A simple (simple, not easy) thing like grounding all high altitude air traffic at night could make a substantial change in global temperature and actually counteract the consequences of increased solar output.

An analogous situation:

Mrs Smith says her most honest and reliable friend told her that she had a friend with most excellent eyesight who saw George Peterson leave the scene of the murder only minutes after it occurred.

The above does not do in a court of law. I do not find your hearsay evidence sufficient, though (apart from your acceptance and promulgation of hearsay) I have no other reason to doubt your judgement. Furthermore, I have no reason at all to doubt your sincerity – I just don’t consider that particularly material to the discussion here.

Now, please ask you fair-minded female friend who is a career scientist to let you publish here, either her written assessment (the existence of which, I agree, might be expecting too much) or at least links/references to the evidence she found most convincing.

Best regards

Global warming should not be a left/right issue, it should be a purely scientific one.

However, the remedies proposed are strictly left/right, ideologically based. And the fierce debate over remedies (Kyoto) has spilled over into the scientific debate.

“David Travis, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, presented a paper at a recent American Meteorological Society conference showing a widening of day-to-night temperature ranges in the days following Sept. 11. His research includes findings that challenge prevailing views of contrails and climate.

“Without contrails, Travis was able to measure temperatures across the continent and compare them to similar measurements taken before Sept. 11. He found that the difference between the warmest temperature during the day and the coldest temperature at night grew 3 degrees on average, and as much as 5 degrees in parts of the country where contrails were likely to form.

“Net cooling effect

“This would mean contrails shield the Earth from the sun during the day, causing lower temperatures, and warm it at night, trapping the Earth’s heat like a blanket. Because there are generally more flights and more trails during the day than at night, Travis speculates contrails have a net cooling effect on the Earth. His conclusion is a radical departure from the conventional theory that contrails contribute to warming.”

Which is interesting in light of this(Link).

And yes, that extremely short ice season was 2001/2002 when air traffic was significantly reduced. This reasonably helps to demonstrate that while we clearly have some effect on our environment, it is sometimes (as in this case) not the one researchers are expecting. It also suggests that we are effecting it in both directions and a partial remediation may be worse than none at all.

1. Everybody starts getting really good at building umbrella houses, and using the soil as their natural A/C unit.

2. We now know that polar bears can interbreed with grizzlies. And we know from a couple years back that algae can grow inside the hollow follicles of polar bears in warmer climes.

So we’ll all be busy undergound drinking while we hide from the giant camoflaged eating machines?

Man-made or not I don’t think that global warming is a left/right issue. — abc

Sadly, it is. Because anti-modernity leftists are using this issue to promote a radical environmnetal agenda. Science should not be politics, but it has been hijacked in this instance.

Whether it is caused by human activity is unproven but from what I hear the weight of evidence supports it.

But is he talking about the weight of evidence or the weight of propaganda?

As he has just added to the latter, I’m rather hoping (yes really, I love evidence, it’s the best) he will prove me wrong by providing links/references to some of the former.

Best regards

Most of it is pretty available, although I would recommend going to the sources rather than the digests made by any side. I doubt if it will be practical nor sensible to try and reference the data here nor debate it. If you would like to, I can hook you up with some of the people I know in the “weather business” and you can discuss likely models with them.

I thought this was a public debate.

Publish links/references to your evidence here, for review and comment by everyone.

And:

If you’d like me to explain how this happens in control systems I’ll be glad to recommend some books.

I’m pretty familiar with control theory thank you. You seem to be asserting that existence of complex real-world systems is sufficient to mean that your particular assumed model of climate is correct and that the proposed control by humans will be effective. Isn’t it a little more difficult that that?

Anthropogenic and other global warming theories have been discussed before on Samizdata, recently including on 27th July and 20th July. There, evidential links were included, refuting there being a clear and dangerously strong effect from CO2 levels in preference to other explanations, including the Wegman Report against the Hockey Stick Theory (long and mathematical with summary here) and a simple but clearly scientific and evidence based summary by the late John Daly.

The main point is that there is global warming from solar and orbital effects that are (currently) outside human control. There is also a very modest effect from CO2, that is most likely not sufficiently big to be as important as the other effects. Such sound scientific work as we have available indicates that the CO2 contribution is not that big and the benefits from reducing CO2 are not sufficient (as in no where near sufficient) to warrant the economic cost.

An engineering analogy of the issue as currently seen is that of a bridge, in which all the effort has gone into the decorative aspects (particularly attractive to some people), but the bridge is not well enough engineered and will fall down when driven over.

Best regards