Korean Job Discussion Forums

[visitorq]

[Manner of Speaking]

It takes more than C02 to make a plant grow. Plants don't live alone, they live in ecological communities that are closely interconnected. Adding C02 to a terrarium might make one plant grow a little bigger...but the problem is plants are also critically dependent on temperature and moisture levels. If you take a cactus out of the desert and plant it in a rainforest, it doesn't grow like crazy. It expands, swells with water, bursts, and dies. It is unable, as a single individual, to adapt to what to it is a catastrophic change in its environment. Ecosystems are the same way. They need time - thousands, if not millions of years - to adapt successfully to changing conditions.

[visitorq]

[Manner of Speaking]

Gopher, if someone claims that an airplane didn't really crash into the Pentagon, that it was actually a missile, you would still have to account for the fact that 150 passengers don't exist anymore. Regardless of whatever other evidence or arguments that are made for the supposition. Earth scientists and biologists around the world are observing rapid changes in glacier sizes, arctic marine ice, changes in species populations, migration patterns, etc, and they are continuing to do so. Economists are able to accurately measure the amount of fossil fuels that have been and are being consumed, and earth scientists have and are accurately measuring the percentage change in C02 in the Earth's atmosphere. That extra C02 has to be coming from somewhere. And the only thing that accounts for the volume of extra C02 is fossil fuel emissions.

As one poster earlier put it, the capacity for extra C02 to alter the insulating qualities of atmospheric gases is a given. It can be demonstrated in the laboratory, it's basic physics. In fact, you don't even need to measure atmospheric C02 concentration changes directly, you can forecast them accurately by simply accounting for total annual and accumulated fossil fuel consumption. Adding C02 to the atmosphere, warms the atmosphere. Warming the atmosphere, changes ecosystems. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

[Junior]

The fact is the scientific consensus on climate change has been reached through the publication of thousands of peer-reviewed papers, field research and the lifetime�s work of some of humanity�s best minds. It�s obvious these emails didn�t even go through a spell-check let alone the rigorous peer-review process. Contrary to what the skeptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, NASA and the world�s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth.

�Redefine the peer-reviewed literature!� . Nobody actually gets to do that, and both papers discussed in that comment � McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and Kalnay and Cai (2003) were both cited and discussed in Chapter 2 of the IPCC AR4 report. As an aside, neither has stood the test of time.
�Declines� in the MXD record. This decline was hidden written up in Nature in 1998 where the authors suggested not using the post 1960 data. Their actual programs (in IDL script), unsurprisingly warn against using post 1960 data. Added: Note that the �hide the decline� comment was made in 1999 � 10 years ago, and has no connection whatsoever to more recent instrumental records.
http://www.realclimate.org/

[Fox]