Here is my last post before my trip. It comes from John Moore. For every post you can make one way, I can find another saying just he opposite. That is because most of this is conjecture. Opinions are opinions and you can believe what ever you choose to believe...
The global warming alarmists look to the UN's IPCC report (which comes out periodically) for the best scientific information on the subject. The report has an executive summary, which is highly edited in a political manner, and which is the only thing reported in the press. The main body of the report, which is written by the actual scientific committee is much less alarmist and expresses great uncertainty.
The Kyoto treaty is a fraud, and its proponents know it.... read on....
If you put the Kyoto treaty into the IPCC computer model, you find that the difference Kyoto would make by 2100 (the normal benchmark year) cannot be measured. That is, the predicted change in global average temperature (or pick your parameter) is so small that one could not tell, by looking at the temperature data, whether or not Kyoto had been in effect for 100 years. Looked at another way, Kyoto does not end anthropogenic warming, but only slows it down by 6 years out of 100.
If you pin down a knowledgeable Kyoto advocate and ask them about this, they will (if they are honest) admit that this is true. You will then learn that the purpose of Kyoto is "to get a climate control regime started." Translated, this means "to stop anthropogenic global warming, we must make drastic cuts in CO2 usage in the future. But those will be enormously economically damaging and are not politically possible. So, we will start with a little step. Then we will do another little step, and eventually sneak the whole thing in." Of course, one may also notice that Kyoto was written in a way to hurt the United States to the benefit of western Europe, China and India.
And remember, this is all based on computer models. So back to the "science..."
Consider the models. The climatological global circulation models (GCM's) suffer from a number of problems. They do not come anywhere closes to modelling the atmospheric physics at high temporal and spatial resolution, much less oceanographic physics and biological processes - all of which are very significant. For atmospheric and oceanographics, the fundamental equations are all known and can at least be modelled at low resolution. Biological effects are much less well understood.
Furthermore, models essentially simulate weather, which is known to be chaotic. However, climate may not be chaotic, so the modellers make the assumption that over the long term (climate) the chaos balances out. This assumption may or may not be valid. In any case, the data is are most certainly wrong at any point in space/time during a model run, because at any particular point, you are looking at weather, not climate! In addition, physics based models cannot predict the past 150 years (which is how long we have primary temperature records for).
But models, because they are dealing with chaotic phenomenon and also do not have the computing power to resolve small time or distance scales, are "parameterized." Parameterization means that one throws in a number or vector or array or whatever to account for something to hard to model. For example, the topography cannot be modelled at a lot of spatial detail, so you might have a tweak that "accounts for" how rough it is in a grid volume. Naturally, selecting these numbers is rather difficult, and controversial. As a result, one can sit around and tweak models to say all sorts of different things, just by fiddling with the paramters. So of course, the first challenge is to tweak it to show the past. Now a model which shows the last 150 years is achievable with this tweaking, but there is no reason to believe it will predict next year, much less 100 years into the future! There are too many parameters, and there are no doubt a very large set of parameter sets which would predict the past, with wildly different futures. Thus the tendency is to end up with models chosen by selection bias rather than science.
Furthermore, an assertion was made above that the temperature matches well the CO2 increase in the atmosphere (which has been substantial - mankind has increased the CO2 by about one third). But this is simply not true. Most of the temperature rise took place before most of the CO2 increase. Then the temperature settled down, and then rose rapidly the last 10 or 20 years. This does NOT match the CO2 concentration trend, which is far smoother.
Additionally, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas. It is only 375 (or so) parts per million in the atmosphere. A far more significant greenhouse gas is water vapor, which has a much higher concentration. So be sure not to run your hydrogen powered cars... they produce water vapor!
The fact that water vapor is so significant greatly complicates the modelling, because the it may cause a positive or negative feedback as CO2 is increased. Also, as another poster mentioned, condensed water, in the form of water or ice clouds, has powerful greenhouse effects, and whether the sign is positive or negative depends on droplet size and whether it is ice or not! Now the models have to somehow tell us what the clouds are going to be like through the next 100 years.
Of course, climatologists are not content with using just the last 150 years of data, since in climatological time scales it is not enough from which to draw valid conclusions. Hence they also use paleoclimatological techniques in an attempt to construct both the CO2 and temperature records into the past. Unfortunately, these techniques are not very good. They rely on chains of assumptions and also use very sparsely sampled data. One favorite is tree rings, which are really nifty because one can get precision in time measurement down to the year or better. But whether a tree ring is wide or narrow depends on many factors, such as temperature, rainfall, fire, mean cloudiness, nutrient competition, sunlight competition and even CO2 concentration. Hence the paleoclimatic data is pretty unreliable. Ice cores have their own problems, and of course sample only tiny spots on earth.
Finally, regarding Kyoto, if the science shown above hasn't convinced you that it is an extremely dumb idea, consider that for it to achieve its neglible effects, mankind must behave itself for the next 100 years. No major wars, no big energy using rogue nations, no technological changes that invalidate the assumptions, etc. So just imagine that it is 1903 and we have the same data and are trying to achieve the same results. What would happen?
Obviously, the enormous political and technological changes of the 20th century would have rendered it moot. WW-I, WW-II, the rise of the huge communist states which had zero interest in reducing pollution, the huge increase in oil use, the invention of the computer, the atomic bomb, relativity theory..... Do we really expect the 21st century to be so boring and predictable that Kyoto would be meaningful after 100 years, given past history?
