Quote:
|
Originally Posted by kutulu
Weather is the day to day temp, humidity and wind. Climate is the average weather over a long period of time. We cannot predict the weather precisely, but we absolutely can predict that climate. If you live in Arizona, it's going to be hot 8 months of the year. The winter will be cool and you'll have a monsoon somwhere between June and August. Global climate mostly refers to the global average temperature.
Climate change models consider the sources and sinks of greenhouse gas emissions. Neglecting human interference and rare catastrophic events (like a HUGE volcano eruption) greenhouse gas concentrations are relatively static because the emissions are consumed by biogenic sinks.
Now, our industrialization adds a LOT of greenhouse gasses to the system. There are no sinks for the additional emissions and as a result CO2 levels rise. Normally, most radiant energy is reflected back into space. Greenhouse gasses aborb the energy and allow more heat to be trapped in the atmosphere. We have sampled ice cores and determined historic CO2 levels we can line them up with known sea levels at those times and we know that when CO2 levels are low, there is more land mass and the climate is cooler. At high CO2 levels, the climate is hotter and we have less land mass because the ice caps have melted.
These are facts that cannot be disputed. THe arguements (logical ones at least) are with the models, and hte projections built into the models.
|
But since the climate models do not match up with each other, or even past data its rather silly to think that they are anything but a bad guess as to future climate.
We are still in a colder climate than just after the Roman period as we recover from the little ice age (yes the temperatures were WARMER than then now). We had a cooling period in the 1970's where all the doom and gloom types were predicting starvation by the 1990's. We have had ice ages and rapid rising of the earth temperature many times in the past.
Was it a lack of industry that caused the cooling known as the little ice age? Of course not, so what was it? What caused the ice ages? What caused the snowball earth? What caused the extinction events which all seem related to climate change? Do your models predict any of this?
No, the models are very simple, based only on a few variables, relying on what we say happens.