An inconvenient truth

[bluesdave]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I wouldn't go that far, but I'd like to know whether that 420,000 year graph was actually indicating ocean temperature rather than air. It may be, they think they can extrapolate both from the ice cores and did so for different projects.

Bruce, you underestimate the importance of ocean temperatures. While the media seems to give more time to air temperature, it is actually the ocean temperature that interests us more. Ocean temperatures can be directly linked to precipitation over land.

BTW, I had a lengthy discussion with our senior scientist about you yesterday, and our on-going debate about global warming. I explained that you are a very smart guy, and an engineer, and that you want to see "proof" that Man is involved in global warming. He said that there isn't any research that on its own actually says: "Man, you did it", which is pretty much what I tried to tell you once. You have to take all of the research and draw conclusions based on the bulk of evidence. He said that no one so far has been able to come up with a single experiment that will prove or disprove man's impact. That is how we work - how science works. You have an idea that you want to test, then design an experiment to test your theory.

In one your posts you said that the world has been warming since the last ice age (12,000 years ago). I was reminded that in fact this is not correct. Air and ocean temperatures climbed to a height at about 10,000 years ago, and then gradually declined again. This continued until around 140 years ago when temperatures started to climb again. This is where the connection to man comes in. It ties in with the Industrial Revolution.

We also talked about the ozone hole over Antarctica. Did you realise that it is now at its second largest size? This also affects the Earth's climate.

If you want to satisfy your engineering need for complicated equations, have a look at this page. It discusses ocean currents in the Pacific.

Here is a great Google resource for finding sites that look at global change. If you dig deep enough you will also find pages that discuss why reflection (reflectivity), is not as simple as some people have made out in this thread. There are many factors that interact, and by chopping down trees you do not automatically reduce air temperature because more sunlight is being reflected. You have to take into account the loss of the transpiration by the trees that no longer exist. Sorry if that sounds like double Dutch, but there is actually a complicated mathematical formula for working out the likely temperature change of a cleared area (we use it in our models).

I hope you will begin to see that we are not idiots. We don't publish papers with dire warnings just for the fun of it. A lot of work (and I mean a *lot* of blood, sweat and tears), goes into each and every research project.