Mankind Is Not the Main Cause of Global Warming

In this round, I will post arguments against an anthropogenic cause to the recent global warming, and also consider as much as I can of my opponent's argument. Arguments Against Human-Caused Global Warming There are many indicators that point to CO2 emissions not being the cause of the modern global warming. First, CO2 is actually a lagging indicator compared to temperature. As it turns out, temperature may be what's causing CO2 levels to rise. "The most recent study on this concluded that the results of their tedious but meticulous analysis led them to ultimately conclude that "the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 +/- 200 years. " There is also shorter correlations, but again, temperature seems to cause CO2 rise instead of the reverse. [1][2]This graph shows just one of the lags: Second, according to the greenhouse effect, global warming should be starting from the lower atmosphere and moving to the surface (because the CO2 collects in the upper troposphere first). However, this is not happening. ". .. satellite and high-altitude balloon data confirm that the lower atmosphere is not trapping lots of additional heat due to higher CO2 concentrations. It is hard to know how fast the Earth's highly variable surface is warming, but it is warming faster than the lower atmosphere where the CO2 is accumulating. This is strong evidence that CO2 is not the primary climate factor. "[3]Here is a graph showing how the surface has warmed more than the troposphere: (The blue line is lower tropospheric temperatures)Third, global warming is not starting at the poles like it should be, by the greenhouse theory. In fact, there has been general, relative cooling: "If the greenhouse theory were valid, temperatures in the Arctic and the Antarctic would have risen several degrees Celsius since 1940 due to the huge emissions of man-made CO2. .. Recently, a team led by the University of Chicago's Peter Doran published a paper in Nature saying, 'Although previous reports suggest recent continental warming, our spatial analysis of Antarctic meteorological data demonstrates a net cooling on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000'. The data from 21 Antarctic surface stations show an average continental decline of 0.008 degrees C from 1978 to 1998, and the infrared data from satellites operating since 1979 show a decline of 0.42 degrees C per decade. David W. J. Thompson of Colorado State University and Susan Soloman of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration also report a cooling trend in the Antarctic interior. "[3][4]To illustrate, here is a picture of the southern hemisphere sea ice anomaly, which shows that southern sea ice is actually increasing: [5] Fourth, current levels of CO2 have very little effect on temperature. The greenhouse effect certainly exists, but it doesn't become linearly stronger with increasing amounts of CO2. CO2's effect on temperature is logarithmic, meaning that each additional increase has a smaller effect on the climate than the last. "The carbon that is already up in the atmosphere absorbs most of the light it can. CO2 only soaks up its favorite wavelengths of light and it's close to its saturation point. It manages to grab a bit more light from wavelengths that are close to its favorite bands but it can't do much more, because there are not many left-over photons at the right wavelengths. " This has to do with how CO2's absorption spectrum overlaps with water vapor's. [1][6][7]This chart shows approximately the effect that each additional increment of CO2 increase has on temperature: Note how the pre-industrial to modern level increase has had less than a 0.2 C increase in temperature. Fifth and most importantly, the predicted "hot-spot" 10 miles above the tropics that would be a signature of CO2-induced global warming is absent. "The computer models show that greenhouse warming will cause a hot-spot at an altitude between 8 and 12 km over the tropics between 30 N and 30 S. The temperature at this hot-spot is projected to increase at a rate of two to three times faster than at the surface. However, the Hadley Centre's real-world plot of radiosonde temperature observations shown below does not show the projected CO2 induced global warming hot-spot at all. The predicted hot-spot is entirely absent from the observational record. This shows that atmosphere warming theory programmed into climate models are wrong. "[1]Here is the plot of predicted temperature changes due to CO2: However, here is the actual observed temperature changes: The hot spot is completely missing, which is pretty much a knockout blow to the anthropogenic global warming theory. However, the correlation isn't even there. See the below graph: In case the graph's methodology is questioned, consider this: “The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming. ”[8] Surely these periods should have been warmer. Surely some other factor did not outweigh CO2 by that much. Even climate sensitivity cannot account for something as drastic as that. Further, CO2 concentrations have been much higher - as much as 7000 ppm in the Cambrian period. I'm not going to argue that humans have not caused the CO2 increase, but it kind of shows how an increase of 100 ppm is rather insignificant. Even if the graph is analyzed, the correlation just isn't there. Even so, again, CO2 seems to lag temperature changes anyway. As for humidity, it is, in fact, decreasing. “This shows that the actual water vapor content in the upper troposphere has declined by 13.7% (best fit line) from 1948 to 2012 at the 400 mb pressure level. The climate models predict that humidity will increase in the upper troposphere, but the data shows a large decrease; just where water vapor changes have the greatest effect on global temperatures. ”[1] This graph shows this: The two feedbacks, water vapor feedback and cloud feedback, are weak. The fact that humidity is decreasing negates the former. However, even if the humidity were increasing, more lower level clouds would form, which block sunlight from reaching the Earth, essentially negating the warming effect of the water vapor. Further, while higher numbers of cirrus clouds (which supposedly would increase in the scenario) cause warming, what has actually been found was that cirrus clouds were decreasing in number. “What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere into outer space. .. "it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent. ”[1][9][10] Finally, global warming is not happening unbelievably fast. “Temperature changes recorded in the GISP2 ice core . .. show that the global warming experienced during the past century pales into insignificance when compared to the magnitude of profound climate reversals over the past 25,000 years. In addition, small temperature changes of up to a degree or so, similar to those observed in the 20th century record, occur persistently throughout the ancient climate record. ”[1][11] This graph shows this: It doesn't look different than all the rest of the warmings. It even looks rather moderate. The Consensus The problem with any consensus argument, no matter how strong, is that science does not work by consensus. Michael Crichton has said, “Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. ”[1] There have been many false consensuses in history. Heliocentrism, evolution, the big bang theory, continental drift, and even climate change itself used to be ridiculed by the majority of scientists. There's no reason why this consensus should be believed above all of the other false ones. Even so, the consensus is based off of a misrepresentation of the data, and a selective look at studies. Over 31,000 scientists (with at least a Bachelors' degree in relevant fields, and over 9000 PhDs) have signed a petition saying that global warming is not anthropogenic. “Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it. A book I own (but unfortunately don't have access to at this moment) cites over 500 studies that don't believe in the whole global warming edifice, showing various inconsistencies in the hockey stick graph (i. e. the 1500-year cycle), that the sun causes global warming, and that CO2 cannot be causing global warming, other things. [3][12][13][14] Conclusion There are many arguments against the anthropogenic global warming theory, and there are many problems with the assumptions it makes. The consensus is based off of a false understanding of how scientific hypotheses are supported, and isn't even true anyway. Overall, the anthropogenic global warming theory does not hold water against its own assumptions and predictions. Sources Sources in comments.