Evidence disproving anthropogenic climate change?

Question

I read the evideance and reports, attended guest lectures by both James Hansen and Micheal Mann and believe it is occurring. I always try to study both sides of an issue but most of the opposition I have heard cites conspiracy theories, non-peer reviewed data and unreliable sources. Someone, please give some decent information or sources

Answer 1

Wouldn't that be proving a negative, which is a pretty difficult thing to do?

While there is a lot of statistical data put together in support of AGW, as Dana admits, there are still holes in it.  While Dana may choose to slough those off as inconsequential, any time you have holes in theories, it means the theories aren't provable as stated.  

There is still much to learn in the field.  Because it is still in it's infancy, it is absurd to call either side wrong.  As in any field, there are believers in the extremes, and there are those, who are usually the ones that end up right, who figure out that the truth lies somewhere in between.

Answer 2

http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/...

this is "Evidence ".

note this journal is considered to be on the fringes of science (aka pseudoscience). it has also published papers related to UFOs, reincarnation, astrology, cryptozoology, consciousness-related physical anomalies so i don't think its review process can be that good or its standards that high.

Answer 3

The problem with this questions and ones like it is that it presumes AGW to be a single discreet thing, that either it is or it isn't.  AGW is a set of beliefs, some may be true and others may be false.

AGW is also a matter of degrees.  There is a world of difference between a slight rise in temperatures and the "planetary emergency" that Al Gore portends.  Furthermore many of these impending changes could take centuries to play out.  People in 1900 couldn't begin to imagine the challenges of the 21st century, it's unlikely we have an accurate idea of the world 100 years hence.

Anyone who says things like "the science is in" and "the debate is closed" has zero knowledge of science.  The history of science is full of orthodoxy overturned by new discoveries.  The truth is there is a lot we don't know about the climate and the forces that drive it.

That something hasn't or can't be disproved doesn't make it true.  The burden of proof is on those that advance the belief not those who are skeptical.  That we don't know all that nature does to alter the climate is not proof that we are doing it.  Certainly the geological record is proof that nature can cause the effects we see, so that needs to be considered.

The biggest issue I have with AGW isn't the science, it's the politics.  This whole thing looks suspiciously like a panic being generated by people who have a vested interest in scaring the public into surrendering our wealth and our liberties.  Whether or not climate change will do more harm than good is still an open question, but history has shown that losing one's freedom has never been a good thing.

We should be very suspicious of people who can create a long list of potential disasters without balancing it with potential benefits.  Very little in this world is all good or bad.

Frankly I wish Al Gore would just go away and leave the issue to people who actually attended science classes.  We have a lot to learn and may well discover that all of this is overblown.

Answer 4

You won't find any solid scientific based evidence disproving AGW around here.  Lot's of assertions and accusations, but very little substance.  The few tidbits of valid debate that actually do come up around here are generally on peripheral issues and not the core premise of AGW.

Edit:

Eric C might want to take a look at this link before putting a link to Zbigniew Jaworowski's up again:

http://www.someareboojums.org/blog/?p=7

Answer 5

Poor relation between co2 levels and temperature.

Ground-station results from 27 rural locations in Australia show a mean temperature of 17.38 in 1880, dropping irregularly to 16.78 in 1946, then rising irregularly to 16.98 in 1990, an overall move of minus 0.48 in 110 years. Of course, there is no correlation with CO2 levels (Endersbee, 2007a).

Temperature drops in 1984, 1989, 1993, 1999 and 2003 were not concurrent with or preceded by any corresponding drop in CO2 levels. Moreover, every year since 1998 has been cooler, despite a supposed ever-increasing rise in CO2 levels. So here, too, there is no correlation whatsoever.

Drop in temperatures from 1940 until late seventies.  Many Warmers have tried to explain this as a cooling effect of sulfate aerosols from the burning of sulfur-containing fuels. This does not make overall sense because such burning did not suddenly begin in 1940 or diminish in 1970.

Others point to volcanic activity, the dust ejections of which also cool the troposphere by reflecting sunlight (Robock, 2000). The effect of an extremely large eruption normally lasts 1–3 years, not 30 years.

Balloons and satellite data do not show more than a 0.148 warming of the atmosphere from 1978–2007 , while ground temperatures are claimed by the GISS to have risen 0.88 in this same period .((Christy et al., 2007). How could the surface temperature rise more than the atmospheric temperature if the latter is hypothesized to have warmed the former?

Notice that I say balloon and satellite, because warmers claim a malfunction in the satellite's orbit to account for this.  But how do they account for the balloon measurements.

This disparity was noticed independently by others, including S. Fred Singer, PhD, Physics, Princeton University, whose letter to Nature was rejected.

In two independent papers Jaworowski and Beck have estimated the pre industrial levels of co2 at 330 ppm and not at the 280 the IPCC reports.  So co2 levels have not increased that much.

http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/

Gengi:  That is an article that reviews what other people have said.  The way science works, is by criticizing  what he said, not who said it.  But again we see a typical response.  Do not discuss the science, attack the man.

Answer 6

I've heard of skeptical science but never opinionated.

Answer 7

When people say they "do their own research", do they mean the go out and take readings over time, or do they just mean the sit home and read what other people write (usually about what they have read)?

What evidence do you have that isn't prejudiced? I'm not saying it is, but most of what I'm hearing is.

Answer 8

I've asked this same question several times (aside from doing my own research), and found that there is very little evidence contrary to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory (and certainly none that disproves it).  Skeptical arguments are usually either historical in nature (i.e. past CO2 lags behind temperature) and/or irrelevant to the current climate change (i.e. past solar climate influence) and/or scientifically irrelevant (i.e. natural sources emit more CO2 than humans) and/or political in nature (i.e. Al Gore, liberal hoax, communists, etc.) and/or egotistical (because I don't understand climate science, nobody does).

That's not to say that the AGW theory is perfect.  For instance, it predicts that the troposphere should warm at a rate slightly faster than the surface, and based on current measurements, that appears not to be the case.  However, that's most likely a problem with instrumentation rather than an indication that the theory is wrong, because virtually all other evidence supports the theory, and the measurements of atmospheric temperature have large uncertainties (such as orbital decay of satellites) as discussed here:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/m...

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/s...

As far as I'm aware, there isn't any other significant discrepancy in the AGW theory, and I've asked skeptics to provide me with such flaws several times.  The tropospheric warming is the only valid evidence they've ever come up with.

Most skeptics will claim 'the onus is on you to prove your theory, not us to disprove it'.  However, the body of scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the AGW theory, and the scientific community agrees on this.  It is the accepted theory, and thus the onus is now on skeptics to disprove it.

Answer 9

I don't think you will find any information to disprove AGW, because the information doesn't exist. AGW is still a theory, which means it's not proved, and therefore can't be disproved. However, AGW theory is supported by most of the scientific community/organizations (NASA, NAS, GPU, NOAA...) and explains much of the current warming.

Blogs, conspiracy theories and peoples beliefs get into the way of the debate. But with a change in our lifestyles imminent, there is bound to be resistance.

Answer 10

Airball.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=1...

What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?

This is an issue that is often misunderstood in the public sphere and media, so it is worth spending some time to explain it and clarify it. At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations. These terminations are pronounced warming periods that mark the ends of the ice ages that happen every 100,000 years or so.

Does this prove that CO2 doesn't cause global warming? The answer is no.

The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.

The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.

It comes as no surprise that other factors besides CO2 affect climate. Changes in the amount of summer sunshine, due to changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun that happen every 21,000 years, have long been known to affect the comings and goings of ice ages. Atlantic ocean circulation slowdowns are thought to warm Antarctica, also.

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a "feedback", much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

So, in summary, the lag of CO2 behind temperature doesn't tell us much about global warming. [But it may give us a very interesting clue about why CO2 rises at the ends of ice ages. The 800-year lag is about the amount of time required to flush out the deep ocean through natural ocean currents. So CO2 might be stored in the deep ocean during ice ages, and then get released when the climate warms.]

To read more about CO2 and ice cores, see Caillon et al., 2003, Science magazine

Guest Contributor: Jeff Severinghaus

Professor of Geosciences

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

University of California, San Diego.

Answer 11

CO2 concentration lags temperature in paleo records.  No one in AGW disputes that factoid.  Search on CO2 lag in google and pick a pro AGW site, for example:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12...

Even when CO2 and temp rises about the same time does not guarantee causation.

Climate is a complex chaotic system, and definite proof one way or another is not going happen.

No theory explains all phenomena perfectly, and one sign of the insanity in AGW is beating down people whenever an anomaly is discovered (like CO2 lagging temp) with ever more fanciful and complicated theories to show why CO2 just has to be the culprit.

Other interesting data, like soot decreasing the reflectivity of the arctic, seem to get kind of pushed aside.

No one knows if anthropogenic CO2 swamps the natural water vapor/clouds feedback loop.  No one knows if the enormous uncertainties in all the AGW theories are signficant or not.

Now we do know that people like warm weather.  Otherwise people would be abandoning the tropical/temperature climates for Canada, the Arctic, and Antarctica.  That is why AGW doesn't get any political traction from any gov't -- even ones that promise at every opportunity they are "concerned" and want to do everything they can.  In practice, they don't.

Excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me!  CO2 lagging temperature is "misunderstood"?  What the heck is there is misunderstand?

The doctrine is that rising CO2 increases temperature, either leading or lockstep.  CO2 lagging doesn't support this notion, at all.

Some mysterious happenstance, force, whatever warmed the earth and then CO2 levels rose.  But that mysterious force then disappears when CO2 reaches a certain concentration and then CO2 is the major factor.

Hello Occam's razor.  (Given two explanations that account for the data, pick the shorter one.)

Instead of accepting that no theory accounts for all the loose ends, AGW creates endless tortured explanations.

Answer 12

We all learned in Elementary School that the last, deadly Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago. Since then, the glaciers have retreated 2,000 miles, the oceans have risen hundreds of feet, life has returned to land once crushed under a mile of ice... yet Al Gore and Hansen want to blame us for this?  Like we caused it?  Like it's even a bad thing?

What MORONS.

Read my first link below, then ask yourself the obvious:  Why is it that Hansen once blamed global COOLING on man-made carbon dioxide?  Al Gore answered this in his "Inconvenient Truth" movie, near the beginning.  He stated clearly that he has been trying since 1982 to get a Carbon Tax.

And Bill Clinton explained the true agenda two days ago, when he said we must 'slow down the American economy to fight global warming'.  By slowing American productivity, we are only SHIFTING IT TO CHINA, not reducing anything!

In fact, making the same products in China creates MORE pollution, since they have poor pollution controls!

It's all a huge Socialist game to hurt the US economically.

Answer 13

Good luck.  There isn't any.