Yes. It is a common mistake. Maybe understandable as we humans want simplified messages - they sell whereas complicated scientific explanations do not sell.
We are talking about complicated weather systems that are affected by many factors. The mechanisms of the climate change can be explained fairly accurately but in practice, the consequences of climate change is dealing with probabilities and trends.
It can be calculated that a category 5 hurricane is x times more probable because of the climate change but a single hurricane is not a proof of climate change. Yet, we can make a prediction that there will occur more comparable storms in the near future (next decades) and that such a series of category 4-5 hurricanes would be unlikely without the climate change.
Throughout the history there has been attempts to explain why certain periods have been harder than others. During the ancient times, everything was understood as being dependent on gods and their actions, so it was natural to think that a long period of drought or devastating cold weather was caused by something that displeased the gods. People made sacrifices to gods and tried to get rid of anything (/anybody) that had caused the gods to become angry.
In the ancient Near East, that was the worldview of the people. The worldview did not disappear suddenly, it was replaced with other worldviews piece by piece. Before modern knowledge about the causes of weathers and climate, it was understandable, even rational, that the devastating periods were seen as consequences of what people had done.
What is different today is that we have scientific knowledge about the factors that affect climate and we have also long-term data. If there are disagreements about the climate, everybody is free to utilize the data and modelling to show that the prevailing view is wrong. That is also the general expectation: if you disagree, show where the error is and how to correct it (‘put up or shut up’ principle). We may disagree with the majority view but if we cannot show where the error is, very few will take our opinions seriously.
You do not think far enough. For example, there are data on CO2 levels back to at least 60 million years and other indices of temperature also. This information has been used to predict what kind of climate and world we are going to have in the future if the rapid accumulation of GHG:s continues.
There has been long periods of warmer climate in the past - in fact, most of the last 500 million years. The globe will not melt if the average temperature jumps with 10 degrees C or more (a possible scenario based on the data from the last 500 million years).
What makes life vulnerable is that humans and a large part of the current ecosystems have adapted to the prevailing temperatures during the last 200’000 years (a relatively cold period).
The key problem in the current climate change is the speed of the change. Ecosystems may adapt to changing temperatures if they get sufficient time, tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They have very limited ability to adapt to changes that happen within decades or a century, especially when other human-caused processes are causing declines in both population numbers and ranges.
A rapid climate change is also bad for human societies, economy and food production. Cultivated plants tolerate a small increase in temperatures but a major temperature rise, together with the long droughts, flooding and slowly rising sea levels will start to cut global food production. With sufficient time, we probably can develop new food plants that can better tolerate the warm climate and changing conditions. It will take some time, so the speed of the climate change is a problem also within that area.
If we cannot stop the climate change now, at least we should buy more time to adapt, especially by reducing the outputs of GHG:s. It will have little effect immediately but a major impact to our future.
We have 800,000 - that’s eight hundred thousand - years of ‘local’ Antarctic and Greenland ice cores, separated by 10,000 - that’s ten thousand - miles, showing the exact correlation with CO2 as a driver of temperature.
Any science deniers not wanting to know why CO2 follows temperature rise, that it nonetheless drives, in the Vostok hockey stick ice?
Clue: It’s high school physics, like the water pressure equilibrium analogy.
Well stated. However, there are two “myths" in play. One that there is an unusually rapid rise in temperatures”, and two that CO2 is somehow responsible for THIS change. Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have spent their careers studying temperature and produce an enormous amount of data that do not show such a rapid rise. In the middle of the USA in Kansas where I come from, the hottest day on record in Topeka, the Capital, was July 24, 1936.
And the second is that whatever changes taking place now are associated with CO2.
What is emerging is that electricity is the backbone of a modern society focused on human wellbeing. Hence the question, how is that electricity to be obtained? Or should well-being be forgotten and we move back to caves in a warm climate near the Equator?
The first steps back to the caves are already being discussed in France where use of air conditioning is being discouraged.
OK, what drove the rise in temperature between 1650 and 1850 when CO2 concentrations were historically LOW? Even by the standards of 800,000 years of data.
You could search for the data with a simple net search.
For example, a page of Csiro tells:
“Evidence from air trapped in ice cores shows that the current rate of warming is occurring at a faster rate than has occurred in thousands of years. Recent warming has occurred about 10 times faster than warming at the end of an ice age.”
It is possible that there has been also other rapid climate change periods in the past, for example when there was massive volcanic eruptions. Such massive events are associated with previous mass extinctions at the end of Triassic, Cretaceous (crudely simultaneously with the Chicxulub meteor impact) and Permian periods. I don’t know how rapid the change was then but anyhow, not very positive examples…
The mechanism of how CO2 leads to climate warming has been known for more than a century (a simple explanation below).The predictions and observations have matched quite well. You may claim that there are also other factors involved but the research and data tells convincingly that GHG:s play a role.
If you deny the role of CO2 in the climate change, what alternative explanations do you suggest for the climate change?
Or do you deny that there is an ongoing climate change?
Once again, what was responsible for the warming between 1650 and 1850 when the CO2 levels were around historic lows? I don’t have a clear explanation for that change. But, whatever that mechanism was, why would it STOP and make way for CO2? And, once again, THE GREENHOUSE GAS is water.
Global warming (really climate change) does not mean that everywhere will get warmer. It only means that the global average will get warmer. Which it is:
Top 10 warmest years (data from NOAA) (1880–2024):
1 2024
2 2023
3 2016
4 2020
5 2019
6 2015
7 2017
8 2022
9 2021
10 2018
It would be extremely improbable that the last ten years would also be the hottest ten years if the Earth wasn’t getting warmer.
FWIW (WIM), the hottest day on record for Kent, England, was July 19 2022.
The so called ‘little ice age’ was a period of regional cooling that has been explained with a combination of factors affecting simultaneously that region. When the combined effects did not anymore affect the region, there was a gradual warming.
Wikipedia lists many potentially contributing factors:
cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation (AMOC that brings heat to Europe), variations in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt, decreases in the human population (such as from the massacres by Genghis Khan, the Black Death and the epidemics emerging in the Americas upon European contact).
An explanation about the last one: one way how human populations affect climate is through their impact on the vegetation, especially forests. When populations decline, much carbon is tied to vegetation in abandoned or less intensively used areas and that carbon is largely taken from the atmosphere.
Fossil fuels are a reversal of a comparable phenomenon: carbon stored in the vegetation is released again into the atmosphere.
These effects have been taken into account in the climate change research. These factors have not disappeared, they just are not sufficient to explain what has been observed (except the carbon out-and-in part).
About water: water vapor in the atmosphere acts as a GHG but it is not the only stuff that is GHG.
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
76
The warming you are talking about was limited to specific regions. It wasn’t global. The Little Ice Age, and the warming back to expected norms, is thought to involve ocean currents and arctic ice.
Normally, there is a transfer of warm water from the tropics to the Arctic. It’s a well-known process called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, which is like a planetary “conveyor belt.” Typically, warm water from the tropics flows north along the coast of Northern Europe, and when it reaches higher latitudes and meets colder Arctic waters, it loses heat and becomes denser, causing the water to sink to the bottom of the ocean. This deep-water formation then flows south along the coast of North America and continues to circulate around the world.
But in the late 1300s the AMOC strengthened significantly, which meant that far more warm water than usual was moving north, resulting in rapid Arctic ice loss. Over the course of a few decades spanning the late 1300s to early 1400s, vast amounts of ice were flushed out into the North Atlantic, which not only cooled the North Atlantic waters, but also diluted their saltiness, ultimately causing the AMOC to collapse. It is this collapse that then triggered a substantial cooling.
Water only spends a few weeks in the atmosphere before precipitating out. It can’t drive long term climate trends. CO2 can drive long term climate trends because it stays in the atmosphere for decades.
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T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
77
This was settled at the end of the 19th century. Svante Arrhenius did the first rough calculations demonstrating the expected temperature change from increased CO2. It’s in his 1896 paper:
Since 1989 Christy, along with Roy Spencer, has maintained an atmospheric temperature record derived from satellite microwave sounding unit measurements (see: satellite temperature record). This was once quite controversial: From the beginning of the satellite record in late 1978 into 1998 it showed a net global cooling trend, although ground measurements and instruments carried aloft by balloons showed warming in many areas. Part of the cooling trend seen by the satellites can be attributed to several years of cooler than normal temperatures and cooling caused by the eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano. Part of the discrepancy between the surface and atmospheric trends was resolved over a period of several years as Christy, Spencer and others identified several factors, including orbital drift and decay, that caused a net cooling bias in the data collected by the satellite instruments.[5][6]Since the data correction of August 1998 (and the major La Niña Pacific Ocean warming event of the same year), data collected by satellite instruments have shown an average global warming trend in the atmosphere. From November 1978 through March 2011, Earth’s atmosphere has warmed at an average rate of about 0.14 C per decade, according to the UAH satellite record.[citation needed]
“it is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way.”
“We just said that human effects have a warming influence, and that’s certainly true.”
In 2014, Christy and his UAH colleague Richard McNider wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal , arguing that climate models projected temperatures consistently higher than real-world satellite and balloon data. The authors also pointed to past instances where scientific consensus turned out to be incorrect. However, his statements have been debunked by experts on this field.[16][17]
