Tarheel Red

I’ve moved back and forth on the whole Global Warming thing for a number of years.  I remember sitting in an office cafeteria 13 years ago reading an article in the Minneapolis paper.  They were talking about how the pine forest of northern Minnesota would turn into prairie with a simple 1 or 2 degree change in the global temperature.

I bought it.

Then as the years moved on, I began to listen to wailing from the Left and, combined with their “solutions” came to the conclusion the whole thing was a “hoax”.  The Left isn’t interested in saving the planet anymore than BP is.  Rather, the Left is interested in using the phenomenon as a platform to continue policies that involve more and more taxation combined with more and more distribution.  Morals and ethics through legislation.  Never mind the fact that a 2% vig isn’t bad either.

Now, however, I’ve come to accept a couple of things:

1. Literally, the world’s temperature is getting warmer
2. This would be true had man never existed
3. CO2 is a green house gas that contributes to increase heat
4. Man is contributing to increased levels of CO2 and therefore, the earth is warmer than it otherwise might be.
5. This man made warmth is minimal and has little to no significant impact on the affects of natural warming.

I think that if sat down, coffee in hand, most people would accept that position.  The only reason that people would completely deny the fact that we’re warming is because the Left has made it a binary proposition:

1. You are a denier who ignores science and thinks that dinosaurs roamed the earth 700-800 years ago.
2. You are “all-in” and think that we need to tax the economy into the stone age, you know, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Anyway, every now and then little bits of data come floating by that support this position of mine.  For me.  In my own way.  And the Coyote does an AWESOME job of explaining those bits:

It is possible for the theory that the climate has a high sensitivity to CO2 (ie that a doubling of CO2 concentrations will lead to global temperature increases of 2.5C or higher) to be correct while still having ten years of flat to declining surface temperatures.  That is because Earth’s great surface heat reservoir is the oceans, not the atmosphere, and so the extra heat from the greenhouse effect could be going into the oceans rather than into near-surface air.

However, it is NOT possible, as least as we (and by “we” I mean everyone, skeptics and alarmists alike) understand the climate, for CO2 to be holding a lot of extra heat and it not show up either in surface temperatures or ocean heat content.  The greenhouse effect does not turn off — its effects may be masked in the chaotic weather systems, perhaps for years, but if the climate sensitivity to CO2 is really as high as the IPCC says, there has to be new heat going somewhere.

Here, the Coyote quotes a study from Jo Nova:

In short, though, we have seen no rise in measured ocean heat content since we started measuring with technology dedicated to the task.  This means, if those who believe the climate has a high sensitivity to CO2 are right, something like 50,000 quintillion joules of energy have gone missing since 2003.  This is the “missing heat”, and though climate scientists sometimes discuss it in private, they almost never do so in public.  Ocean heat is the dinosaur bone fossil that the creationists simply don’t want to acknowledge.

See, in order to maintain the hysteria, sell books and movies, the alarmists have to create models that fit their narrative.  They create a system that describes the climate in such a way as to show their story has been and will continue to be, right.

But the data doesn’t support it.