> Although I never really questioned the idea that there is evidence of warming or man-made warming, I always questioned the the stated impact.
You are just leaving yourself open to manipulation.
Whatever the science said, 99 44/100% of the whole global
warming/climate change movement was a flim-flam, fraud,
scam for a few people to grab power and money. The recipe goes back to, say, the movie 'The Music Man' about the terrible threats of a pool table in town, to
the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a
rock to "keep the sun moving across the sky",
English morality plays 1000 years ago, and various
other charlatans trying to scare people and, thus, get
power and money.
It was about power and money.
For the science, there was some careful work on
diffusion in an ideal column of gas. Cute, but not
much reason to shut down all the coal fired electric
generating plants with, in a US DoE report a few
years ago, 49% of US electrical energy
and about 23% of all US energy.
Then there was the IPCC report with Ramaswamy's
radiative forcing not much based on science and
not in any physics book I saw. Best I could
say about it was that, mathematically, it was local, linear,
and differential.
Then there's the fact that we know a lot, likely
enough, about the basic chemistry and physics
and know what to calculate -- the Navier-Stokes
equations, black body radiation, molecular
spectral lines, etc. But we also know that
if we set up such computing, then really we are
trying to calculate long term climate change
by weather prediction one microsecond at a time
and that fails to predict actual weather for longer
than about two weeks. Bummer. But that's the
basic chemistry and physics, and we know that.
Moreover, less
detailed but more stable calculations
are necessarily just approximations
and not from first principles of the
basic science where we have confidence.
So, we know too much,
that is, know what we have to do but find that
doing the calculations accurately enough for
meaningful answers is too difficult.
Next, we can be empirical: So there is the US National
Academic of Science report of about 2006 with a
graph on page 2 that shows temperature reconstructions
for the past 1000 years or so. The graph shows (1)
as far as we can tell, in about 2006 the
temperature was exactly the same as in the year
1000 and (2) the increase in the 100 years before
year 2006 was exactly the same as the increase
from year 900 to year 1000. Since year 1000, for
whatever reasons we fell into The Little Ice Age
that did influence some history -- killed off
Viking settlements in Greenland,
had three years of crop failures before the
French Revolution, killed off nearly all of
Napoleon's army on its way back from
Moscow, put ice in the Delaware River the
night Washington crossed it, etc. By
year 1900 or so, we were still pulling out
of The Little Ice Age.
Then there was the bad data: Trying to measure
temperature of the earth by trying to measure the
temperature of the Arctic by pictures of
polar bears and ice bergs falling from glaciers
that reach the ocean.
Net, empirically, the actual temperature record
gives no significant reason for alarm, certainly
no reason to shut down the economy of the
Industrial Revolution which Al Guru would have
us do. The science is too difficult, e.g., we
are not able to do anything like accurate
calculations of the future climate.
In a sense the Al Guru community picked a good
problem, much like the Mayan charlatans did:
Pick a problem too complicated to debunk with
current knowledge, and then bleed people.
Flim-flam, fraud, scam.