Um, well yeah. The temperatures on different planets are very different, even at the same pressure - as you'd expect, given all the other differences, like distance from the Sun, cloud cover, chemical composition and who knows what else. I'm really not sure where you're going with all this. It certainly doesn't show that "the chemistry of the atmosphere makes almost no difference." It just shows that there are a lot of factors that determine temperature. The pressure may be "apples to apples" but nothing else is.

And of course the temperature goes up & down with the pressure at different altitudes; that's the Pressure-Temperature law I linked to earlier. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see what any of this has to do with the Greenhouse Gas effect.

What's different about CO2 compared to the other, stronger greenhouse gases like water vapour and methane is that it accumulates over a long time.

Water vapour is a stable quantity in the atmosphere (for a given temperature). Any excess simply precipitates out as rain. It doesn't increase, at least not until you start warming the air up.

Methane does accumulate, for a while - but it is broken down by UV light over a period of years, so it has only a short term effect as well. It can still be a problem (e.g. if melting permafrost like the Siberian Traps releases significant methane into the atmosphere, which is a real concern and could trigger other warming feedbacks), but it doesn't build up over a long time, so any direct effects of a methane pulse are short-lived.

CO2 takes centuries to be removed from the atmosphere. This is done by vegetation, to a small extent, but the vast majority of CO2 uptake is done by the ocean. Even so, this is a slow process. CO2 has been building up rapidly in our atmosphere, and even if we stopped emitting ALL anthropogenic CO2 tomorrow, it would still take centuries to return to pre-industrial levels. Worse, much of that CO2 being absorbed by the oceans is being converted to carbonic acid, which is resulting in ocean acidification - a decreasing pH that we've been observing for some time, and is already having measurable results on sensitive ocean ecosystems.

Yep, that looks like a useful graph. It's certainly clear that water vapour has a bigger effect - but the primary point here is that CO2 also blocks outgoing energy. It's in addition to the effect of water vapour. Water doesn't "black out" the effect of CO2, it adds to it, trapping more energy.

While the water vapour effect is bigger, the CO2 effect is added to this - and that is steadily increasing, as the CO2 in our atmosphere increases. This is enough extra trapped energy to change the temperature equilibrium of our planet; we've done the maths. See e.g. Myhre '98 for how this is forcing value is derived, while Puckrin '04 compares our radiative flux models for a variety of greenhouse gas mixes with atmospheric observations, and finds them to agree well.

Have a look here for a comparison of the radiative forcing values of the significant greenhouse gases, particularly the Greenhouse Gases section and this graph; you'll note that CO2 has the dominant effect. Note also that water vapour isn't considered a forcing (cause of change) - while it traps more energy than CO2, that effect isn't increasing or decreasing - it's stable, because the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is stable, and therefore is not a direct factor in the increase in temperatures we've been seeing.

However, if something else (like CO2) starts warming the planet, the warmer atmosphere will then hold a little more water vapour, which will increase its effect - in which case it will make the pre-existing warming effect stronger, as a feedback rather than a forcing.

It's not just "my" premise; it's accepted by the vast majority of climatologists and atmospheric scientists. The specific percentage of CO2 is not the issue; the effect of it is, and the changes in that percentage & effect.

Sure, because there can be other causes of warming besides CO2, such as orbital cycles. And this warming can trigger the release of CO2, e.g. warming oceans hold less dissolved CO2. So when something else warms the planet, CO2 release follows soon after - and then amplifies the warming through the greenhouse effect. 90% of the warming follows after the CO2 release. But none of this prevents CO2 from causing warming, if we release it into the atmosphere ourselves.

There have been such times in the distant past, yes - but solar output was significantly lower then. CO2 isn't the only driver of climate - solar output is of course a major factor, as are orbital variations. The last time CO2 was around 400 ppm was about 3M years ago, for a few thousand years - and temperatures then were about 2-3 degrees higher than now.

So don't listen to Al Gore. He's another example of that bad reporting I was talking about. Ignore the "progressive political elements" too. But don't let political biases blind you to what the science is saying!

Don't listen to Al Gore or Anthony Watts or even me - listen only to the papers that are cited. The deniers insist the alarmists are making it all up... who cares, only the science is important. If you read the cited papers themselves you'll find a refreshing lack of politics, unlike all the noise around the subject. Once a clear picture of what's actually happening is obtained, then we can worry about what to do about it (which is certainly political).

As for shutting people out of the discussion, that obviously hasn't happened - there's more noise on both sides than ever. But within the scientific circles, there's only one criteria for whether you get a voice - you have to have data to back your conclusion, obtained by solid methodology that passes review by your expert peers. If you don't have solid data, you don't get to publish doubtful conclusions. You'll have to agree that's for the best.

Anyway, this discussion's been fun & all, but I've spent way too much time writing all this out and finding appropriate citations. Please do read at least the abstracts and conclusions. If you don't find those convincing, then nothing else I say will help. Best of luck with it all.

Of course; there are other greenhouse gases too.

Citation most definitely needed for that claim.

Obviously, but distance from the sun only affects the level of incoming energy, not outgoing radiated energy. And it's also obvious that pressure affects temperature. This goes back to the 1700s. But this doesn't trap heat.

Where greenhouse gases make a difference is because they allow most of the incoming radiation to pass (which from our sun is primarily in the optical spectrum, and CO2 is invisible to optical light), but they block a significant amount of the outgoing radiation, much which has been absorbed then re-radiated at black-body temperatures, i.e. in the infra-red range.

If you don't like the Skeptical Science site, don't read it - just read the cited sources (that's what I've been telling you to do all along, if you recall). I merely provided the page as it has a good list of relevant papers, but if you can't even bear to go near it, I'm happy to list them here for you.

Show many any reputable atmospheric scientist who is questioning the basic science of the greenhouse effect. I'll concede that there are still ignorant people in the world who aren't up to speed on this, but if you want to include any old uninformed opinion, then there are still people who question whether the earth is round.. Let's not muddy the discussion by being over-literal, yes? Context matters. This is centuries-old science, dating back to the 1820s.

Now I think you're being disingenuous. When I said there was no question about the effect of CO2, I was clearly referring specifically to the well-established greenhouse effect, and there is pretty much no controversy about that in scientific circles (I'm largely ignoring uninformed opinion outside that, as I don't see that as relevant to the science). And as I said, there is still debate about how much this effect translates into increased temperatures on the surface.

Now you're going all straw-man on me. I'm not "simply dismissing" anything. I've provided citations to peer-reviewed papers for every single claim I've made - which is far more than you've been doing, I might add - and the few links you've provided have not challenged anything I've said, or even backed your own claims.

Let's start seeing some actual citations for your claims, because this conversation is ending up as one-sided as all the others. I've spent enough time providing you with verified evidence, and all you've done so far is change the subject.

The new link does show corrections to a single satellite dataset - but there's nothing there even faintly close to the 0.6 degrees/year you were claiming. There are both positive and negative corrections that are a fraction of that, as they discover and account for factors like orbital decay.

There is your citation. Don't be stubborn or proud. It will undermine your intellectual credibility. Admit that and move on ;-)

Perhaps you should engage in further study, then - and until then, you'll have to accept that this evidence has been audited by expert reviewers, both before and after publication; by people who have enough experience in the field to understand what heat content is. This is how science works in every field.

That said, I don't understand your confusion. How would a temperature figure help here? Do you just want to see an overall degrees/year amount so you can decide subjectively if it's "significant" or not? It's rather more complicated than that.

That's because you're calculating from incomplete data. The 200 Gt/year ice loss figure I quoted was an estimate from a single paper that dealt only with the major ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. To get a more accurate figure for all the sea level rise inputs, you also have to factor in the melting glaciers everywhere else in the world. This is further complicated by the fact that ice melt in different areas can contribute quite differently to sea level rise (e.g. if it's floating, or if shrinking ice extent decreases albedo, resulting in warmer water and thus more moisture uptake in the atmosphere, to name a couple of factors). Then on top of this you have to include the effects of thermal expansion, which is around 25% of the total rise.

For a more detailed discussion, you could start with Meier et al 2007, which for example estimates that 60% of sea level rise actually comes from glacier melting, not including the two ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic.

Take a look at Figures 5 through 7 in Church et al 2011, that I already linked to earlier.

Obviously satellite data doesn't go back that far, which is what Shepherd was looking at, but we have fairly good logs of tidal data going back hundreds of years. These are confirmed by sedimentary cores going back to 1300.

This is only looking at ice melt in some specific areas. A direct quote:

This is consistent with our calculations above, as it includes areas beyond Greenland and the Antarctic. But it does not include all global sources of sea level rise; besides, we can measure that directly.

What's more, the rate of sea level rise has itself been increasing. Prior to 1900 it was close to 1mm/year, but in the last 20 years it's been more like 3.2mm/year. Two separate papers, using different methodology, have both concluded we can expect around 80 cm total sea level rise by the end of the century (these are the conservative estimates; the higher end estimates are both almost as high as 200 cm).

Sorry, I thought the error was clear - you converted cubic metres to cubic kilometres incorrectly. I'll spell it out:

It should be 195.699 cubic kilometres of water, because there are 1000x1000x1000 cubic metres to a cubic kilometre, not 1000.

Thus, over 20 years this would be 3,913.97 cubic kilometers of water, and as the surface of the world's oceans is ~361,740,000 square kilometers, you would see a rise of 0.0000108198 km, or 10.81 mm.

We know exactly how much effect CO2 has on incoming and outgoing radiation, because we can measure it in the lab, and via satellite. We know beyond doubt that it allows broad-spectrum energy in, but blocks much of the Earth's black-body radiation from escaping again.

We have measured precisely how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, and we can calculate accurately how much effect it should have. That's how we know that CO2 is such a significant problem; see this page for empirical measurements, a discussion of the maths, and a graph of the Earth's radiative forcings (all with fully cited sources of course, which I recommend you follow up).

The effect of CO2 is unquestioned. What is still being debated is only how much does this affect us? At what rate will surface temperatures change as a result? This is complicated by the myriad feedback cycles involved in the climate system. Current scientific opinion varies between "this could be a real problem" to "if we don't do something ASAP we're in for a very unhappy time".

No, it really isn't. ICS lets a user connect to a PC and access the internet through that PC. The PC becomes an access point.

WiFi Sense lets your friends connect directly to your router, by securely sharing its details with them. Your PC doesn't even have to be on.

This is how it's possible for your friends to share those router details with their friends. Win10 doesn't know it's your router and not theirs, it will let anyone with the password enable WiFi Sense sharing.

Because if your friends can connect to your network, and they have WiFi Sense enabled, then access to your network is shared with all of their Facebook friends.

So you have no control over who now get access to your network. Is that clear enough yet?

And making sure nobody who has access to your wifi ever enables it either. Best of luck!

Every time you give a friend your password, you have to make certain they don't have their Wifi Sense option enabled, or the same situation arises. It's also possible for them to opt into Wifi Sense for your network details any time afterwards too, so you better remain on good terms with them.

There's a reason that Microsoft added the ludicrous option of opting out via your SSID - it's because there's simply no other way to be certain this doesn't happen to you.

The problem is, if I let any of my friends near my beer, they could easily end up inviting all their Facebook friends to whizz in my ale. And the only way to scare them off is to write "_OPTOUT" in large letters on my favourite beer mug.

Here's the thing: You can leave your box unchecked - but if ANY of your friends have access to your wifi, and *their* box is checked, then all their Facebook friends will also get access to your wifi.

And the only way you can prevent this is to append "_optout" to your SSID.

Thanks, it's a refreshing change to have an actual rational discussion :-)

Luckily the sea ice calc was easy to debug, and does get you into the ballpark. Most of the climate papers are much harder to work through (kinda why you need to have all that study and experience under your belt); while many of the principles can be grasped by laymen like ourselves, it quickly becomes clear from reading the papers that there can be a lot of subtleties and counter-intuitive effects that we just don't realise, and I'm happy to admit I get lost in the depths of many of them.

For auditing papers, the peer reviewers read the described methodology in data collection, and work through the calculations to check them, while looking for factors the paper may not have dealt with adequately. But the raw data has to be taken on faith, and errors can still slip through.

Luckily, papers examining different lines of evidence can often come up with similar figures, so cross-correlation is possible, where multiple different sets of observations and methods can confirm each other, and this is the basis for much of our confidence in the climate research to date.

I'd like to think I'm quite open to correction too, particularly on specifics (easy to get those wrong), but I have fairly high standards of proof required these days. There's so many different lines of confirming evidence for the observed warming that to change my views on that I'd need to see a peer-reviewed paper from a reputable climatologist, ideally that has also been publicly checked and confirmed by other reputable climatologists. Disputing global warming has reached the threshold of an extraordinary claim, given the sheer weight of studies, climate scientists, and scientific institutions that have confirmed it, so extraordinary evidence is now required to question it.

Sorry, you'll have to explain to me where in that link you're seeing hard figures for satellite corrections. You're not assuming "Global Temperature Anomaly" is a correction factor, are you? (it's the difference in temperature results from a mean value). All I see is that graph of those results, and some figures for trends. I followed some of the source links, but the methods they use are complex, and some of them only have abstracts available.

It's NOAA's graph, not mine, and they use joules because it's a measure of total energy change. This is helpful for discovering how much solar energy is being trapped by greenhouse gases and subsequently absorbed by oceans. Temperature is a less useful figure because it's dependant on the volume of water and thermal mass, but will show the same ongoing trend.

It's true that El Nino and La Nina cycles directly affect ocean heat, but these are relatively short cycles and can easily be smoothed out by averaging data over decades; similarly for solar cycles. There are also geologic cycles as you say, but those have a much slower effect, and can be accounted for by measuring the change in their causes (e.g. orbital changes). While we can't discount the effect of an undiscovered long-term climate cycle on what we're seeing now, nobody has yet found a natural cause that would result in such a relatively rapid change - but the effects we're observing match quite closely with the calculated effects of the rise in atmospheric CO2, so that's a sufficient and far more likely cause than postulating an unknown factor.

Similarly for sea level rises. Of course it has changed much more drastically in the past, and sometimes very rapidly too, but nonetheless the level of rise we're seeing helps confirm our hypotheses, and is still of concern to our many coastal communities.

Yeah, you're off by a factor of 1 million - 195,698,545,959 cubic meters of water is actually 195.7 cubic kilometres of water (there are 1000x1000x1000 cubic metres in a cubic kilometre). Though because the ice is freshwater, 200 Gt of ice would be closer to 200 km^3 when melted, or about 0.55mm when spread out evenly. There are of course other sources of meltwater than just Greenland + Antarctic, and thermal expansion is about 25% of the total rise too.

The last link was to the IPCC AR5 paper; they don't do the calculations there, they summarise the conclusions of the papers that do, and cite those papers. (The link I gave you was actually a draft and was missing diagrams, so here's the relevant section of the final report).

If you look at section 13.3.6, that discusses the contributing factors to the total sea level rise, and cites a number of papers for their sources, including Shepherd et al 2012 (better link than earlier) and Church et al 2011a.

Hope that helps.

Well, you took the time to write all that out, so I'll do you the courtesy of a response, but I will point out that none of it is worth saying without citations (which was the entire point of this thread).

You call it "common knowledge", but when it contradicts the published, peer-reviewed results from any number of studies, which are compiled, published and endorsed by organisations like NOAA, CRU, CSIRO, and the IPCC in numerous countries, then your "common knowledge" doesn't seem to be all that common at all. I provided linked citations of reputable sources for my claims, so you'll need data at least as reputable (please, no blogs or news articles). I've heard claims just like yours countless times, and nobody has yet provided any reliable data to back them up.

"[surface temperature stations] are mostly not very accurate" - a vague claim, but in aggregate they can still give a very accurate picture of the temperature trend.

"[satellites] have their readings INCREASED every year...The current "correction" is about .4 C" - citation certainly needed for this one, for both claims.

"the depths of the ocean are not warming... It rarely goes below 100 meters much less 200 meters." - the data shows that ocean heat content has been rising steadily down to 2,000m. Below that, NASA finds no significant change. But there's a huge amount of energy going into that top 2km of the world's oceans.

"there is no way to know how much [sea level rise] is the result of a climate change and how much is climate cycle." - well, we know that sea level rise accelerated significantly in the last 150 years. We know that it's consistent with predictions based on thermal expansion and measured ice loss. If it's part of a long-term cycle, there needs to be a cause, and there's no credible evidence of any cyclic cause at that timescale.

"There are regions that are losing ice and regions that are gaining ice... How much ice are you saying has melted... just give me your rough estimate." - Shepherd et al 2012 finds a net ice mass loss of over 200 gigatonnes/year for the last couple of decades, using multiple lines of evidence.

"ice extent is very easy to estimate. And ice extent doesn't show a decline." I cite ice mass because it's what matters, for rising heat content and for sea levels. Ice extent is a fairly inaccurate indicator of overall ice melt. That said, ice extent has been declining in the Arctic and Greenland while increasing in the Antarctic (despite overall ice mass decreasing there by around 70 Gt/y).

"if the ice packs were melting over all to any significant degree you'd see a great deal more sea level rise than we have seen thus far... We can look at the volume of water in the oceans and compare the change to your ice loss figures." - Yes, and it matches well with what we've observed, including accounting for thermal expansion (which, if you're tacitly admitting exists, requires significant ocean warming).

Citations - yes please. At this stage, if you have any further claims to make, I want to see only links to reputable published data and peer-reviewed studies, not talk of "common knowledge" or speculation from laymen or reporters.

That's quite a rant there - assumptions, ad hominems, sweeping declarations, invective, ironic projection, the lot. In fact, pretty much everything except data.

Science & Education, really? Remember what I said earlier about crap publications that would publish anything? Yeah. It's not exactly Nature, is it? Where is its peer-review policy anyway?

Shame the article is paywalled so we can't examine it, but these guys did. And if it's the article I think it is, applying Monckton's own peculiar standards for handwaving-away any papers that aren't explicit enough for him, only makes the numbers for rejection of AGW look even tinier, at a mere 9 out of 11,944 papers reviewed. And nowhere is there anything to back your claim that the consensus figures "included papers that argued against climate change".

And of course, Cook's paper isn't the only one that arrived at ~97% consensus - from Oreskes to Powell, they all give similar results. Plus, of course, the long list of scientific institutions that have confirmed the findings of AGW, and none dissenting.

Ah, specifics. Cite the papers that predicted these, please. Or are you getting misled by bad reporting again?

Every year, the surface temperatures rise, ocean temperatures keep going up, sea levels rise some more, global ice mass keeps decreasing - the ongoing trend is obvious everywhere to anyone who opens their eyes, and comes from climate scientists around the globe who couldn't care less about all that Republicans vs Democrats nonsense. The argument about what to do about global warming is certainly political - but the data aren't, and wild, unsourced claims of massive political bias in the field only make the accusers look like the foolish ones.