Scott Pruitt is absolutely right about Climate Change.

Posted on 3/13/17 at 3:14 pm

Posted by cokebottleag

I’m a Santos Republican

Member since Aug 2011

24080 posts

Posted on 3/13/17 at 3:14 pm

LINK

quote:
Except now he’s done it. In a CNBC interview, the host asked, “Do you believe that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?” Pruitt answered: “No, I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

Oh my, not believing computer models are scientific fact? What is the world coming to?

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For example, NPR goes on to say: “The view that CO2 is a major heat-trapping gas is supported by reams of data, including data collected by government agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” Er, which data would that be? Carbon dioxide is certainly known to be a greenhouse gas, but nobody needed NASA or NOAA to tell them that. (More on this in a moment.) Presumably NPR thinks there is data which shows that carbon dioxide is primarily responsible for recent increases in global temperatures. But “data” can’t show that. Any assertion of cause and effect in a complex system like the climate, where there are hundreds of competing variables, is someone’s interpretation of the data.

Oh no, the data definitely shows that CO2 is the main factor in climate change. Doesn't it?

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There is good reason for skepticism. For one thing, just on the “basic science,” Pruitt is absolutely correct. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but it is not the most powerful greenhouse gas, by a long shot. Water vapor is far more effective at trapping heat and releasing it back to the atmosphere, primarily because it absorbs a lot more radiation in the infrared spectrum, which is released as heat.

That’s why all of the climate theories that project runaway global warming use water vapor to juice up the relatively small impact of carbon dioxide itself.

Well of course, everyone knows that this is true. There's a million computer models that show that it's true.

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But does it really work that way? By how much does water vapor magnify the impact of carbon dioxide? And is that effect dampened by other factors? Consider cloud formation: more water in the atmosphere means more clouds, which reflect sunlight back into space and have a cooling effect that counteracts the warming effect. But by how much?

The answer is that nobody really knows. There are varying estimates for “climate sensitivity,” that is, how sensitive global temperatures are to increases in carbon dioxide. They range from a relatively trivial impact—less than one degree Celsius warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide—to more than five degrees.

quote:
The important part is that these are all estimates. Some are developed based on mathematical models, some from looking at historical records, some from other observations of the atmosphere. But there’s quite a range of disagreement among them, and none has been definitively established. So there really is “tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact.”

There are also competing theories about completely unrelated factors that could be more important in driving the climate. Over geological history, carbon dioxide levels have been far higher than today during periods when the earth was colder. This certainly suggests that carbon dioxide is not the “control knob” and we need other factors to explain the climate of the distant past.

Well, now I know this is fake news. Scientists don't disagree on things. That's not how science works. Scientists make computer models about something extremely complex with millions of known and unknown factors, and then demand skeptics be silent. It's right there in the scientific method.