re: Scott Pruitt says carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to global warming

A few inconvenient questions that man-made climate change advocates can't answer.
Back in the old Medieval days wine grapes grew very well in England. Since it's too cold to grow them today, the logical conclusion is that it was warmer then.
1) What were the Romans, Gaules, Angles, Norse, etc doing to pump all that CO2 into the atmosphere?
Then it suddenly got colder, a lot colder! So cold in fact that smart scientist often refer to this period as the Little Ice Age.
2) What did humans do to cause this?! Did we stop exhaling CO2?
3) Why do these scientists never just propose what ever we did then, we do now?

Don't even get me started on Snowball Earth and the Carboniferous Period! Huge climate change swings predate the appearance of Homo sapiens!

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1) What were the Romans, Gaules, Angles, Norse, etc doing to pump all that CO2 into the atmosphere?
Then it suddenly got colder, a lot colder! So cold in fact that smart scientist often refer to this period as the Little Ice Age.
2) What did humans do to cause this?! Did we stop exhaling CO2?
3) Why do these scientists never just propose what ever we did then, we do now?

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Damn, and I don't think there were any pirates back then... Or at least not enough to help cool the earth.

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Water vapour is by far the most important contributor to the greenhouse effect. Pinning down its precise contribution is tricky, not least because the absorption spectra of different greenhouse gases overlap.

At some of these overlaps, the atmosphere already absorbs 100% of radiation, meaning that adding more greenhouse gases cannot increase absorption at these specific frequencies. For other frequencies, only a small proportion is currently absorbed, so higher levels of greenhouse gases do make a difference.

This means that when it comes to the greenhouse effect, two plus two does not equal four. If it were possible to leave the clouds but remove all other water vapour from the atmosphere, only about 40% less infrared of all frequencies would be absorbed. Take away the clouds and all other greenhouses gases, however, and the water vapour alone would still absorb about 60% of the infrared now absorbed.

By contrast, if CO2 alone was removed from the atmosphere, only 15% less infrared would be absorbed. If CO2 was the only greenhouse gas, it would absorb 26% of the infrared currently absorbed by the atmosphere.

A simplified summary is that about 50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder.

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LINK

75% of the "greenhouse effect" is due to things that are natural and unless we find George W. Bush's hurricane machine, things we can not significantly change one way or another.

That article is about 10 years old and since then we found out that CO2's role is even smaller.

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At issue is the global warming potential (GWP), a number that allows experts to compare methane with its better-known cousin, carbon dioxide. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.

In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.

There is no scientific reason to prefer a 100-year time horizon over a 20-year time horizon; the choice of GWP100 is simply a matter of convention.

The 100-year GWP value underestimates the gas's negative impacts by almost five times, said Ilissa Ocko, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. The quick warming in the short run catalyzed by methane can affect environmental processes, such as the flowering of plants, she said at the American Geophysical Union meeting last week.

"The short-lived climate pollutants [like methane] that we emit from human activities are basically controlling how fast the warming occurs," she said. "This is because they are very powerful at absorbing radiation."

EDF and some scientists are calling on the United Nations and policymakers to stop relying on GWP100. They would instead like experts to use GWP20 and GWP100 as a slashed pair.

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LINK

Pruitt is 100% factually correct on that, CO2's contribution is minor compared to other gasses. That is just one of the many examples of where political ideology has surpassed scientific knowledge on the issue; which is why we need solutions based on the best science available at the time instead of solutions based on political ideology aimed at furthering government's role in everything. Until we get a majority of the ppl to realize that we are better off doing nothing than some of these stupid arse liberal ideas (i.e Paris Climate Accords or the Clean Power Plan).

What kind of damn shop?

Sweat shop?
Soccer ball repair shop?
Truck nuts shop?

Damnit man.

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frick you are stupid, the current temperature anomaly is around 1.7-1.9 degrees above the global 100 year average. you dont have a clue what that means or the ramifications thereof so stfu.

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You're brainwashed.

In terms of geological time, how significant is 100 years? Honest question, and I'll bet you're too much of an intellectual coward to answer it.

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yes but methane is mostly trapped in hydrates atm, it is not a primary contributor to our warming at the moment.

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1. As the link in my previous posts points out, that is because the IPCC uses a formula that has no basis in science to calculate CH3 impact.

2. CO2 is not a primary contributor to our warming at the moment either. Solar energy is a much greater contributor than all of the greenhouse gasses combined. Water vapor & clouds have more of a contribution to warming than CO2.

3. Our emissions are not helping or hurting the situation at all and I'll let the scientists tell you why:

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Scientists can study Earth’s climate as far back as 800,000 years by drilling core samples from deep underneath the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Detailed information on air temperature and CO2 levels is trapped in these specimens. Current polar records show an intimate connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature in the natural world. In essence, when one goes up, the other one follows.

There is, however, still a degree of uncertainty about which came first—a spike in temperature or CO2. Until now, the most comprehensive records to date on a major change in Earth’s climate came from the EPICA Dome C ice core on the Antarctic Plateau. The data, covering the end of the last ice age, between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, show that CO2 levels could have lagged behind rising global temperatures by as much as 1,400 years. “The idea that there was a lag of CO2 behind temperature is something climate change skeptics pick on,” says Edward Brook of Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. “They say, ‘How could CO2 levels affect global temperature when you are telling me the temperature changed first?’”

Frédéric Parrenin of the Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysical Environment in France and a team of researchers may have found an answer to the question. His team compiled an extensive record of Antarctic temperatures and CO2 data from existing data and five ice cores drilled in the Antarctic interior over the last 30 years. Their results, published February 28 in Science, show CO2 lagged temperature by less than 200 years, drastically decreasing the amount of uncertainty in previous estimates.

The wide margin of error in the EPICA core data is due to the way air gets trapped in layers of ice. Snowpack becomes progressively denser from the surface down to around 100 meters, where it forms solid ice. Scientists use air trapped in the ice to determine the CO2 levels of past climates, whereas they use the ice itself to determine temperature. But because air diffuses rapidly through the ice pack, those air bubbles are younger than the ice surrounding them. This means that in places with little snowfall—like the Dome C ice core—the age difference between gas and ice can be thousands of years.

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LINK

We do not know if Co2 levels follow temperature or if temperature follows CO2 levels. This article suggests that CO2 levels rise 200 years after temperature rises and most of the data shows that CO2 levels rise 1400 years after temperature. If that is the case then what could would cutting CO2 emission do?

4. If temperture follows CO2 levels then the CO2 emissions that are affecting our current warming trend were emitted between 617A.D & 1867.

5. The main reasons behind trying to curb carbon emissions was to try and prevent "runaway climate change" in the 2nd half of the 21st century and the 22nd century. However, what good will curbing our emissions? If temperature follows CO2 levels, the the CO2 affecting the current warming was emitted 200 - 1,400 years ago? Curbing our emissions might lessent the suffering of "runaway climate change" in 2200 - 3600 AD, but if climate change is as big of a threat as you liberals think it, mankind would have altered suffered 150+ yrs of "runaway climate change." Then if CO2 levels follow temperature, curbing our emissions would have 0 affect on temperature. Which means we would have spent trillions and destroyed our economies for nothing. That is why all of the liberal solution of a carbon tax or a carbon credit scheme and "green energy" projects completely useless and f**king stupid.

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once it warms enough for the siberian permafrost to thaw, warming effects will have a postive feedback loop

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Is this before or after the lower 48 states become a massive glacier?

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3) It's not the sun this time.

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What it are you talking about? .8 of (1) degree in 100 years and you're comparing that to natural changes over much longer periods of time? Thats not even a rounding error.
The small up tick in temps could be reasonably attributed to natural cycles and a small effect of cleaner air standards removing particulate matter allowing more sunlight and heat to reach the Earth...oddly that tracks the clean air regs time frame...I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

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and btw climatologist do make great money...I got offered 79k a year for 3 3 month tours in Anartica coming out of college

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Just one "t" shy of landing it?

But you make an unintended point. Where did that money come from? What were the associated political ties?

Was this the data you'd have been addressing?

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What it are you talking about? .8 of (1) degree in 100 years and you're comparing that to natural changes over much longer periods of time? Thats not even a rounding error.

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Clearly these "rounding errors" have significance or we wouldn't have records of English vineyards during the Medieval Warm Period.