You want to know what makes me angry? This.

You want to know what makes me angry? Sh*t like this. Way to go Sen. Sanders and others for calling them out on this bullsh**.

If you can't accept what an overwhelming majority of WORLDWIDE (hint: it's not some U.S. liberal conspiracy) scientists say they are observing and what it means for the planet, then get the f*** off the Science Committee. You. Are. Not. Fit. For. Office. If you can't put your ideologies aside and do what's best for the people of this country, and the health and safety of this country's future, you don't deserve to serve as our representative. Even the f***ing military says this is a serious threat to our security.

Citing Breitbart? Trying to claim temps are plunging (LOL, of course they go down from summer to winter, duh) when in fact we are experiencing yearly record breaking temps at the other end of the scale? I never knew that the dollar bill was so much more powerfully hallucinogenic than the best drugs we've yet created. They need an intervention and rehab, stat.

Checked out the author, he had this to say: Delingpole responded <snip> as to whether he had read any peer-reviewed papers, he maintained that as a journalist "it is not my job" to read peer reviewed papers, but be "an interpreter of interpretations."

So...it's not your job to get the facts from the source but to publish an opinion based on someone else's opinion? You know what that makes you dumbass? Irrelevant and useless. That right there is the definition of fake news.

And now we have Trump appointing a climate denier to head the EPA. Yeah, this'll end well.
Bernie burns House Science Committee after devastating Breitbart tweet
By Andrew Freedman
19 hours ago

The House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology sent a tweet on Thursday linking to an article on the conservative media outlet Breitbart, saying that Earth's temperatures are in a "plunge."

Judging from reactions on Twitter — one of which was a stinging burn tweeted by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — many are finding it deeply and sadly ironic that the Science Committee doesn't recognize the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and influenced by human activity.

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Call Ed Perlmutter, he's our rep and on this committee. Tell him this is unacceptable. Lamar Smith needs to go.

Nope, I have never, and would never, use the term "control". Humans are influencing the climate above and beyond the natural forcings, and we have the power to alter that influence so that we don't create a bigger change in the climate than is already put into the system. We wouldn't have gone from 290ppm to over 400ppm if we hadn't been burning so many tonnes of fossil fuels and causing so much deforestation over the past several decades. All of that additional greenhouse gas addition to the atmosphere and oceans is done now, but we can change how much more we add and mitigate some other effects like not clear-cutting forests (especially rainforests) as before.

The human fingerprint in global warming

Back in 1988, NASA's James Hansen made some of the first projections of future global warming with a global climate model (Hansen 1988). He created 3 scenarios which he called Scenarios A, B, and C which used various possible future greenhouse gas emissions levels. Scenario A used a model with accelerating greenhouse gas emissions, Scenario B had linearly increasing emissions, and Scenario C had emissions leveling off after the year 2000. None of these models ended up matching greenhouse gas emissions exactly right, but the radiative forcing (energy imbalance) in Scenario B was closest, too high by about 10% as of 2009. Additionally, the climate sensitivity in Hansen's 1988 model (4.2°C global warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2) was a bit higher than today's best estimate (3°C warming for CO2 doubling).

Hansen's Scenario B projected a global warming trend from 1984-2009 of 0.26°C per decade. The actual trend as measured by surface temperature stations over that period was about 0.2°C per decade. When corrected for the 10% smaller radiative forcing than Scenario B and the higher climate sensitivity in Hansen's models, his study projected the global warming over the ensuing 25 years almost perfectly .

ramage wrote: We are in agreement that homo sapiens influence the climate. It is refreshing that you realize that man does not have the ability to control the climate. Now the question I posit is, "what would the climate be if the 'natural forcings' were the only factor?

It's what it would have been a hundred years ago, or even 50 years ago before we started seeing the beginnings of climate change that we do now. The oceans are acidifying, killing coral reefs and altering sea life. Before we saw species move habitats to different latitudes or elevations, before many of the extinctions now happening. (See the pika for an example). Before we started the process of the glaciers melting and retreating, Arctic sea ice shrinking, Antartica calving and sending fresh water into our oceans. Before we started seeing "storms of the century" happening more frequently than once a century.

ramage wrote: Are you upset by the fact that 'natural forcings' created a tropical climate that allowed dinosaurs to thrive in Canada, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, to name but a few areas in which they lived?

Of course not! That allowed some fantastic beasts to develop and wander our planet for an era, leaving us creatures' fossils to study and allow our imaginations to run wild creating stories involving them.

Edit to add: there's a reason scientists have massive time scales divided up into eras. At the boundaries of each are significant events, usually climate or mass extinctions are involved. It's no surprise that they have proposed that we are entering a new one, the Anthropocene, based on projections of what will occur over the next hundred to several hundred years because of the influences we've put on the climate and strain on the planet with our unsustainable use of natural and limited resources. We will not suffer the consequences, or see the worst of them, our children and their children will have to adapt.

Ramage, I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing so I want to first clarify the climatologists' definition of natural vs anthropogenic forcings to make sure we're on the same page. My apologies, sometimes I assume that everyone knows what I know, or that they have done what I've done in going out and voraciously reading tons of climate data, and that's a silly thing to do.

Human vs. Natural Contributions to Global Warming

The two largest human influences are greenhouse gas (GHG) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions, mostly from burning coal, oil, and natural gas (sulfur emissions tend to have a net cooling effect). The largest natural influences on the global temperature are the 11-year solar cycle, volcanic activity, and the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

A Comprehensive Review of the Causes of Global Warming

Figure 2: Percent contributions of various effects to the observed global surface warming over the past 100-150 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple), Stott et al. 2010 (S10, gray), Huber and Knutti 2011 (HR11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange).

How do we know more CO2 is causing warming?

The amount of warming caused by the anthropogenic increase in atmospheric CO2 may be one of the most misunderstood subjects in climate science. Many people think the anthropogenic warming can't be quantified, many others think it must be an insignificant amount. However, climate scientists have indeed quantified the anthropogenic contribution to global warming using empirical observations and fundamental physical equations.

Figure 1: Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere over both the last 1000 years and the preceding 400,000 years as measured in ice cores

Figure 4: Global average radiative forcing in 2005 (best estimates and 5 to 95% uncertainty ranges) with respect to 1750 (IPCC AR4).

Radiative forcing is the change in the net, downward minus upward, irradiance (expressed in W m–2) at the tropopause due to a change in an external driver of climate change, such as, for example, a change in the concentration of carbon dioxide or the output of the Sun. Definition courtesy of IPCC AR4.

Figure 3: Time series of anthropogenic and natural forcings contributions to total simulated and observed global temperature change. The coloured shadings denote the 5-95% uncertainty range.

With that, to answer your questions. I believe I already acknowledged and affirmed your first question as it's similar to what you'd previously asked, but to be clear

ramage wrote: As you state if "natural forcings" would have resulted in the climate of one hundred years age or even 50 years ago, wouldn't it be 'natural forcings" that created a tropical climate in the Rocky Mountain Region as i had previously referenced?

Yes, quite obviously natural forcings created the climate of any era before humans even existed.

ramage wrote: Are not homo sapiens and all other plant and animal life perhaps a portion of the internal forcings which is half of the" natural forcings" or would you prefer that no life forms existed and therefore the climate could be a function of your concept of "natural forcings"?

Here's where I'm a little confused and it's why I started with defining natural vs anthropogenic forcings. Climatologists do not use the term "internal forcings" so I'm not sure what you mean there or how you came up with an estimate of "internal forcings" being half of natural forcings. Can you elaborate, or does it fit into what I explained above?

Of course I would not prefer that no life forms existed because that would mean that I'm dead, along with all of my friends and family. That seems a silly question to me and I'm not sure why you would ask.

Regarding the Anthropocene Era, I specifically used the term "proposed" in my last post for a reason.

ScienceChic wrote: It's no surprise that they have proposed that we are entering a new one, the Anthropocene, based on projections of what will occur over the next hundred to several hundred years because of the influences we've put on the climate and strain on the planet with our unsustainable use of natural and limited resources.

I do know that it hasn't been officially accepted yet.

I hope that I didn't overload with you with too much info. Thank you for the conversation so far!