No, it isn't. It says it starts at the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial revolution usually dated as mid-18th to mid-19th century. The former is neither before nor at the same time as the latter.
> Not that I want to see continued use of fossil fuels in place of more sustainable options like nuclear and solar/wind. But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
There is no good reason to think that they have, and this study does not at all contravene, or even call into question, the consensus on the causes of warming.
From the article:
> “Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,” said Tommaso. “We rely on these simulations to project future climate change, but the lack of any signs of an early warming in the Arctic Ocean is a missing piece of the puzzle.”
I'd generally encourage people to be skeptical of everything, but I'd call this a really good reason to be skeptical.
This has been going on for a long time, and steel production was a major factor long before Watt.
When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.
The article talks about the Arctic Ocean. It is not denying the warming of the world's ocean due to climate change.
> But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
This would require several, distinct and unrelated fields of science being wrong about the way CO2 and other GHG have in the past and currently regulate the Earth's temperature.
There is no question that CO2 in the atmosphere has been rapidly rising.
There is no question that humans have been the cause of this rise, it's just basic math given the wild amount of hydrocarbons we combust every year.
So while it's possible that scientists are wrong in the big picture sense it would require a sea-change in our understanding of climate from every perspective as well as being a remarkable coincidence that we are seeing the impact we are in correlation to our own CO2 emissions.
A far, far more likely explanation is that the Earth's climate is even more sensitive to small changes in CO2 on a small time scale than we have previously thought.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plows,_Plagues_and_Petroleum
We are not that uncertain about climate change.
That is extremely unlikely. We can measure the spectrum and intensity of incoming solar energy and of outgoing radiation from Earth, and see that we are gaining. We can see that much of that gain is due to incoming energy heating things which re-radiate that energy in infrared which we can see gets trapped by CO2.
We can tell by looking at the isotope distribution of the C in the CO2 where it comes from. CO2 from still living or recently living (say dead for only a few hundred years) has a different isotope distribution than CO2 from long dead or never living sources. This lets us tell that most of the CO2 increase over the last couple hundred years is from burning fossil fuels or an increase in geological processes that release long trapped CO2 such as volcanic activity.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that we can tell from that did not come from living or recently living things matches fairly well with what we know of volcanic activity and how much fossil fuels we burn, giving us enough data to conclude that most of the warming due to CO2 is due to human emitted CO2.
For that to be wrong would require that we have massively overestimated how much fossil fuels we use and massively overlooked a large amount of volcanic activity.
It's not one factor you can examine cleanly in isolation. There are many many interacting factors.
The industrial revolution is generally dated from 1760, which is...somewhat more than a decade before 1900.
How are we driving mass warming in 1900 when CO2 emissions were barely 1% of what they are today?
Literally, no, where? Even if I did see one claiming that, I’ve also seen the charts of net atmospheric CO2 from human activity that show a sharp rise already in progress by 1800.
From 1800 to 1900, CO2 ppm rose from 280 to 300
Of course, from 1900 til today it has risen to over 400ppm
My point is, we were burning a significant amount of coal throughout 1800s - Acid rain was happening in the 1850s [1]
[0] http://interactive.fusion.net/200-years-of-climate-science-a...
I guess I was quoting the source in saying the pencil and paper estimate is in line with modern climate models
edit: from a cursory googling, looks like 450ppm is in line with 2C warning while 600pm is the higher end at 4C warning
note also temperature lags behind co2 (since heat is captured cumulatively over time) so even if we stabilized now at ~412ppm we will continue to see warming