How do we know CO2 is causing Global Warming? | Hacker News Reader

How do we know CO2 is causing Global Warming?

skepticalscience.com

15 pointsphilipn26 comments

Folks, also see the graph of CO2 in the atmosphere over time: http://mathburritos.org/Atmos-CO2.gif

Doesn't seem like a water tight argument at all to me.

How about the alternate theory that heating up causes CO2 to be released from the Ocean - the extra CO2 is not the cause of heating, but the result of it.

Way too much energy is being spent on this. Far more imminent threats to peoples lives and freedoms.

The fact that CO2 is emitted from the oceans as they warm may explain long term trends in temperature. It would not explain short term trends in radiative transfer, or laboratory measurements of CO2's absorption spectrum.

Note that you could write the exact same article replacing "CO2" with "H2O", though you might need to cite slightly different papers.

> In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite that measured infrared spectra between 400 cm-1 to 1600 cm-1. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations. Harries 2001 compared both sets of data to discern any changes in outgoing radiation over the 26 year period. The resultant change in outgoing radiation was as follows:

> What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation over CO2 bands was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect".

Direct experimental evidence. Good enough for ya?

No, I can imagine there being many reasons for that (I'm no expert, but you have to admit there's quite a leap there between what was observed, and the explanation).

It is nearly always possible to imagine alternative explanations for observations in complex systems. Sometimes the only way have any high level of confidence in a theory is to spend years studying the area and then more years researching the specifics of the particular theory. If you have a passion for this area then why don't you go down this path. Otherwise, like most people, you will often have to resign yourself to relying on the opinions of 'experts'. Choose your 'experts' wisely.

True, I don't have a passion for it at all. I find the whole idea that we could be responsible for global warming to be far fetched. The idea that we could do anything to prevent/alter it is also to me, pretty far fetched really. In short I find the whole thing to be mainly a waste of effort. We could be curing diseases or something more useful.

If you can't be bothered to know anything about it, then you shouldn't be commenting on it.

For you, global warming has become a religious belief. So, even if articles existed which laid out and cited the risks and benefits of warmer climate (http://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negativ...), or which showed that humans are indeed very capable of altering their environment (http://skepticalscience.com/Are-humans-too-insignificant-to-...), or that debunked the myth that it won't matter anyway (http://skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htm), or that global warming can contribute to the spread of diseases (http://www.ebiologynews.com/3137.html) ...

...you would still ignore them.

3 of those sources are the same (obviously pro-manmade global warming) website. (Probably from people who get government funding to do the research).

It doesn't interest me to learn all about the thoery/(At times it seems like a religion), but I don't think that should stop me from commenting on it.

The issue is, anyone can pull 'facts' out of the air to support either side of the debate. It's not a clear cut thing, it's a heap of theories about what might be going on.

My point was, there's more useful things to investigate/research/worry about.

Actually, as a physicist, I see no leap there. We know the absorption spectra of CO2. We measure an increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere. We measure the how well light penetrates the atmosphere, and we find it does so less well at the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs. At this point, we have a simple theory that is well supported by direct experimental evidence. What more do you need?

Well for a start, you need to know absolute numbers. Are the numbers big enough to make a difference.

It took only the merest effort to find this:

http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

You are right though that there are "far more imminent threats to peoples lives and freedoms". I would place willful ignorance to be chief among those threats.

I was talking about threats that actually kill people day to day.

If I'm ignorant about the finer points of green house effects, it's not really that big a deal to my life, or that of my children.

Perhaps every generation has to have a "catastrophe is just around the corner". I remember being taught at school how we'd run out of oil, coal, etc by the year 2000.

What if it turns out it'll kill 90% of all humans in say a hundred years? And what if we could have saved everyone if we just wasn't so ignorant?

Now it doesn't really matter if you and I are ignorant, but if everyone is then that's potentially disastrous. You could draw similarities to medicine I think. What if nobody would've taken the first seemingly unnecessary steps towards creating the first vaccine, the first medicine etc etc. Where would be now? Sure there would be more acute things for these first "doctors" to do, but thanks to them we've now saved countless of people.

I find it extremely far fetched that if it was that imminent (Next 100 years), that there's anything we could do to prevent it.

You're missing the point. In our little what if scenario, the point isn't how long it would take, but that it would happen and we had the power to prevent it.

How are we going to prevent it?

Still not getting it. It doesn't matter how. Just imagine for a while that we could. Please reread what I said without focusing too much if it's really going to happen and if so how and to what extent.

Is it so wrong to focus some effort in studying the climate change? After all we all depend on it and we definitely don't want to loose our home, however probable or improbable.

Given the lack of consensus about what is or isn't happening, I'm really extremely skeptical that we could reach consensus on a way to prevent it.

Sure, it's nice to spend some money researching potential threats, but this one seems to have been blown way out of proportion. Although it's probably been overtaken now by swine flu.

You and many, many other people, are not merely ignorant about the finer points of greenhouse effects. On the contrary, you are all too willing to jump into a discussion about the finer points of greenhouse effects -- a subject which you admittedly are ignorant about -- with counter-arguments based only on a quick gut feeling or guess on your part, and which have already been answered in the conversation that you're jumping into.

Please understand, I'm not just singling you out here; this is an observable and strange pattern of behavior in many different social gatherings, including HN.

Instead of coming up with a question about what you had read, and then doing even a few minutes' diligence to see if there was an answer, you stopped after coming up with the question and pronounced that it "didn't seem like a water tight argument at all". The flaw in thinking that causes that kind of behavior surely carries over into other aspects of your life and career, so it is a big deal to your life.

And furthermore, your children likely learn first by your example. If you think that way, your children are more likely to also, and that's going to have a negative impact on their lives. If nothing else, it will destroy their curiosity, and curiosity is something that should be revered on a forum like HN: it is one of the greatest drivers of human inventiveness and ingenuity.

And ignorance does kill. There are numerous other countries where the example is so blatantly stark that it shouldn't even need citing. In Uganda, for one example, simple water quality improvements would save numerous lives every year [1].

But there's ignorance, and there's willful ignorance, willful ignorance being the more evil of the two. It disregards and dismisses the efforts of those that would advance human society and promote peace. It values its "gut feelings" over research, study, and experimentation. It believes that its "freedoms" are being trampled every time its environment changes, with no acknowledgement of history or context, and no forward thinking for the future.

Those things are a big deal, and they do kill people.

[1]: An in-the-field look at some of the water quality problems in Uganda: http://gondauganda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html

Come on.

All I said was that the argument didn't seem water tight. For me, it was like observing that a server stops responding to pings, and concluding there must be a memory leak in the kernel.

I want water tight isolated tests that prove categorically what is happening.

And my main point is that I'd far rather spend effort on things like water quality which you mention, that have a direct measurable impact on peoples lives, rather than spending so much time, effort and money researching climate change.

This article provides strong evidence for a minor and mostly undisputed point. This also proves almost nothing with regards to anthropogenic global warming, since I could write an identical article about H2O (maybe I'd need to tweak some citations).

A treasure chest of answers has just been gathered up for you, the result of efforts of many other people.

And it has been opened for you.

And your attention has been diverted to it, briefly.

And in that brief moment, you've noticed only one gem, found it not to your liking, and you've walked away, safe and comfortable in your belief that there is no such thing as a chest full of treasure.

Try clicking some links on the site.

I clicked a link on HN. I noticed the article didn't live up to the title. I wrote a comment indicating this.

Now it's my job to read other articles on the site (perhaps also misleadingly titled) to try to find evidence for the theory the original article hinted at in the title, but not in the body?

Perfect example of the kind of straight-forward writing that is needed to help people to help people understand what's going on. It'd be great to see writing like this used to explain evolution clearly. (It may exist, certainly should exist, but I've never seen it.)

I was all set to get all indignant and bombard you with links to PZ Meyers and the like, when I realized that you're right.

The wonderful thing about this site is that it does such a great job of rounding up all the various global warming denialism and answers it factually and straightforwardly, without an excess of opinion or diatribe.

Even after searching for a bit, I couldn't find anything like that for evolution.

There are always books, though.

This is great. So line up the radiation measurements against temperature reports and you close the loop. ie, begin to form some sort of hypothesis about radiation and temperature.

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