An inconvenient truth

[xoxoxoBruce]

OK, where were we, helped a friend celebrate her birthday last night and I see it’s been moving here.
Now I started this thread because of that magazine article claiming human contribution to Global warming was very small and had credible evidence to back it up. I couldn’t dispute it, even though it flew in the face of “common knowledge”, I figured you guys would shoot it down right away with something I didn’t know, but on the contrary I found nobody could really shoot it down, just poo-poo it. I also found there is much more disagreement than I thought and that the same numbers look big to some and small to others.

I tried to pin it down to some key points but no answers there either, only generalizations.
Some are entirely skeptical of the whole scenario having heard so many wrong predictions in the past which is probably the media’s fault.
Some buy the problem and are saying, yeah but, what do we do
Some think Global Warming is entirely man made.
I’m sure some think it’s God’s Punishment for queers and abortion.

I think it’s another normal upswing in the natural cycle of the Earth, that man has given a kick so it’s happening faster and probably go higher. But I don’t know if it’s all that bad that it does, and don’t know what if anything we can do about it.

Then there’s tw who reads scientific articles, grabs some buzz words, the starts yelling the sky is falling and it’s all Bush’s fault. Postulating that he, unlike us, is a true patriot and smarter than us because he thinks he’s the only person in the world that knew that Nixon was a crook and there were no WMDs in Iraq.
Tedious at best and I’m getting fed up with the personal attacks on me.

He’s probably got a good point, but posting a graph with no background is bullshit. It’s got to be validated
Being the warm and wonderful guy I am, I’m going to help him out here.

I believe the graph came from a Scientific American Magazine? Since I don’t subscribe and I’m not paying $40 to read it online or go to the library.
I found the source, CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Fort Knox) and OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) organized in 1960.
Every graph I could find refers to an earlier work and the daisy chain leads to Lorius et al. (1985) and amended as cores became available
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/jouz_tem.htm

Because isotopic fractions of the heavier oxygen-18 (18O) and deuterium (D) in snowfall are temperature-dependent and a strong spatial correlation exists between the annual mean temperature and the mean isotopic ratio (18O or dD) of precipitation, it is possible to derive ice-core climate records.

Then this data was peer reviewed and accepted. That means nobody could find anything wrong with the method. The question is, does this Antarctic sample represent the whole earth properly since the Antarctic isn’t where the tracers are developed. Other samples using shorter spans agreed, mostly, but they should because they used his formula for calculation.
From Nature Magazine http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../364218a0.html

RECENT results1,2 from two ice cores drilled in central Greenland have revealed large, abrupt climate changes of at least regional extent during the late stages of the last glaciation, suggesting that climate in the North Atlantic region is able to reorganize itself rapidly, perhaps even within a few decades. Here we present a detailed stable-isotope record for the full length of the Greenland Ice-core Project Summit ice core, extending over the past 250 kyr according to a calculated timescale. We find that climate instability was not confined to the last glaciation, but appears also to have been marked during the last interglacial (as explored more fully in a companion paper3) and during the previous Saale-Holstein glacial cycle. This is in contrast with the extreme stability of the Holocene, suggesting that recent climate stability may be the exception rather than the rule. The last interglacial seems to have lasted longer than is implied by the deep-sea SPECMAP record4, in agreement with other land-based observations5,6. We suggest that climate instability in the early part of the last interglacial may have delayed the melting of the Saalean ice sheets in America and Eurasia, perhaps accounting for this discrepancy.

From Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Division on Earth and Life Studies, National Research Council

Over long time scales, outside the time period in which humans could have a substantive effect on global
climate (e.g., prior to the Industrial Revolution), proxy data (information derived from the content of tree rings, cores from marine sediments, pollens, etc.) have been used to estimate the range of natural climate variability. An important recent addition to the collection of proxy evidence is ice cores obtained by international teams of scientists drilling through miles of ice in Antarctica and at the opposite end of the world in Greenland. The results can be used to make inferences about climate and atmospheric composition extending back as long as 400,000 years. These and other proxy data indicate that the range of natural climate variability is in excess of several degrees C on local and regional space scales over periods as short as a decade. Precipitation has also varied widely. For example, there is evidence to suggest that droughts as severe as the “dust bowl” of the 1930s were much more common in the central United States during the 10th to 14th centuries than they have been in the more recent record.
Temperature variations at local sites have exceeded 10°C (18°F) in association with the repeated glacial advances and retreats that occurred over the course of the past million years. It is more difficult to estimate the natural variability of global mean temperature because large areas of the world are not sampled and because of the large uncertainties inherent in temperatures inferred from proxy evidence. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that global warming rates as large as 2°C (3.6°F) per millennium may have occurred during the retreat of the glaciers following the most recent ice age.

I notice the climate wasn’t all sweetness and light before we came along, it’s been cycling for as long as they can tell, sometimes wildly and sometimes very quickly.
They think they know what temperatures were but that’s because nobody has been able to disprove Lorius’ guess yet. It’s not likely they will soon, first because I doubt that’s a high priority at the moment, and just because it’s almost impossible with no records.
Also the climate was far from uniform but highly regional with periods of deviation in different regions at different times. Deviation that may or maynot be reflected in the 400 kyr graph.

btw, I'm amazed how much scientific information is available online that you have to pay to see.