That is watt they want.
I'm pretty new here and I'm not a climate scientist, but there is one consideration that I don't hear (read) people talk about much. I came across it in one of the answers here. We all know that CO2 and temperatures aren't exactly linear. I've seen ice core graphs that show that CO2 lags temperature by several hundred years, but nothing that actually shows CO2 is driving temperatures constantly up.
Consider this:
It has to do with the wavelengths that CO2 receives infrared radiation and that it is currently saturated to a point that CO2 can not cause much more warming and as CO2 goes up it has less and less effective warming. in other words the infrared rays at the specific wavelengths are fairly constant and have already saturated the CO2. Is there anything or anyone that refutes this? To me this explains why there isn't any "runaway warming" and never has been any due to this limited ability.
Jesse - I've seen what you are talking about when you say that the planet has been warming at a 0.15 C pace per decade for the last 30 years, but you have to consider the rise wasn't much lower than that for the first part of the 1900s and yet CO2 wasn't nearly as high as what it has been recently.
Even though the Economist has bought into the bad assumption that the Earth's temperature is not going up, it has noticed that the carbon dioxide concentration has continued to rise and that we will eventually have to address the issue. Anthony Watts is ignoring that as he receives money from the Heartland Foundation and other sources that profit from ignoring the problem. Those who believe Anthony Watts rather than the scientific research do so for religious reasons, because they hate scientists being smarter than they are, or as Lewandowsky showed, they like conspiracy theories.
The first reference below shows that if natural factors are accounted for, the Earth's temperature has been rising at a steady 0.15°C per decade for the last 30 years. The second reference is to the Lewandowsky Survey.
Zippi: The saturation argument has been brought up time and time again. It's a false argument. The band CO2 absorbs at is saturated at the center of the band, at 667 cycles per centimeter, in the first 10ppm. After this the band gets wider not deeper. Current measurements within the atmospheric window show that the edge of the band is indeed getting wider.
https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/physics...
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
http://yly-mac.gps.caltech.edu/Radiance/...
And the rise for the first part of the 1900s was partly due to solar output.
http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfaml.html
Probably for a similar reason that alarmist dupes deny the recent halt to warming. Being puzzled is a bad thing for those with cognitive dissonance.
Economist's conclusions: "Good news we must use...[for]...putting a price on carbon and ensuring that, slowly but surely, it gets ratcheted up for decades to come."
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21574490-climate-change-may-be-happening-more-slowly-scientists-thought-world-still-needs
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AhM1C0S5v.VIq1lZEYcrHoPsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20130330113146AAB5PYd
APOCALYPSE PERHAPS A LITTLE LATER
Climate change may be happening more slowly than scientists thought. But the world still needs to deal with it. March 30th 2013, p. 14
It may come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”―the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level―may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.
It is not clear why climate change has “plateaued” (see article). It could be because of greater natural variability in the climate, because clouds dampen warming or because of some other little-understood mechanism in the almost infinitely complex climate system. But whatever the reason, some of the really ghastly scenarios―where the planet heated up by 4°C or more this century―are coming to look mercifully unlikely. Does that mean the world no longer has to worry?
No, for two reasons. The first is uncertainty. The science that points towards a sensitivity lower than models have previously predicted is still tentative. The error bars are still there. The risk of severe warming―an increase of 3°C, say―though diminished, remains real. There is also uncertainty over what that warming will actually do to the planet. The sharp reduction in Arctic ice is not something scientists expected would happen at today’s temperatures. What other effects of even modest temperature rise remain unknown?
The second reason is more practical. If the world had based its climate policies on previous predictions of a high sensitivity, then there would be a case for relaxing those policies, now that the most hell-on-Earth-ish changes look less likely. But although climate rhetoric has been based on fears of high sensitivity, climate policy has not been. On carbon emissions and on adaptation to protect the vulnerable it has fallen far short of what would be needed even in a low-sensitivity world. Industrial carbon-dioxide emissions have risen by 50% since 1997.
Any emissions reductions have tended to come from things beyond climate policy―such as the economic downturn following the global financial crisis, or the cheap shale gas which has displaced American coal. If climate policy continues to be this impotent, then carbon-dioxide levels could easily rise so far that even a low-sensitivity planet will risk seeing changes that people would sorely regret. There is no plausible scenario in which carbon emissions continue unchecked and the climate does not warm above today’s temperatures.
Bad climate policies, such as backing renewable energy with no thought for the cost, or insisting on biofuels despite the damage they do, are bad whatever the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases. Good policies―strategies for adapting to higher sea levels and changing weather patterns, investment in agricultural resilience, research into fossil-fuel-free ways of generating and storing energy―are wise precautions even in a world where sensitivity is low. So is putting a price on carbon and ensuring that, slowly but surely, it gets ratcheted up for decades to come.
If the world has a bit more breathing space to deal with global warming, that will be good. But breathing space helps only if you actually do something with it.
