Al Gore, looking on, went on to make all kinds of false doomsday predictions. He revised some of them, moving the year out, and those failed too. I can't recall -- was every single prediction in "An Inconvenient Truth" false, or just most of them?
Anyway, sure. The greenhouse effect is a thing. But the climate system is a lot more complicated than a glass aquarium with some CO2 in it. It's not a high school science fair project, it's the most complex of complex systems with millions of phenomena all affecting each other. So no, we can't just code up a model and see what it's going to do. It's fundamentally not amenable to simulation.
So we look to the past. We have pretty good ideas what was going on with CO2 and temperature for at least 500M years, more like 2B years. If mankind adding 100ppm over a century is supposed to cause a disaster, why didn't adding ten times that much cause a disaster when it happened in the past? CO2 has actually been around 20x what it is now. Present CO2 levels are just up off their all time lowest point. We're actually much closer to a dangerous low point of CO2, since plant respiration fails at around 150ppm.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 10.3 ms ] threadAnyway, sure. The greenhouse effect is a thing. But the climate system is a lot more complicated than a glass aquarium with some CO2 in it. It's not a high school science fair project, it's the most complex of complex systems with millions of phenomena all affecting each other. So no, we can't just code up a model and see what it's going to do. It's fundamentally not amenable to simulation.
So we look to the past. We have pretty good ideas what was going on with CO2 and temperature for at least 500M years, more like 2B years. If mankind adding 100ppm over a century is supposed to cause a disaster, why didn't adding ten times that much cause a disaster when it happened in the past? CO2 has actually been around 20x what it is now. Present CO2 levels are just up off their all time lowest point. We're actually much closer to a dangerous low point of CO2, since plant respiration fails at around 150ppm.