Guy Callendar, the engineer who discovered human-caused global warming

Thus people in 1900 saw net heating from the exact same coal burned in 1800 that produced cooling back then.

The same thing happened again with the explosion of automobile use globally before that growth curve slowed down. And it’s even part of climate models where if you stop all fossil fuel emissions you get a few years of additional warming before things stabilize.

Whether CO2 is referred to as "pollution" or not depends on the context. In this case they were talking about other industrial greenhouse gases.

For example, in 1883, Krakatoa erupted, one of the most powerful volcano events in recorded history.

The eruption of Krakatoa had a significant impact on global climate, with summer temperatures in 1883 falling by as much as 1.2°C (2.2°F) below normal in parts of the Northern Hemisphere. It changed the skies to various colors like blue, gold, green, and purple, "... more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets... the glow is intense; that is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire."

And that was just a single volcanic eruption, in the southeastern hemisphere, massively affecting temperatures on the opposite side of the planet. There have been other natural events, like a massive simultaneous triple-eruption, possibly in 536, that plunged the planet into a short ice age.

Other interesting natural phenomena are things like solar storms that can cause a global increase in both wildfires and electrical storms (or the cooling effect during less active cycles) as well as the significant dust clouds that occur when a large meteor strikes the earth.

An interesting one that didn't seem to cause any climate changes was the Tunguska event. In 1908 in Siberia, it was thought to have been a meteor, except for the total lack of an impact crater, and is now believed by leading scientists to have been a meteor air burst. (Of course scientific consensus always is, until it isn't.) This didn't seem to cause a significant dust cloud or changes in weather patterns, but there are many other documented cases of meteors and volcanoes massively changing the weather. It'd be very interesting to map the climate curves (such as they may be known) against various known natural phenomena over the centuries.

I think we often forget that most of the indigenous people who died from disease never came in contact with Europeans directly and disease burned through the population moving from tribe to tribe. I’d love to learn more about the pre-Columbian population of North America and what that time looked like.

I think it's more likely that the Little Ice Age was caused by a drop of solar output, and that all of the turmoil in Europe (Black Death, Hundred Years War, War of the Roses, Wars of Religion) that led to the eventual colonization of the Americas was a consequence of resource scarcity in Europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#/media/File:200...

They're not "skeptics". They're not even deniers. They're just liars.

It should also be noted that the type of C in CO2 matters:

> In addition, only fossil fuels are consistent with the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon in today’s atmosphere. Different kinds of carbon-containing material have different relative amounts of “light” carbon-12, “heavy” carbon-13, and radioactive carbon-14. Plant matter is enriched in carbon-12, because its lighter weight is more readily used by plants during photosynthesis. Volcanic emissions are enriched in carbon-13. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere and the ocean are roughly the same. Since carbon-14 is radioactive, it decays predictably over time. Young organic matter has more carbon-14 than older organic matter, and fossil fuels have no measurable carbon-14 at all.

> As carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen over the past century or more, the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 has fallen, which means that the source of the extra carbon dioxide must be enriched in "light" carbon-12. Meanwhile, the relative amount of carbon-14—radioactive carbon—has declined. The record of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is complicated by nuclear bomb testing after 1950, which doubled the amount of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. After the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, the excess atmospheric carbon-14 began to decline as it dispersed into the oceans and the land biosphere.

* https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-k...

> In this “Grand Challenges” paper, we review how the carbon isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 has changed since the Industrial Revolution due to human activities and their influence on the natural carbon cycle, and we provide new estimates of possible future changes for a range of scenarios. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and land use change reduce the ratio of 13C/12C in atmospheric CO2 (δ13CO2). This is because 12C is preferentially assimilated during photosynthesis and δ13C in plant-derived carbon in terrestrial ecosystems and fossil fuels is lower than atmospheric δ13CO2. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion also reduce the ratio of 14C/C in atmospheric CO2 (Δ14CO2) because 14C is absent in million-year-old fossil fuels, which have been stored for much longer than the radioactive decay time of 14C.

* https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

But it's a pretty simple equation. We know the approximate mass of the atmosphere, and the number of molecules per weight. We know how many molecules are in a unit mass of CO2.

Thus we should be able to calculate out "how many gigatons of CO2 are necessary to increase atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm", and then given measurements of actual CO2 increases, how much CO2 is necessary to increase atmospheric levels by the amounts seen.

If the amount of CO2 required to yield the observed increase is greater than annual human emissions, then that's a strong signal that CO2 increase is NOT anthropogenic and something else is going on. If it's less, then that is a strong signal that humans are the primary culprit.

Anyway, I did out all the math and it takes about 8.8 gigatons to increase atmospheric levels by 1ppm, and we're netting an increase of about 17gt into the atmosphere per year, for an increase of ~2ppm annually. So it's pretty clear that this is anthropogenic.

If anyone wants to check my math I wrote it all up here [0]. Numbers are a couple years old at this point but the conclusion still stands.

[0] https://biotinker.dev/posts/climate1.html

Dynamical systems are often sensitive to the value of a parameter, its rate of change and/or its rate of rate of change.

Eg. You can warm milk to a certain temperature (the parameter) on a stove on gentle heat and it will be fine. If you warm it to the same temperature on high heat (i.e. increased rate of parameter), it will burn. That's because the convection process in this system has limited maximum speed.

If you look at when previously the Earth's atmosphere had high CO2, it took hundreds of thousands to many millions of years get there. We did it in a 100 years, so at least a thousand times faster.

There are no alternative facts.

This is all that matters at the end of the day. Most people are not self-aware enough, and/or willing enough to experience their own emotions, to handle ugly truths. It's more emotionally comfortable to find reasons to deny them.

I can't find the exact quote, but to put it in perspective: the weight of the extra C02 added in the last 100 years is more than the sum total of everything humanity has built. The actual quote might be everything from the last 2000 years, regardless, same point. If you weigh all of that CO2, it's an enormous amount.

The oceans can absorb a practically infinite amount of CO2, so there's no way for it to build up in the atmosphere in the long run. Also, the atmosphere is already saturated with CO2 to the point where adding more will have no effect. Also, water vapor's absorption spectrum overlaps that of CO2 so there is no way for CO2 to have any additional effect. All of these facts were known more than a century ago, and consequently AGW was considered disproved.

"Skeptics" should not read past this point, because it turns out all of those things are misleading. The oceans don't mix fast enough to prevent CO2 buildup, and the action of CO2 is felt not in the lower atmosphere but at the radiative top-of-atmosphere, the point where outgoing infrared radiation is more likely to escape to space than strike another molecule. Adding CO2 makes the CO2-dense region greater in extent, thus the outgoing heat takes longer to leave Earth, thus raising the total atmosphere temperature and causing a nasty feedback mechanism with H2O. Because this changes which elevation energy gets radiated at, we can directly measure it. Checkmate skeptics.

To tie this back in to the main point, Callendar was one of the prime movers in rehabilitating the AGW theory (one of his papers amusingly refers to the theory's "checkered past"), but it took until Keeling's work in the late 1950s to conclusively demonstrate the year-over-year increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Most of them in the western industrialized countries could never imagine or want another way of living because this was the promise and evidence of progress and success since they were born.

Unfortunately I wish I shared your optimism that things will change after the boomers pass. I am from and have family in Alberta, oil country, and there's... just no chance. Some of the most vicious deniers (or worse, the "don't carers") are young.

I feel like things are swinging back the other way, and quickly.

When things start to fall apart people can have two reactions to it... stick and work together to solve the problem, or scatter and hoard and everyman-for-himself and proclaim "I got mine, now get lost..."

Indeed! It's also quite possible that some of the humans that will live forever (or until they choose not to) may already be around us.

We will be at 2000 in 640 years.

Previously those rates of change were over the course of millions of years.

It is crazy how much things have changed over millions of years, perhaps crazier to see those same changes 3 orders of magnitude faster.

It's certainly not causative, and I don't see the steps from A to B.