Mankind Is the Main Cause of Global Warming

Thank you Con for this debate. Solar Activity (SA) Contrary to what Con claims, the intensity of the Sun has dipped (16) Of particular import are these parts: "It is curious that the theory depends so much on sparse information " what we know about the climates on other planets and their history " yet its proponents resolutely ignore the most compelling evidence against the notion. Over the last fifty years, the sun"s output has decreased slightly: it is radiating less heat. We can measure the various activities of the sun pretty accurately from here on Earth, or from orbit above it, so it is hard to ignore the discrepancy between the facts and the sceptical argument that the sun is causing the rise in temperatures. ... Pluto: the warming exhibited by Pluto is not really understood. Pluto"s seasons are the least understood of all: its existence has only been known for a third of its 248 -year orbit, and it has never been visited by a space probe. The "evidence" for climate change consists of just two observations made in 1988 and 2002. That"s equivalent to observing the Earth"s weather for just three weeks out of the year." In addition, let's consider the Sun's intensity in the variation of the "brightness", it's nonetheless too small to account for the earth's recent warming (17), measuring at only 0.1% over an 11 year solar cycle: " "The small measured changes in solar output and variations from one decade to the next are only on the order of a fraction of a percent, and if you do the calculations not even large enough to really provide a detectable signal in the surface temperature record," said Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann." According to NCDC, the earth's base temperature, without greenhouse warming is 0"F, or -18"C. The amount of warming due to GH effect at ~1900C.E. is 57"F (32"C) (18). There has been a .74"C increase in temp over 110 years, and is rising at the rate of .13 , or 1.56"C/century recently: "Global surface temperatures have increased about 0.74"C (plus or minus 0.18"C) since the late"19th century, and the linear trend for the past 50 years of 0.13"C (plus or minus 0.03"C) per decade is nearly twice that for the past 100 years. The warming has not been globally uniform. Some areas (including parts of the southeastern U.S. and parts of the North Atlantic) have, in fact, cooled slightly over the last century. The recent warmth has been greatest over North America and Eurasia between 40 and 70"N. Lastly, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1995." The percent change in temperature over the last 110 years is .74"C/32"C = +2.3%, and the change in solar radiance has increased (19): "Since the late 1970s, the amount of solar radiation the sun emits, during times of quiet sunspot activity, has increased by nearly .05 percent per decade, according to a NASA funded study." The extrapolated amount of change in solar radiance in the last 110 years is + .55%. The ratio of change of temperature to the rate of change of solar radiance is 2.3%/.55% = 4.2 times as fast. Not only that, but the rate of change of temperature is increasing. Now compare these two graphs, the first is the changes to solar radiance over the last 150 years (20), and then the temperature change(21). The SR baseline is flat and the TC baseline is rising, thus, solar output and global temp over a 150 year period shows no correlation, and there is a 4.2 times greater increase in TC than solar output. So SR can, at most, only account for less than 25% of the total increase in temperature over the last 110 years. Troposphere Temperature and Cooling (TT) (TC) On the subject of the troposphere, I will point out that the TT decreases with altitude. With a more energetic dynamic occurring in the troposphere due to heating, or overall energy increase, the higher and lower altitude air will mix more and the resultant surface temps will appear cooler even though the overall heat content of the troposphere has increased! On Con's source 6 (which, incidentally, comes from a denier site), please observe Con's accompanying graph the length of line the "cooling" is based on. The overall graph shows data consistent with longer term warming. By taking the shorter time frame that the author does (11 years), the graph can be interpreted, for the years 1979 " 1989, to show an even more dramatic cooling effect, even though the long term trend including that time frame is warming. Ten years or so, periods are not relevant, contrary to what the author tries to show. Another method of TC is by the energy expended in increasingly energetic storm systems. These systems have a net cooling effect on the troposphere, as explained in Con's very own [6]: "I have to wonder whether the atmosphere is currently in a destabilized state. I doubt that surface temperatures anomalies are as anomalously low as the mid-troposphere temperatures are running, which in combination with anomalously cold mid- and upper-tropospheric temperatures means there is extra energy available for storms. " Oceans and PDO Con claims the oceans are losing heat and that the PDO is "in a cool cycle". However, this is due to an unusually intense el Nino in 1998, which produced the overall heating, as there is a great lag effect to el Nino of several years. Of course there is cooling as the ocean returns to homostasis. Furthermore, Con's "Examiner" link that he uses to support his claim is extremely suspect, because the whole report is not included in the link Con gives, and leaves out the part where the author of the research doesn"t claim the cooling is long term, but is a possible short term anomaly, and also the author of the Examiner article fudged and discarded data that did not fit his hypothesis. To quote a comment from said article: "I couldn"t help but notice that your article follows the NASA article almost exactly (though not literally copying from it) and the graphs on your article are also present in the NASA article. But the strange thing is " besides some misquoting, ie Takmong Wong never said the cooling could be due to melting Arctic sea ice " that you don"t finish the story that it turned out there was a problem with the measurements and thus there was no global cooling. You just leave the most important thing out!" As pointed out earlier in my R3, Con has relied on confirmed climate deniers who aren't even climatologists and also is guilty of relying on outdated data, as BobC also points out about the Examiner article in the sixth comment down. La Nina has been the influence for ocean cooling since 2006 (22), which paints a considerably different picture on Con's argument. Notice that el Nino didn"t return until 2009, and is not included in Con's studies which only date UP TO 2009. Also note that whatever the ocean temps, it is a red herring. The global temps are still increasing dramatically, and furthermore, no one knows what affects ocean temperatures reliably. On a side note, the author of this article that Con links to for his ocean temperature arguments ALSO predicted that Arctic ice levels would begin to increase, based on his interpretation of the ocean temp papers. His predictions were wrong. What does that tell us about the veracity of his ocean temp arguments? Conclusion That humans are the main cause of global warming is overwhelmingly evident, and SA alone isn't enough. Sources: (16) http://www.skepticalscience.com... (17) http://www.livescience.com... (18) http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov... (19) http://www.nasa.gov... (20) http://www.nasa.gov... (21) http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov... (22) http://en.wikipedia.org...