Quote:
Originally Posted by spot1234
I too have raised questions that are still awaiting answers, such as why are arctic and alpine regions warming more then other areas if the change is due to extra evaporation from man made sources?
The point is your denying that there is hard evidence, and there is; the spectrograph. The fact that you don't believe is irrelevant, its true and it has shown to be true.
Your point with the sun was not some random mistake. Reading your post it seems that untill yesterday your whole objection to AGW is based on the fact that the sun does not emit enough IR to effect the climate. It seems to me that you were implying that most of the energy that we think CO2 absorbs just passes straight through the atmosphere and this fact is not accounted for by the AGW crowd. true I make mistakes as well, but you have to admit that you're hardly qualified to say whether or not enough data exists to make a judgment.
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Fair enough. Lets talk about AGW. I will attempt to answer your questions.
Para 1: You asked BestTimesNow (page 7 of this thread, 15 July) about Arctic and Alpine regions. Climate models suggest that polar regions should warm more quickly than temperate or tropical regions because the cold temperatures cause the air to be very dry. The low amounts of water vapor, (the most important greenhouse gas), causes the relative effects of other gases, such as CO2, to be greater. Thus climate change caused by an increase in CO2 should be most evident in the polar regions. I agree the temperature does appear to have risen slightly more in the Arctic and Northern Hemisphere mountainous regions, but not the Antarctic or, as far as I can make out, Southern Hemisphere mountainous regions. My answer to your question is that this observed temperature increase is more likely to have been caused by increased levels of soot (Black Carbon), causing a change in albedo, which has a larger effect than that of CO2. The reason that the Northern regions are more affected is - in my opinion - due to the fact that there is a larger concentration of industrial areas in that part of the planet.
Para 2: I am really not sure what you are getting at here. A spectrograph shows the chemical constitution of a gas by 'separating out' the different radiation wavelengths. It will therefore show, for example, what gasses make up a distant star. It will show that CO2 is present in the tested unit. Of course I believe that. What point are you making?
Para 3: No. You are wrong in your assessment of my problem with the AGW brigade. My problem has nothing to do with a lack of absorption of CO2. I have always admitted that CO2 is a GHG (see my posts of 11 July and 12 July). I will even reproduce something I wrote to Windguy, who called me a denier:
"By the way, I don't DENY that GW exists; I don't DENY that AGW exists and I don't DENY that CC exists. I just don't feel the need to panic over it and I just don't see the need to spend trillions of dollars on Kyoto policies. I firmly believe that mankind should stop wasting energy, but for reasons of efficiency, not fear."
My problem with AGW brigade is this: I do not agree that CO2 is the DRIVING factor behind GW (or CC) and, therefore, is not the ogre it is made out to be in terms of AGW. The hype surrounding CO2 has been extreme, and has been fuelled by the media and certain politicians.
Now here's a few questions for you:
1) Why can't computer modellers put historical data into the models and come up with the actual data we have today?
2) Why has the global temperature not risen relatively in accordance with the measured CO2 rise?
Cheers for now.