Comment Re:Not the OP, but a physics-based criticism. (Score 1) 1057
Why is it *so* important that policy be enacted immediately? The human race has a long history not fully understanding nature - if the consequences are *so* dire, then we should be very careful we don't muck things up even more. If it's completely unreasonable to have some rigor, because of looming catastrophe, a "tipping point", where is the data that supports this idea?
You seem to be confused about my questions involving standard deviation and experiments - if you're uncertain about what I'm saying, just say what you don't understand, and I'll clarify it for you. Here they are again, as simple as I can make them.
My specific claim about standard deviation is that no one has taken the observed temperature readings, and calculated the standard deviation from that, for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and 1 year. If you've read a paper which has this value, please provide a quote, and link.
"I want to know what the observed experimental data is, from a ~10 meter tube, or the observed atmosphere, or such, not computer models" - the absorption spectrum of CO2 is measured by a spectrometer over ~1cm, I think it's important to have done the (simple) experiment that would verify we know how CO2 behaves over longer distances, if it's a fundamental part of our models.
The derivation is available at the wikipedia article on Adiabatic Lapse Rate, you can find data for the atmosphere of Venus, and the least square algorithm there as well. All the other numbers are accepted values of physical constants. The equation is independent of planet, besides dependence on g, and the value for Earth is 9.8C/km, from the wikipedia article. I don't understand what you consider short-hand - if you don't understand the derivation then you need to pick up a copy of Kittel and Kroemer, Thermal Physics. It's rather disingenuous to expect me to provide a simpler derivation, but you surely can plug in numbers, do the least squares, and check that I wasn't lying about the numbers I gave.