It Just Doesn't Matter

Many people still deny that 1) the Earth's surface is warming; and 2) human activity is causing it through emissions of greenhouse gases (CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, etc.). I ceased paying attention to such folks in the mid-1990s. Global warming is an outcome of changes in the basic chemistry and physics of the Earth's atmosphere. If somebody refuses to believe the science, it makes me wonder how they think the internal combustion in their car works. By magic? Maybe they think the internal combustion engine was a gift from God

Humans are what they are, but physics doesn't care. So I consider this latest result on changes in the Earth's atmosphere to be redundant. Nonetheless, the effort by scientists to "sell" anthropogenic climate change to politicians and the public continues. Science Daily reported on the global warming clincher in Human-Caused Climate Change Signal Emerges from the Noise—

By comparing simulations from 20 different computer models to satellite observations, Lawrence Livermore climate scientists and colleagues from 16 other organizations have found that tropospheric and stratospheric temperature changes are clearly related to human activities.

The team looked at geographical patterns of atmospheric temperature change over the period of satellite observations. The team's goal of the study was to determine whether previous findings of a "discernible human influence" on tropospheric and stratospheric temperature were sensitive to current uncertainties in climate models and satellite data.

The troposphere is the lowest portion of earth's atmosphere. The stratosphere sits just above the troposphere, between 6 and 30 miles above earth's surface.

The satellite temperature data sets were produced by three different research groups, and rely on measurements of the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules. Each group made different choices in processing these raw measurements, and in accounting for such complex effects as drifts in satellite orbits and in instrument calibrations.

The new climate model simulations analyzed by the team will form the scientific backbone of the upcoming 5th assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is due out in 2014.

In both satellite observations and the computer model simulations of historical climate change, the lower stratosphere cools markedly over the past 33 years. This cooling is primarily a response to the human-caused depletion of stratospheric ozone. The observations and model simulations also show a common pattern of large-scale warming of the lower troposphere, with largest warming over the Arctic, and muted warming (or even cooling) over Antarctica.

Tropospheric warming is mainly driven by human-caused increases in well-mixed greenhouse gases.

"It's very unlikely that purely natural causes can explain these distinctive patterns of temperature change," said Laboratory atmospheric scientist Benjamin Santer, who is lead author of the paper appearing in the Nov. 29 online edition of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"No known mode of natural climate variability can cause sustained, global-scale warming of the troposphere and cooling of the lower stratosphere."

There you go. You could send this post to your denier friends and family. Or not. You could tell them to take their heads out of their asses. You could tell them to piss up a rope. Whatever. It doesn't matter what you tell them. It doesn't matter what they think.

It just doesn't matter.

 

Comments

[Oliver]

Thanks Dave, especially for the clip. I now know what to play on a loop at full volume as the sun finally dips over the horizon for me and my fellow bipedal imbeciles.