach that equilibrium. The same for our atmosphere. The more CO2 we put in the atmosphere the more captured heat we need to reach an equilibrium between incoming and outgoing heat.
4 Likes
Witch Hunts and Climate
| 
|
|----|
| 
| |
|----|----|
 |
|---|
European witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries targeted witches that were thought to be responsible for epidemics and crop failures related to declining temperatures of the Little Ice Age.
A belief that evil humans were negatively affecting the climate and weather patterns was the “consensus” opinion of that time. How eerily similar is that notion to the current oft-repeated mantra that Man’s actions are controlling the climate and leading to catastrophic consequences?
The first extensive European witch hunts coincided with plunging temperatures as the continent transitioned away from the beneficial warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (850 to 1250 AD). Increasing cold that began in the 13th century ushered in nearly five centuries of advancing mountain glaciers and prolonged periods of rainy or cool weather. This time of naturally driven climate change was accompanied by crop failure, hunger, rising prices, epidemics and mass depopulation.
Large systematic witch hunts began in the 1430s and were advanced later in the century by an Alsatian Dominican friar and papal Inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer. At Kramer’s urging, Pope Innocence VIII issued an encyclical enshrining the persecution and eradication of weather-changing witches through this papal edict. The worst of the Inquisition’s abuses and later systemic witch hunts were, in part, empowered by this decree.
 |
|---|
| |
|----|
This initial period of cooler temperatures and failing crops continued through the first couple of decades of the 16th century, when a slight warming was accompanied by improvements in harvests. Clearly, the pogrom against the weather-changing witches had been successful!
Unfortunately for the people of the Late Middle Ages, the 40 years or so of slight warming gave ground to a more severe bout of cooling.
The summer of 1560 brought a return of coldness and wetness that led to severe decline in harvest, crop failure and increases in infant mortality and epidemics. Bear in mind that this was an agrarian subsistence culture, nearly totally dependent on the yearly harvest to survive. One bad harvest could be tolerated, but back-to-back failures would cause horrific consequences and, indeed, they did.
Of course, the people’s misfortunes were attributed to weather-changing witches who had triggered the death-dealing weather, most often in the form of cold, rain, frost and devastating hailstorms. Horrific atrocities were alleged of the witches, including Franconian witches who “confessed” to flying through the air to spread an ointment made of children’s fat in order to cause a killing frost.
Across the continent of Europe, from the 15th to the 17th centuries there were likely many tens of thousands of supposed witches burned at the stake, many of these old women living without husbands on the margins of society.
 |
|---|
The worst of the witch hunts occurred during the bitter cold from 1560 to about 1680. The frenzy of killing culminated in the killing of 63 witches in the German territory of Wiesensteig in the year 1563 alone. Across Europe, though, the numbers of witches continued to increase and peaked at more than 500 per year in the mid-1600s. Most were burned at the stake; others were hung.
The end of the witch hunts and killings tie closely to the beginning of our current warming trend at the close of the 17th century. That warming trend started more than 300 years ago and continues in fits and starts to this day.
Source: *A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more **CO2*are benefiting humanity, by Gregory Wrightstone, executive director, CO2Coalition.
References:
Pfister (2007) Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries
Behringer (1999) Climatic change and witch-hunting: the impact of the Little Ice Age on mentalities.
Completely irrelevant.
3 Likes
Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing, after all, sometimes correlation is causation, though we may disagree this time if the rising CO2 levels are causative of the rising global temperatures.
How can you possibly doubt it? There is no if.
You reply at last. Thank you. Why are you a science denier?
Science denier??? I have over 300 papers in the refereed literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. I have been doing science since 1950.
Yep. You. You are a science denier. 75 years of doing science, undone. By you denying the science of global warming. Shame on you.
With a name like Potholer, I would expect him to come from Michigan.
I will say it again and again. The temperature has been warming since the mid 1650s. How did it warm from 1650 to 1850? The alarm community only show data since 1950 when CO2 was also rising. If they showed data back to 1650 then they would have to explain why the same mechanism that drove the temperature higher from 1650 to 1850 is NOT THE SAME mechanism that has driven the temperature higher since them. Name calling is the last resort of a scoundrel.
S h o w . m e .
I have to admit that on the subject of the quark model of the nucleon, I was ….at least…a skeptic. I still remember the stunning of the discovery of the fourth quark in 1974. My thoughts were “It looks like these guys are on to something!!!” And, it was easy to buy into the notion that there would be sic quarks. The fourth quark was a science turning point. Another BIG turning point was Supernova 1987a. There were a lot of “not so good” ideas floating around about the origin of heavy elements, including the work of Hoyle and Fowler and their fixation on Cf-254. 87a wiped out all of those notions. Nothing like a huge trove of excellent data to permit the separation of the grain and chaff.
Exactly. Junior high school physics and chemistry. Equilibration. CO2 can’t not be a driver of global warming or cooling, depending whether the concentration is going up or down, respectively. To deny that is anti-science. And cynically so.
Which works as with Covid and evolution. Also cynically so. The ruling class, i.e. the American oligarchs, need the whole anti-science culture to stay in stolen power, to be kept there by the masses they have robbed. The uncritical mass, deprived, especially of education.
3 Likes
Looks like there might be some reseach on the question of human effects on climate before the Industrial Revolution. Of course, I’m no scientist. And high school chem and phys were a very, very long time ago.
Just doing a little putzing with Google. I don’t have access to the articles, unfortunately.
1 Like
The same thieves, robber barons, who gave us the industrial revolution, because it was more profitable than slavery, gave us global warming.
1 Like