The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #87391   Message #2679583
Posted By: Amos
13-Jul-09 - 09:16 PM
Thread Name: BS: Where's the Global Warming
Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
Well, it was only a few posts upthread, BB, that all warming was being roundly denied.

There are two arguments that support the greenhouse causation theory. One is the difference in the increase between day and night, which shows more pronounced warming at night because radiation is escaping less due to greenhouse gases.

A second is the difference in rate of the Arctic declines.

"...computer models predicted that greenhouse gases would cause a particular pattern of temperature change. It was different from what might be caused by other external influences, such as solar variations. The observed geographical pattern of change did in fact bear a rough resemblance to the computers' greenhouse effect maps. "It is likely that this trend is partially due to human activities," the researchers concluded, "although many uncertainties remain."(43) Even before it was published, the finding impressed the community of climate scientists. In an important 1995 report, the world's leading experts offered the "fingerprint" as evidence that greenhouse warming was probably underway. The leader of the team at Lawrence Livermore Lab that found the "fingerprint," Benjamin Santer, helped write the summary of this report, and he was deeply hurt when a few skeptics attacked not only the statement but his personal scientific integrity. (By 2006, when the warming had progressed considerably farther and the computer models were much improved, his judgment was confirmed. A thorough analysis concluded that there was scarcely a 5% chance that anything but humans had brought the changes observed in many regions of the world.)(43a)"

Further:

Data from various locations in Alaska, published in 1986, showed that the top 100 meters of permafrost was anomalously warm compared with deeper layers. The only possible cause was a rise of average Arctic air temperature by a few degrees since the last century, with the heat gradually seeping down into the earth.(45) In a burst of enthusiasm during the 1990s, scientists took the temperature of hundreds of deep boreholes in rock layers around the planet. The averages gave a clear signal of a global warming over the last few centuries, accelerating in the 20th century. A still more important example of the far-flung efforts was a series of heroic expeditions that labored high into the thin air of the Andes and even Tibet, hauling drill rigs onto tropical ice caps. The hard-won data showed again that the warming in the last few decades exceeded anything seen for thousands of years before. The ice caps themselves, which had endured since the last ice age, were melting away faster than the scientists could measure them.(46)

FInallly, Gore is basing his information not on some private agenda of profit but on the reports from the Inter-Governmental Panal on Climate Change. You can look over the same historical and physical analysis data he is using here, for example.

You ad hominem slurs do not contribute to the discussion or clarify anything at all.