Turns out, high up in the stratosphere the winds are predictable and have just the patterns they need. They did simulations using real-world wind data and found it was quite feasible to navigate balloons effectively to maintain coverage using only prevailing winds.

Since 2012 they've been trialling in New Zealand, Brazil and other places, they've increased balloon flight times from 50 days to over 6 months (despite expert scepticism), and now they're close to ready to roll out a commercial service. Pretty sure they've done their research by now.

By raising & lowering the balloons between opposing jetstreams.

Been a while since I needed this, but: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=project+loon&l=1.

Sure, certainly premature to declare it "100% confirmed" at this stage.

But every lab that reproduces the effect successfully, and eliminates more possible sources of error, bumps the confirmation percentage a little closer towards something we could actually use. It's encouraging.

How about the very next sentence?

Pretty sure the GP wasn't being quite so black & white. All scientific models are an approximation of reality, as you say, and the only real question is are they "good enough to be useful" for your situation. Newton wasn't incorrect, Relativity just better approximates reality at scales outside Newton's experience.

GP's post isn't "very wrong"; it's correct for to a "good enough" approximation of the question: established physics is virtually never disproved, merely improved at wider scales.

There's clearly a distinction between the government mandating my self-improvement vs preventing others from reducing the length and quality of my life. I'd say the latter is firmly in the constitution's purview.

Compromise is when you get some of what you wanted, but not all.

Horse trading is when you support something you don't care about in exchange for something you do.

Hypocrisy is when you claim to dislike something, then support it anyway.

I see no reason why politics cannot function with only the first two.

Say no more.

Thanks, it's been fun & all, but I can see this is going nowhere. If you feel peer-review results can be challenged, then you better come up with even more solid data - not your own inexpert "reality check". If you think a consensus of experts is meaningless (or merely "political") without stopping to consider why the majority might be in agreement, then I can't see how me citing more data will help you.

Yes, you gave that link already, and I responded. This conversation is going around in circles.

Yes, and responded with a link to a graph of it.

If you can find datasets that are more complete than the ones I've cited, please do link to them. I gave you all the data I could find, including pH & sea level, and I even found different proxy data for you that went back further. Your turn.

It's the same graph! Same dataset, same values, same time period (1870-2010) = same graph.

If you still think it doesn't show an accelerating trend, draw a straight line on it and see how well that fits.

No, it isn't. Here is the full Mauna Loa CO2 record. And yes, it's accelerating - look at the graph directly below it, which shows atmospheric CO2 growth rate. See how it's now around double what it was in the 60s?

Your "issues" seem to be based around wondering why the results aren't quite what you think they should be. Perhaps it's all just not as simple as that?

Right, there's my answer. You've found reasons to distrust the experts (though strangely not the few who are saying what you want to hear), so you've decided your own conclusions are more valid, despite your total lack of expertise.

That's Northern Hemisphere data, not global. Cherry picking? or honest mistake?

Humans emit around 26 Gt/year of CO2. Annual atmospheric CO2 increase is currently about 2.1ppm, which works out to about 15 Gt. The difference is being absorbed, primarily by oceans (causing acidification), but clearly it's not enough.

Volcano eruptions are a tiny blip on this process, as I pointed out in the other post.

Is it? It's still a significant imbalance - and the overall imbalance figure is of course higher, when the sun is not at a minimum.

A measurable net influx of energy is precisely what's causing global warming.

What's causing most of this net influx of energy? CO2 has a well-established mechanism, and the calculated effect correlates surprisingly well with our observations. Unless and until someone proposes a new cause that better fits the data, we'd be foolish not to act on what is by far the most likely cause.

It's been studied extensively. The conclusions remain clear - it's bad for our food and water security, it's bad for our health, it's bad for our weather, and it's bad for our coastal communities. There are some upsides (more in the long term), but they are greatly outweighed by the negatives - which will be particularly harsh for the world's poor, who cannot pay the cost of adapting.

Nor is it meaningless.

Of course it is questioned - before, during & after peer review - by experts. But when numerous experts have questioned it, and found no cause for doubt, what makes you think a layman is likely to find something they missed?

If you, or me or any layman, thinks we've discovered a mistake in a peer-reviewed paper for any complex scientific field - it's far more likely that it's us that has made the mistake, than the paper's authors AND all the experts who reviewed it, including after publication. Wouldn't you agree?

No, not stupid, never said that. Ignorant of the field, yes - just like me. We are both profoundly ignorant of climate science, at least compared to any practicing climatologist. Dunning-Kruger is the assumption that one already knows all one needs to know about a field to make a valid judgement, and says nothing about intelligence. Why do you assume that it's an insult? It's an unconscious bias that we all need to strive to avoid.

I'm deferring to expertise, not appealing to authority. If someone thinks expertise is meaningless, that would be Dunning-Kruger.

Seems to me you're the one conflating scientific consensus with politics.

Please cite data that shows that.

What was that you were saying about cherry-picking trends?

In any case, surface temperatures are only one symptom of climate change - and we know they're quite variable over decadal periods. Others, like ocean heat content, ice melt, and sea level rise, are still rising. And that table you cited looks to me like mostly negative anomalies in the 70s, and mostly positive anomalies in the current time - how is that not a warming trend? Perhaps a graph would make it clearer?

No, it isn't. The difference in trend from the first couple of decades to the last couple looks clearly visible to me, and Vermeer's graph of the derivative rate of change makes the accelerating sea rise crystal clear.

The Mount Pinatubo eruption emitted 42 million tonnes of CO2. Human emissions in 1991 were 23 billion tonnes of CO2. Don't expect to see much of a blip.

Why do you assume they're wrong, instead of assuming you're missing something?

As I said (and my citations tried to explain), it's not as simple as a fixed number. CO2 uptake depends on numerous processes, some of which are feedback loops. Some CO2 is re-absorbed quickly, some slowly, and some of it takes centuries to be removed from the atmosphere. That's why I mentioned the CO2 lifetime graphs - it's not a linear process.

But you only have to look at the rising atmospheric CO2 levels to see that, clearly, our CO2 emissions are currently exceeding the uptake.

It's got nothing to do with how many people agree with me. It's got everything to do with how many experts agree with each other.

Did you look at the graph page 4 of the presentation link I gave? Is 25 million years not long enough?

If you can find other data from 1900, please do feel free to cite it.

Still waiting for you to validate yours. You've made a lot of claims, but cited very little data - and the data you've cited so far has contradicted your claims, not backed them.

It's only "special" because we're pumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the air every year. That makes its effects relevant to us.

Regarding the earth's energy fluxes (in and out), we can measure those accurately with satellites (not just the less-accurate surface measurements you cite further down). See this picture for figures, and details, particularly Fig 2 - the energy imbalance is +0.58±0.15 W/m^2, even during a solar minimum (and you'll note the error levels are perfectly reasonable).

It's not an absolute guarantee of truth (there's no such thing) - but it's the closest we've been able to get. Individual papers can be wrong (though far more often they're simply incomplete), but you can't dismiss all peer-reviewed papers because of that, particularly when similar conclusions are reached from independent evidence, all across the field, for decades.

Or, you could accept that certain other people are better equipped (by means of study, experience and access to data, if not intelligence) to make judgements about the evidence, than yourself, and defer to their conclusions. You can't hope to make an informed conclusion yourself about any field you know so little about, any more than myself or any layman. To assume your own meagre knowledge is sufficient to contradict the findings of experts is pure Dunning-Kruger effect.

I did not say that. I said there's such broad agreement among climatologists and institutions - are they all misrepresenting the truth? Every one of them?

To dismiss consensus as "political" is to accuse every scientist and institution that endorses the consensus opinion, of falsifying their conclusions for political reasons, which would be career suicide. All those scientists are doing their jobs by evaluating the decades of evidence and reaching conclusions - are you really claiming they're all lying to us?

No, they're not. The measurements are going up, not the adjustments. The citations you yourself provided show only tiny adjustments to the trend, every few years, going both up and down - while the measured temperature trend is ever upwards.

The calibration is not re-done from scratch every year. That would be meaningless, as you say. The satellite data obviously must be kept comparable, both to itself and to ground measurements, so that any trends can be determined. Give these people some credit, would you? not to mention the expert reviewers who checked their methods.

Similar data is in the HadCRU and NASA datasets, not just NOAA. They're all cross-checked with each other and with related evidence. Perhaps you should look harder.

No, it doesn't. Church's Fig 5 and Vermeer's Fig 3 Lower are the same graph, though Vermeer has a blue trend line drawn over the red measurement line. You can see clearly they have the same values at the same decades. Fig 3 Upper is the derivative of that trend line, showing rate of change.

Individual molecules of carbon are being re-absorbed - and re-emitted - all the time, by plants and by the ocean, in large quantities (around 200Gt/year). This is normally in equilibrium, with a slow growth from geologic weathering and occasional volcanism. The rates of natural emission and uptake aren't fixed however, due to numerous feedbacks, so the best we can say is between 30 and 95 years for much of it, with perhaps 20% persisting a lot longer (thousands of years). It depends a lot on the atmospheric concentration, and how much we keep releasing. This page discusses the issue and provides lifetime graphs.

Obviously that's not the case, because atmospheric levels have gone up sharply for 150 years See this ice-core data and more recent Mauna Loa data, showing a definite acceleration even in the last 50 years.
Regarding CO2 spectrum absorption, your questions were already answered by the citations I've given. Broad-spectrum sunlight is not only reflected, but also absorbed and re-radiated in infra-red (look up black-body radiation), which is then partially blocked by various greenhouse gases. This is well-understood science going back to the 1800s. and I'm not going to go over it all yet again. I've already cited papers that quantify the measured radiative forcing of CO2. There's no serious debate about this aspect, only about the feedbacks and resulting temperature rise.

Regarding ocean acidification, Turley et al 2006 is cited by many. Can't find a link to the paper, but here is a related presentation by Turley - see page 4.

Sorry, but I no longer have the time to spend with long explanations. It's taking too much time from my work. If the many peer-reviewed papers I've already provided haven't convinced you of anything, then providing more won't help. Either you're unable to follow the studies I've cited, or you're unwilling to to accept them as valid evidence, despite peer review and cross-correlation with other evidence. You claim that the broad agreement among climatologists and scientific institutions is somehow not expert opinion, but dismiss it as "political" - yet your own decidedly non-expert doubts and admitted political preconceptions are more convincing to you? Sorry, I can't help you further.