>A new study reaffirming that global climate change is human-made also found the upper atmosphere is cooling dramatically because of rising CO2 levels. Scientists are worried about the effect this cooling could have on orbiting satellites, the ozone layer, and Earth’s weather.
I oftentimes miss the internet before YouTube so that instead of a link to 20 minute video there would be a link to an article instead that I could consume and understand in 5 minutes while still feeling that I'm consuming slow internet instead of moving pictures.
The issue with video is that there isn't really an efficient way to "skim." So, for those who can learn from text, learning from a video is like 100x slower.
I 100 agree. I would love a service that would automatically transcribe all the text spoken in the video so that I would be able to absorb the knowledge 2 orders of magnitude faster.
For many informative videos the service would need to be good at excerpting relevant images (and ideally summarizing them in text for the blind). Maybe by focusing on areas that are unchanged during a period of time (such as when graphs or pictures are being talked about).
Usually you have say a few days ago. Turn on cc in a web YouTube, not app. Then in the row you can like you can find an option to see the caption in transcript. Seem no longer.
Youtube has a transcript for automatic closed captions, and Sabine's here actually has been hand-written and even has some headings so it's much better than most.
I do feel a bit of surprise every time I read about the massive popularity of Youtube, or hear from a friend how they love the 2020s because they learned to do some bit of home improvement or car maintenance by watching a video. I wanted to learn how to frame an accessory building, so I went to the library and picked up "The Very Efficient Carpenter" by Larry Haun, when I needed to replace the water pump in my new car car I got a Haynes manual.
On the other hand, engineering school seemed at times to be a test to filter out anyone who wasn't capable of ingesting massive amounts of text in a short amount of time, which did well to prepare me for my career, which mainly consists of gleaning data from enormous PDFs, so maybe my cohort is unique in this ability.
I understand where you're coming from, and it isn't like I can't consume a 300 page PDF in a sitting when I need to, or it's the best way. But honestly doing it is a chore, and I don't enjoy it. For work I'm fine reading specs and RFCs. But at home I'd rather spend a bit more time and enjoy the process more.
Also, I find videos tend to communicate more, better. For example when I needed to learn how to drywall, I could have picked up a book about it. But drywalling is more about feel and experience. Watching a video and seeing their technique and what the finished product should look like before it has dried is way more educational.
The reason I wrote my original comment was to point out that these types of comments (I prefer this, I prefer that) don't really add anything to a conversation. I guess I should have spelled that out instead of assuming people would make the connection.
Larry Haun has an excellent video series about framing also. I watched it for free on youtube then spent my money on the applicable IBC code reference.
yeah there is. put it to 1.5x or 2x with '>', turn on CC (or not) with 'c' and hit the vim key bindings. or i just do a manual binary search with the scroller.
did you also know that , and . will go frame by frame?
+1. I am not sure why you were downvoted though. Some folks are visual and some prefer reading. For me it "depends". I am somewhere in between and even based on the kind of project. For code etc I absolutely hate videos. Ikea stuff - that imagery definitely helps. For learning sport or instrument playing technique videos are a god send (imagine reading a description of how to pucker your lips when playing the French horn). Having to sit through someones monolog and "production" can be annoying (sadly I get that they are driven to doing it for the sake of engagement).
Maybe part of it is the sense that many videos are padded to be more advertiser friendly, and that what could have been text, or a concise and effective two minute video, is instead a 15 minute attempt to use your eyeballs to make money.
This is especially true for vehicle repairs. Often what could be accomplished in 2 paragraphs and some pictures is instead a 15 minute production you have to sit through to make sure you don't miss a step.
I actually prefer the video for that kind of stuff. My gripe is when a 2 minute video is milked out to 15 minutes of background story, affiliate link plugs, and other useless noise.
On top of that (and maybe I'm just clumsy with controls) I can easily jump back and forth and re-read the text a few times if I need to. It's very difficult to rewind the video to exactly the same position you need it to.
Free version will of course have penis enlargement recommendation and another almost unrelated ad, both unskipable.
Premium will outright book you visit to penis enlargement clinic based on your IP browsing history from 20 years ago, saving you your precious time and adding a groupon discount.
I'll spend 20 minutes looking for more versions in text if I find videos first, and only watch the video as a last resort. I'm sure we're just a year away from someone hooking YouTube to ChatGPT and then it writes article versions of videos, and we'll have come full circle.
TL;DW summary -- Greenhouse Effect traps infrared (heat) at lower altitudes, so there's less outgoing radiation available for the upper layers of the atmosphere. Thus the surface gets hotter but the upper atmosphere cools.
These are the same people that think "global average temperature going up 2 degrees C" means that the only outcome is local maximum temperature being 2 degrees higher.
To be fair, nobody started to understand chaotic systems until the 1960s. That's roughly 5,000 years of people saying that in any system, moving the inputs a tiny bit should always produce a similarly small change in the output.
Yes, and chaos theory is SO fundamental to climate and weather that understanding its application there is compulsory. So if you've not heard of chaotic systems, it's completely impossible to be up to speed on what reality's doing.
Nothing I said was the least bit sarcastic. The direct application to the upper atmosphere cooling isn't exactly what I meant, but 'counterintuitive things happening which are outside our experience of what can happen' is completely down to chaos in action on a global scale.
Well, I didn't think that anyone would say "completely impossible to be up to speed on what reality's doing" without some arcane math topic and mean it perfectly seriously.
People were talking about the greenhouse effect at the end of the 1800s. You don't need chaos theory to know more energy in a system will mean more energetic events.
Went to Home Depot to buy a new refrigerator. They had one plugged in as a demo. Guess what: there was warm air coming out of the bottom. Can you believe it? They were literally trying to pull off a huge hoax. Sell people something that's supposed to keep things cold, and there's warm air coming out?
Climate is not the air that you have inside your refrigerator. Its a system. If one part of it changes, the other parts will change in different ways to keep the system stable. So something cooling off somewhere does not mean that it will also cool where you are. It may rain more, it may be dryer, it may be much more hot, it may not have any effect or any combination of all of that may happen.
Climate change is basically pulling the levers in a slot machine. Better not to pull the lever at all.
don't fret, most of the brands HD sells will cease to confound you in this way within about 18 months, they stop making noise and the interior and exterior reach a pleasant equilibrium!
it was not enough to have man made horrors beyond our comprehension, we also had to go and cause man made horrors without even being aware of our lack of comprehension
Not true. Global cooling was a fad not supported by most the effects of CO2 had been know for more than a century. The burden of proof is on you: fetch all publications since 1960 and post your meta-analysis to Nature.
They knew all about CO2 and its warming yes, but Schneider calculated that the effect was offset by other pollutants being put into the atmosphere. He had to because, as the NY Times article states clearly, at that time thermometer records showed that temperatures peaked in the 1940s and "have been cooling ever since".
Nice try on defining proof as "the people accused of lying have to admit it or else it's not proven". That's not how it works. The NY Times story is high quality proof that Yale's claim about the past isn't true. People were told by the most trusted authorities that not only was the world getting colder but that this was well understood and the trend would continue. If you don't like that article you have to provide equally compelling counter-evidence, not insist on some stupid definition of proof selected only to avoid cognitive dissonance.
But hey, seeing as you want more proof, here's NOAA - the US government agency - stating in 1974, two years before the NY times story that "Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently":
It goes on to list some pieces of easily understood evidence, like "pack ice around Iceland is once again becoming a serious hindrance to navigation" and "warmth loving animals like Armadillos are retreating southward".
Today we're told the NY Times, NOAA and the NSF were all reporting on a made up "fad" no scientists believed, and there never was any cooling trend.
In this article, Yale is lying to us about the past. Why is that?
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Pop-science is peddling expertise as newspaper copy.
And by the way, someone having been wrong in 1970's is relevant for you to the droughts and floods of 2023, how?
The wrongness I'm pointing out is the Yale article, circa 2023. It makes false claims about the past, so what else are they saying that's false?
Re: droughts and floods. Good example. These aren't getting worse. The media and academics like to claim they are, but they are wrong. Select the "Palmer Drought Severity Index" here from official US data and plot "All months" from 1895 to 2023 i.e. all data. Observe that there's no trend:
Then select "Precipitation". Observe that there's only a very slight trend of 0.18 inches/decade. That's tiny and not enough of different in average rain to change the incidence of flooding.
Remember that the actual climate claim is only about 0.1 degree of change per decade since ~1980, i.e. only about half a degree of warming since the end of the period of global cooling. Half a degree isn't enough to have any visible impact on weather patterns. The climate just isn't that sensitive.
Your specific example is cherry picked and does not reflect reality (even the reality of the seventies). Wikipedia's page on Schneider tells the full story:
"The story made headlines in The New York Times [note: this is your NYT article]. Shortly afterwards, Schneider became aware that he had overestimated the cooling effect of aerosols, and underestimated the warming effect of CO2 by a factor of about three. He had mistakenly assumed that measurements of air particles he had taken near the source of pollution applied worldwide. He also found that much of the effect was due to natural aerosols which would not be affected by human activities, so the cooling effect of changes in industrial pollution would be much less than he had calculated. Having found that recalculation showed that global warming was the more likely outcome, he published a retraction of his earlier findings in 1974."
If you're going to look for counter-evidence it's important first to accept just how blatant and widespread lying about climate is. Academics - assisted by the media - are willing to lie continuously, brazenly and effectively. They very much want to cover up these sorts of things and will do whatever it takes.
Consider the Wikipedia quote you just provided. You say it provides the full story. Please, think about the things you are reading.
It starts by admitting that in 1971 Schneider published a paper arguing for global cooling, but then claims he realized he made a maths error and by 1974 had published a retraction and accepted global warming. The NY Times article where he promotes his book on global cooling, and where the public is being told that he's representing The Scientific Consensus, was published in 1976. Two whole years after supposedly converting to global warming, there he is, asserting with complete confidence the reality of global cooling!
This claim about Schneider is a lie, like almost everything else about the history of climatology. Wikipedia even provides a citation for their claim of a retraction, but it isn't actually pointing to any retraction, it's to a book published by The Guardian in 2010.
Remember also that in the NY Times article it's stated as 100% fact that temperatures peaked in the 1940s and were falling ever since. That's not a mistake or distortion by the journalist. That's exactly what temperature graphs of the USA showed right up until around the start of the millennium. At that point the historical record was altered to remove this long period of cooling. If you look at modern temperature graphs that period of history shows a flat trend.
On the surface these two messages may seem contradictory but underlying both is a consistent message that excessive man-made changes to a delicate highly non-linear system are dangerous to our survival as a species.
Am I misunderstanding you? Sure, we probably won’t be able to continue expanding exponentially, but to be honest I don’t really care if we grow forever or stay steady at 10 billion.
There’s a significant, nonzero risk of complete species death though, a matter about which I care a great deal. Extinction is worse than stagnation.
There's good evidence that if we can alleviate poverty and child mortality everywhere, fertility rates will start coming down like they have in richer countries and we'll end up at 10-11 billion people.
One thing that I have learned as someone who interacts with highly non-linear systems from an engineering perspective is that the outcome can be unpredictable.
That is annoying when you are working with the stuff, but when you are living inside that system, that is downright suicidal. Sure. If you are lucky nothing happens. If.
When the ground gets too hot for crops we’ll have to build aero farms that float high up in the atmosphere to grow food and then bring down the blimps when it’s time for harvest.
Can someone ELI5 me how a gas that occupies 400ppm (0.04%) of our atmosphere creates a massively scaled “heating blanket” around the entire Earth? More than “scientists have determined”. What is the physical effect that enables the minuscule presence of an element to multiply to such effect.
Think of it like a tiny pinch of a very spicy pepper in a big pot of soup. Even a little bit can have a big effect!
The reason CO2 is like very spicy pepper is that it is very good at absorbing infrared radiation from the sun, and then re-emitting that energy as heat in the atmosphere.
Simple. If you don’t give me your vote and your money the world will end. Exact reason doesn’t matter.
If cheap clean portable fusion was invented tomorrow, if would quickly be banned for one reason or another. People need to sell disasters, not solutions.
Just Wow. Clothing yourself in counterfeit cynicism much? "People" don't sell disaster, how much disaster do you fill up at the pump? What proportion of your first world non sustainable lifestyle is spent on these sales of disaster you mentioned?
The light coming down is in wavelengths that get through, the radiation on the way back is lower frequencies, infrared that CO2 intercepts. The sun is a massive fusion reactor there is a lot of energy coming. The effect is small, but compounds and CO2 is an oxide, very stable molecule that sticks around.
It’s not massive. It’s extremely tiny. It’s just that the system is very delicate and we are even tinier, so the effects from our perspective are large. (Think getting hit with a little 1/100000000th of earth mass meteor. The earth will barely react on galactic scale/ long term, but the momentary occupants will sure get a shock)
CO2 is opaque to many wavelengths ("colors") of infrared light. So when the surface would be cooling at night by radiating infrared light back to the darkness of space, CO2 blocks(and reabsorbs) this energy, warming the atmosphere. This effect is strongest in a band around 15μm wavelength.
Mostly what's going on is that infrared that would have escaped to space at about 12 km up in the atmosphere is now partially absorbed and re-radiated by the increased CO2 at this level. At these altitudes, the atmosphere is cold and dry so injecting more CO2 has a knock-on effect:
> "Improved physics theory and precise laboratory measurements in the 1940s and after encouraged a new way of looking at the absorption. Scientists were especially struck to find that at low pressure and temperature, each band resolved into a cluster of sharply defined lines, like a picket fence, with gaps between the lines where radiation would get through.(24) As Hulburt and Callendar had claimed, the most important CO2 absorption lines did not lie exactly on top of water vapor lines. Instead of two overlapping bands, there were two sets of narrow lines with spaces for radiation to slip through. So even if water vapor in the lower layers of the atmosphere did entirely block any radiation that could have been absorbed by CO2, that would not keep the gas from making a difference in the rarified and frigid upper layers."
However, this CO2 at 12km only accounts for about 1/3 of the warming - what happens is that the warming is amplified by more evaporation (due to increased warmth) which injects more water vapor into the atmosphere (from the oceans and land evaportation) and that's the other 2/3 of the effect more or less.
It is a slow change, but steady. It's entirely possible that humans will be able to adapt to much of the change, assuming we stop pumping fossil CO2 into the atmosphere within the next few decades or so.
It doesn't get rid of total heat in the system, only on the surface from which is has evaporated. That heat is still in the vapor. You're not getting rid of heat, you're transferring it from the surface to the air.
Most of the “greenhouse effect” is provided by water vapor, CO2 is indeed a small component of the effect by itself.
CO2 is the point of concern because the carbon cycle is slow. Any CO2 we add will be there for many decades. So it’s like compound interest: a small change over time adds up to a noticeable effect.
The water cycle is very short, extra water vapor rains out quickly.
A 1.5 ° increase is a 0.5% increase in temperature if you measure the temperature in Kelvin. There is hardly any discrepancy in scale. A 12x multiplier is not that surprising once you consider that oxygen and nitrogen don't have a greenhouse effect and thus we are speaking of 0.04% out of 1% of gases that might have a greenhouse effect.
Both the concentration and effect of CO2 are small but since human life has a limited temperature band, even a 1.5°C increase does matter.
And so far I have just been applying some commonsense to your number comparison logic. I didn't even have to understand the basic mechanisms of how it works, just that there might be some effect.
Keep in mind if look at Venus from space (i.e. point an infrared-spectrum analyzer at it) it looks signficantly colder than Earth does from space, because even though the surface of Venus is very hot, it radiates to space at longer wavelengths because of the thickness of the atmosphere.
If you increase atmospheric CO2 on Earth, you'd see a similar effect.
Notice also that this debunks the 'Earth warming is due to increased solar output' claim, because if that was true, increased solar radiation inputs would result in a warming of the stratosphere, not a cooling.
Imagine looking at a human in an IR scope at night. Then the human wraps themselves in a nice sleeping bag, and their apparent temperature decreases from the point of view of a remote observer. Even after equilibrium is reached, they'll still appear cooler due to thermal diffusion effects.
>Notice also that this debunks the 'Earth warming is due to increased solar output' claim, because if that was true, increased solar radiation inputs would result in a warming of the stratosphere, not a cooling.
While there's strong evidence that the increase in CO2 caused by human activity is causing global warming, the sun has increased output considerably over the eons, and Earth's surface was much hotter billions of years ago. Thin stratospheric air doesn't absorb nearly as much heat as denser layers closer to the ground and the ground and water themselves. Water is black in IR imaging because it absorbs so much of it!
> "Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions..."
If he was correct then you wouldn't see a steady trend of stratospheric cooling, would you? However, if you were looking at an increase in the IR-absorbing blanket of atmospheric CO2, then you would expect it, right?
Water vapor saturates infrared absorption low in the atmosphere, so adding CO2 at ground level has almost no effect on net IR absorption. It's only high in the atmosphere, where there is no water vapor, that added CO2 has a noticeable effect on net capture of infrared from Earth's surface that would otherwise escape to space.
This was all verified in the 1950s, by the way. The fact that people still don't understand it can be put down to the disinformation put out by the fossi fuel lobby since the early 1980s, I suppose.
> "Plass pursued a thorough set of one-dimensional computations, taking into account the structure of the absorption bands at all layers of the atmosphere. In 1956 he explained clearly, for the first time, that the water vapor absorption lines did not block the quite different CO2 absorption spectrum, adding that there was scarcely any water in the upper atmosphere anyway. He further explained that although some of the CO2 band itself was truly saturated, there were many lines to the side where adding more of the gas would increase the absorption of radiation. His arguments and calculations showed convincingly that adding or subtracting CO2 could seriously affect the radiation balance, layer by layer through the atmosphere, altering the temperature by a degree or more down to ground level."
>The fact that people still don't understand it can be put down to the disinformation put out by the fossi fuel lobby since the early 1980s, I suppose.
Framing everything as truth vs disinformation is not a healthy way to foster debate. I am genuinely interested in understanding the mechanisms here. Don't call me a propaganda dupe because I don't fully grasp some concept or another.
Not to be too picky... but water is not black in IR imaging because it absorbs so much IR radiation. It is true that liquid water reflects very little IR radiation (less than 10%)... but water also emits thermal radiation (important to note that IR emission from water is quite different from black-body sources).
Water that looks black in an image is simply emitting less IR radiation than other objects in the image... typically because the water is colder.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcyU8oXBn6k
<-- used to work on infrared detector development and IR radiometry
> Notice also that this debunks the 'Earth warming is due to increased solar output' claim, because if that was true, increased solar radiation inputs would result in a warming of the stratosphere, not a cooling.
This is not necessarily true, if increased radiation hitting the water raised the temperature and caused release of dissolved carbon dioxide you'd see the stratospheric cooling effect no matter where that carbon dioxide came from.
To be clear I'm not saying that global warming due to man made co2 isn't real. I think it is. But there is a scenario or hypothesis in which you might see stratospheric cooling as a result of increasing solar radiance. I don't know the exact numbers and I'm sure the math has been done on that showing that any co2 from oceans due to surface warming wouldn't have as pronounced an effect as we see and might get negated by absorption at higher altitudes, but the hypothesis is sound and I'm sure looking at data on it would be enlightening.
103 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8
I do feel a bit of surprise every time I read about the massive popularity of Youtube, or hear from a friend how they love the 2020s because they learned to do some bit of home improvement or car maintenance by watching a video. I wanted to learn how to frame an accessory building, so I went to the library and picked up "The Very Efficient Carpenter" by Larry Haun, when I needed to replace the water pump in my new car car I got a Haynes manual.
On the other hand, engineering school seemed at times to be a test to filter out anyone who wasn't capable of ingesting massive amounts of text in a short amount of time, which did well to prepare me for my career, which mainly consists of gleaning data from enormous PDFs, so maybe my cohort is unique in this ability.
Also, I find videos tend to communicate more, better. For example when I needed to learn how to drywall, I could have picked up a book about it. But drywalling is more about feel and experience. Watching a video and seeing their technique and what the finished product should look like before it has dried is way more educational.
The reason I wrote my original comment was to point out that these types of comments (I prefer this, I prefer that) don't really add anything to a conversation. I guess I should have spelled that out instead of assuming people would make the connection.
did you also know that , and . will go frame by frame?
From the position of someone very confident about server management, I prefer the text.
Horses for courses and all that.
You just will have to hover the link.
Premium will outright book you visit to penis enlargement clinic based on your IP browsing history from 20 years ago, saving you your precious time and adding a groupon discount.
Same here. Except that I do not "consume" articles. I read them fuckers.
https://www.you-tldr.com/
https://www.summarize.tech/
etc...
Cooling means warming. Got it.
Climate change is basically pulling the levers in a slot machine. Better not to pull the lever at all.
Not everyone can understand basic thermodynamics without first being shown some examples.
The near past was the one of the coldest points in history in the last 500 million years.
The idea that the Earth is going to explode if temperatures increase by 1.5C is amusing.
Yes, it's definitely not going to be fun, and yes it looks like it's definitely going to happen.
But the world has been that hot plenty of times before (100s of millions of years), and we haven't turned into Venus yet.
I'm all for cutting CO2 emissions - definitely think they're causing a problem - but it's not going to be annihilation / world ending.
I say this because I had existential dread for literally a decade until I looked into it more.
Nice try on defining proof as "the people accused of lying have to admit it or else it's not proven". That's not how it works. The NY Times story is high quality proof that Yale's claim about the past isn't true. People were told by the most trusted authorities that not only was the world getting colder but that this was well understood and the trend would continue. If you don't like that article you have to provide equally compelling counter-evidence, not insist on some stupid definition of proof selected only to avoid cognitive dissonance.
But hey, seeing as you want more proof, here's NOAA - the US government agency - stating in 1974, two years before the NY times story that "Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently":
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/NO...
Global cooling wasn't in doubt, only its effects. Here's a meeting of the National Science Foundation in 1972:
"The present cooling trend, which reversed the warm trend of the 1940s, is still underway"
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.178.4057.190
It goes on to list some pieces of easily understood evidence, like "pack ice around Iceland is once again becoming a serious hindrance to navigation" and "warmth loving animals like Armadillos are retreating southward".
Today we're told the NY Times, NOAA and the NSF were all reporting on a made up "fad" no scientists believed, and there never was any cooling trend.
In this article, Yale is lying to us about the past. Why is that?
Re: droughts and floods. Good example. These aren't getting worse. The media and academics like to claim they are, but they are wrong. Select the "Palmer Drought Severity Index" here from official US data and plot "All months" from 1895 to 2023 i.e. all data. Observe that there's no trend:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-gla...
Then select "Precipitation". Observe that there's only a very slight trend of 0.18 inches/decade. That's tiny and not enough of different in average rain to change the incidence of flooding.
Remember that the actual climate claim is only about 0.1 degree of change per decade since ~1980, i.e. only about half a degree of warming since the end of the period of global cooling. Half a degree isn't enough to have any visible impact on weather patterns. The climate just isn't that sensitive.
"The story made headlines in The New York Times [note: this is your NYT article]. Shortly afterwards, Schneider became aware that he had overestimated the cooling effect of aerosols, and underestimated the warming effect of CO2 by a factor of about three. He had mistakenly assumed that measurements of air particles he had taken near the source of pollution applied worldwide. He also found that much of the effect was due to natural aerosols which would not be affected by human activities, so the cooling effect of changes in industrial pollution would be much less than he had calculated. Having found that recalculation showed that global warming was the more likely outcome, he published a retraction of his earlier findings in 1974."
Consider the Wikipedia quote you just provided. You say it provides the full story. Please, think about the things you are reading.
It starts by admitting that in 1971 Schneider published a paper arguing for global cooling, but then claims he realized he made a maths error and by 1974 had published a retraction and accepted global warming. The NY Times article where he promotes his book on global cooling, and where the public is being told that he's representing The Scientific Consensus, was published in 1976. Two whole years after supposedly converting to global warming, there he is, asserting with complete confidence the reality of global cooling!
This claim about Schneider is a lie, like almost everything else about the history of climatology. Wikipedia even provides a citation for their claim of a retraction, but it isn't actually pointing to any retraction, it's to a book published by The Guardian in 2010.
Remember also that in the NY Times article it's stated as 100% fact that temperatures peaked in the 1940s and were falling ever since. That's not a mistake or distortion by the journalist. That's exactly what temperature graphs of the USA showed right up until around the start of the millennium. At that point the historical record was altered to remove this long period of cooling. If you look at modern temperature graphs that period of history shows a flat trend.
5 years later he testified to Congress about the dangers of excess CO2 emissions causing runaway warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI
On the surface these two messages may seem contradictory but underlying both is a consistent message that excessive man-made changes to a delicate highly non-linear system are dangerous to our survival as a species.
Elephant in the room: dangerous to continued exponential growth of our species' population count.
There’s a significant, nonzero risk of complete species death though, a matter about which I care a great deal. Extinction is worse than stagnation.
That is annoying when you are working with the stuff, but when you are living inside that system, that is downright suicidal. Sure. If you are lucky nothing happens. If.
Imagine you have a surface that reflected a unit X of heat back to its source. Now it does 2X. In the next few decades it’s going to do 3X.
Does it make sense now? That X was enough to keep us warm. Now we’re facing with that amount increasing significantly.
The reason CO2 is like very spicy pepper is that it is very good at absorbing infrared radiation from the sun, and then re-emitting that energy as heat in the atmosphere.
If cheap clean portable fusion was invented tomorrow, if would quickly be banned for one reason or another. People need to sell disasters, not solutions.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-...
https://www.acs.org/climatescience/atmosphericwarming.html has a pretty good (though above ELI5) set of graphs and explanations of the chemistry involved.
https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm
> "Improved physics theory and precise laboratory measurements in the 1940s and after encouraged a new way of looking at the absorption. Scientists were especially struck to find that at low pressure and temperature, each band resolved into a cluster of sharply defined lines, like a picket fence, with gaps between the lines where radiation would get through.(24) As Hulburt and Callendar had claimed, the most important CO2 absorption lines did not lie exactly on top of water vapor lines. Instead of two overlapping bands, there were two sets of narrow lines with spaces for radiation to slip through. So even if water vapor in the lower layers of the atmosphere did entirely block any radiation that could have been absorbed by CO2, that would not keep the gas from making a difference in the rarified and frigid upper layers."
However, this CO2 at 12km only accounts for about 1/3 of the warming - what happens is that the warming is amplified by more evaporation (due to increased warmth) which injects more water vapor into the atmosphere (from the oceans and land evaportation) and that's the other 2/3 of the effect more or less.
It is a slow change, but steady. It's entirely possible that humans will be able to adapt to much of the change, assuming we stop pumping fossil CO2 into the atmosphere within the next few decades or so.
CO2 is the point of concern because the carbon cycle is slow. Any CO2 we add will be there for many decades. So it’s like compound interest: a small change over time adds up to a noticeable effect.
The water cycle is very short, extra water vapor rains out quickly.
This explains the physics:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
Many centuries.
Both the concentration and effect of CO2 are small but since human life has a limited temperature band, even a 1.5°C increase does matter.
And so far I have just been applying some commonsense to your number comparison logic. I didn't even have to understand the basic mechanisms of how it works, just that there might be some effect.
If you increase atmospheric CO2 on Earth, you'd see a similar effect.
Notice also that this debunks the 'Earth warming is due to increased solar output' claim, because if that was true, increased solar radiation inputs would result in a warming of the stratosphere, not a cooling.
Imagine looking at a human in an IR scope at night. Then the human wraps themselves in a nice sleeping bag, and their apparent temperature decreases from the point of view of a remote observer. Even after equilibrium is reached, they'll still appear cooler due to thermal diffusion effects.
While there's strong evidence that the increase in CO2 caused by human activity is causing global warming, the sun has increased output considerably over the eons, and Earth's surface was much hotter billions of years ago. Thin stratospheric air doesn't absorb nearly as much heat as denser layers closer to the ground and the ground and water themselves. Water is black in IR imaging because it absorbs so much of it!
However I was discussing the Exxon-financed Willie Soon theory of sunspot modulation of Earth's climate:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-...
> "Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions..."
If he was correct then you wouldn't see a steady trend of stratospheric cooling, would you? However, if you were looking at an increase in the IR-absorbing blanket of atmospheric CO2, then you would expect it, right?
This was all verified in the 1950s, by the way. The fact that people still don't understand it can be put down to the disinformation put out by the fossi fuel lobby since the early 1980s, I suppose.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Radmath.htm
> "Plass pursued a thorough set of one-dimensional computations, taking into account the structure of the absorption bands at all layers of the atmosphere. In 1956 he explained clearly, for the first time, that the water vapor absorption lines did not block the quite different CO2 absorption spectrum, adding that there was scarcely any water in the upper atmosphere anyway. He further explained that although some of the CO2 band itself was truly saturated, there were many lines to the side where adding more of the gas would increase the absorption of radiation. His arguments and calculations showed convincingly that adding or subtracting CO2 could seriously affect the radiation balance, layer by layer through the atmosphere, altering the temperature by a degree or more down to ground level."
Framing everything as truth vs disinformation is not a healthy way to foster debate. I am genuinely interested in understanding the mechanisms here. Don't call me a propaganda dupe because I don't fully grasp some concept or another.
Water that looks black in an image is simply emitting less IR radiation than other objects in the image... typically because the water is colder. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcyU8oXBn6k
<-- used to work on infrared detector development and IR radiometry
This is not necessarily true, if increased radiation hitting the water raised the temperature and caused release of dissolved carbon dioxide you'd see the stratospheric cooling effect no matter where that carbon dioxide came from.
To be clear I'm not saying that global warming due to man made co2 isn't real. I think it is. But there is a scenario or hypothesis in which you might see stratospheric cooling as a result of increasing solar radiance. I don't know the exact numbers and I'm sure the math has been done on that showing that any co2 from oceans due to surface warming wouldn't have as pronounced an effect as we see and might get negated by absorption at higher altitudes, but the hypothesis is sound and I'm sure looking at data on it would be enlightening.