Are the global climate changes cause for alarm?

I have been reading Climate Courage by Andreas Karelas upon finding it at a bargain store. This matter of global warming I had come to believe was something which has been blown out of proportion by the media. Could it be a collective hallucination that human industry is causing all these environmental changes? I have a feeling many want to deny the harmful effect humans have on the environment as it's too much of an inconvenience for them to think otherwise. On the other hand, I have been persuaded that some environmentalists are fabricating information to create a sense of alarm. Carbon dioxide has been this great obsession when it's not truly a toxin and I have yet to see any clear evidence that it's worthy of all the media attention and alarmist propaganda about how it's harming the global environment.

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ElwoodBlues · M

Here's a response I wrote some time ago about CO2 and other factors affecting climate change. The quotes aren't you, they are somebody else with similar questions.

[quote]but I've yet to hear a rational explanation of how miniscule increases in an atmospheric trace gas such as CO2, causes the earth to warm.[/quote] It's because CO2 & methane are transparent to visible light but more opaque to infrared. The solar energy comes pouring in via the visible spectrum, but the heat can't leave so easily via the infrared spectrum due to that opacity. Kids' version:
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-co2-and-other-greenhouse-gases

idealized quantitative model: https://www.climate-policy-watcher.org/coriolis-force/a-simple-mathematical-model-of-the-greenhouse-effect.html

[quote] In order to actually prove human carbon emissions influence climate, all variables would have to remain constant[/quote] Nope. With multiple data points we can solve for multiple variables simultaneously. Detailed climate models account for all the variables you list and more. They are verified and calibrated based on 700,000 years of prior climate data.

http://web.mit.edu/globalchange/www/climate.html

[quote] Global warming models are based on small amounts of data. The earth is 4.6 billion years old, and we are expected to believe they can draw conclusions based on a hockey stick graph with 50 years of data?[/quote]
Nope, not 50 years, 800,000 years, covering about 7 ice ages. The climate data comes from bubbles in glacial ice, and is corroborated by data from lake & sea floor sediments.
https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores
CO2 & methane & temp data

Here's [i]where[/i] the various data sets were collected:

The most salient thing about the 800,000 years of climate data is the rate of change during those previous 7 ice ages compared to the current rate of change this century.

[quote] Where does the money for climate research come from?[/quote]
Fair question - it comes mostly from the National Science Foundation. Equally fair: where does the money for climate denial come from? The US oil industry makes about $110 [i]billion[/i] per year; coal another $20 billion. Big Oil spends $3.6 billion per year on advertising; a sum equal to about 8X the whole NSF climate budget. You're not naive enough to believe [i]none[/i] of that money goes to propaganda, are you?

sunriselover · M

@ElwoodBlues The trouble is if someone does not accept climate change, there is nothing you can do to alter the persons perspective. The evidence is before them and they have chosen to reject it.

One wonders what other delusionary views they hold and how they interact in the real world.

ElwoodBlues · M

@sunriselover The cost of renewable electricity is now below the cost of coal power. Factors like that will phase out some carbon sources easily. Legislation can do a fair amount. And we only need to get down to 2 or so tons per person of C02 emissions.