Sunday, March 13, 2016

Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks that global warming skeptics are insufficiently educated.

Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks that global warming skeptics are insufficiently educated.

Been following this issue since the late 1980's.  I was very concerned about it.  Since the early 90's I started reading skeptics who thought that this issue is overblown.

When a model doesn't agree with the data, then one should modify the theory.  This is how science is suppose to work.  The whole argument is about positive feedbacks versus negative feedbacks.  The data supports the negative feedback models.  Instead of the climate sensitivity being 3.3 or 2.2 celsius per doubling of CO2, it is much less than 1.

The positive feedback models proposed by the alarmists do not logically make sense:  If heat causes positive feedback then we should have a runaway greenhouse.  It would not be unlike the perturbation when a microphone gets too close to a speaker.

When it took a hundred years for the temperature to increase 1 degree fahrenheit, and when you consider just how costly the transition away from fossil fuels is, both in terms of cost and millions of human lives lost, then it makes more sense to adapt to the very gradual changes in temperature. 

The benefits of increased CO2 have been enormous in terms of increased crop yield, and will continue to be benefit humanity as it goes up.  If I had the power to make the CO2 level 600 parts per million, I would do so, but it will happen anyway regardless of what western countries do.  During the last period of glaciation, CO2 levels became dangerously low to the point of being 30 parts per million away from threatening all life above sea level.  If  you look at CO2 levels through the entire history of the earth, it has been one of enormous decline, dangerously so, until humans reversed the trend.

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