What do I think, What can I do?

Image taken from http://www.desmogblog.com

Credibility is very important in any discussion. Sometimes, the different arguments may be convincing but the opinion about the discusser turns the balance. And credibility is not something static as politicians, journalists and many other people know so well. It can be gained slowly, or lost very fast. In my case, I have a lot of doubts about climate skeptics because of important contradictions or even cherry-picking cases I find in their webs. Just one example (maybe later I will show more):

In this post in climaterealists they mention one paper to reinforce their position about the sun’s driving force in climate opposed to CO2. The paper studies the relationship between sun and climate but as read in the abstract of the paper:

In this work the surface temperature anomaly (dTG) and sunspot number (Rz) time series in the period 1880–2000 are studied with wavelet multi-resolution analysis. We found a very low correlation of 0.11 between dTG and Rz in the 11-yr-solar cycle band. A higher correlation of 0.66 is found in the ∼22-yr-band with zero lag correlation coefficient between dTG and Rz. Furthermore, the long-term trend is markedly different between dTG and Rz. This might occurs because of the long-term warming on the last century, which is attributed mainly to anthropogenic effects.

The authors do not consider this relationship meaningful in last century due to anthropogenic effects, i.e., CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The explanation given in the post and  the paper are clearly contradictory, this is quite embarrassing for that webs credibility. And it is not the only case.

Nevertheless, I believe in climate change mainly for other reasons explained here, here, here and here this is just a confirmation.

Comments on: "The Skeptics: Why I believe in Climate Change (V)" (2)

  1. klem said:

    Wow you sound like you’re not entirely convinced that the changes in climate we observe today are anthropogenic.

    See if you can find an answer to a question I have, I have been unable to find an answer which has been confirmed through observation, most explanations I hear are theoritical only.

    Wikipedia tells me that water vapor contributes roughly 5 times the greenhouse effect of CO2. And Wikipedia says that human emissions compose only 3% of all of the CO2 emitted on earth.

    My question is how does our 3% dominate the other 97% of CO2, and in turn dominate the other five fold larger greenhouse effect?

    The only explanation I’ve heard is ‘Feedbacks’ which are theoretical, not observed. They would have to be very large feedbacks to deliver the effect, we’d have obseved them by now if they were so big. Feedbacks don’t really cut it.


    • Dear Klem

      First of all, thank for the comment. Of course I may have some doubts in some moments and this is helpful, but I am convinced about the anthropogenic origin of the present day climate change.

      Your question is interesting and I am not an expert in the field but I made some back-of-the-envelop calculations and got a very nice result. Effectively as you mention our CO2 emissions are no more than 3% of natural ones,b ut they are enough to unbalance the CO2 cycle and the problem of unbalances is that they keep growing. In this case a 8 Gton CO2 per year divided by a 2.5 10^18 m3 atmospheric volume supposes 3 10^-6 Kgr CO2 per cubic meter. Considering that air weight is 1,2 Kgr/m^3 this is more or less an addition of 2 ppm CO2, that is the average CO2 growth for the last decade.


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