Climate change shock: Burning fossil fuels COOLS planet, says NASA

"DrCaleb" said
roflamo!

And yet, NASA has published no such study. But people believe what they want to, regardless of facts. That's why it's given a name - "cognitive bias".

"BartSimpson" said
roflamo!

And yet, NASA has published no such study. But people believe what they want to, regardless of facts. That's why it's given a name - "cognitive bias".

�If you've got a systematic underestimate of what the greenhouse gas-driven change would be, then you're systematically underestimating what's going to happen in the future when greenhouse gases are by far the dominant climate driver,� Schmidt said.

This means that Earth's climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide � or atmospheric carbon dioxide's capacity to affect temperature change � has been underestimated, according to the study. The result dovetails with a GISS study published last year that puts the TCR value at 3.0�F (1.7�C); the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which draws its TCR estimate from earlier research, places the estimate at 1.8�F (1.0�C).

"andyt" said


So actually the study is saying the exact opposite of what the Daily Slime and FD are claiming.

It might also explain what Zip used to talk about - that temp rise has actually been less than would be predicted by the amt of CO2 in the atmosphere. Ie there are counterbalancing effects.

Sadly the full study is paywalled, but I think we get the idea � the abstract is essentially arguing that global warming is being suppressed by other forcings.



The issue I have with this kind of theory is that it postulates an improbably exact balance between all the different forcings. If you start with zero or near zero warming, you can crank up the other forcings to anything you want, as long as everything sums to zero, as long as everything cancels out. The problem is that an observed random balance between powerful forcings is implausible. The stronger you make the forcings, the more improbable it is, that the terms will exactly balance. Why should CO2 exactly balance pollution? Why shouldn�t one term be much stronger than the other? Out of the near infinity of possible sums, suggesting an extended period of perfect balance is due to blind luck stretches credibility.

To me this is the climate equivalent of the Cosmic Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle suggests that the universe is well adjusted for life, because if it wasn�t, we wouldn�t be here to observe it. But as a scientific theory the anthropic principle is pretty nearly useless, because it shuts down further questions. Accepting life friendly cosmic constants as simply being due to a lucky throw of the dice, rejects the possibility that there is more to discover.

A much simpler theory as to why our climate is so balanced, despite the release of allegedly dangerous amounts of anthropogenic CO2, is that either the various forcings are actually quite small, in which case any imbalances will be barely noticeable, or that an as yet unacknowledged dynamic mechanism, such as Willis� emergent tropical heat pump, is compensating for any imbalance we are causing, and keeping the climate stable.

The choice then is either to believe that our current climate stability is an improbable streak of good luck, or to search for evidence of an emergent dynamic mechanism which is suppressing radical change. NASA seems to want us to blindly embrace the theory that we�ve simply been very lucky, which is a shame, because there is a lot of evidence that the Earth�s climate contains powerful dynamic compensation mechanisms, which can easily adjust to counter any imbalance we are likely to cause.

"DrCaleb" said
I don't even know why I bother.

"Brenda" said
I don't even know why I bother.