[QUOTE=ewmayer;276843]the attribution of all or most of the observed warming to human activity is far from as "generally accepted" as the IPCC claims.[/QUOTE]It's generally accepted (97%) by actual practicing climatologists. The dissent is almost entirely by those who do not specialize in climatology.

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(BTW, I really hope you know better than to accuse me of using the 97% figure as evidence of AGW proof. It's evidence about whether the specialists in the field generally accept AGW, not about AGW itself.)

[QUOTE=Christenson;276921]The point was the strength of direct and indirect political and economic pressures surrounding "climate science"....pushing in both directions.

I certainly hope integrity (difficult to differentiate from maintaining personal credibility) won out here. But we would be foolish to ignore the presence of pressure in both directions, and not to catalog some of its very likely effects, which was what I had started with.[/QUOTE]The magnitude of pressure on climatologists to support AGW for unprofessional reasons is far exaggerated by anti-AGW folks.

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BTW, have you noticed that no one has ever publicly shown any actual evidence whatsoever of a supposed conspiracy by climatologists to promote the AGW theory in contradiction of evidence? ("Spin" of out-of-context quotations does not constitute evidence.)

The Evans 2006 study of downwelling longwave IR from the atmosphere is clinching proof of AGW. I've never seen any anti-AGWer try to refute (or even [I]mention[/I]) the Evans 2006 results. And it would be so easy to smash it (_if_ it were fraudulent, that is) -- replicating the measurements would require less than a million dollars worth of commercially-available equipment, easily within the resources of the Koch brothers or any fossil-fuel company, yet no anti-AGWer even [I]suggests[/I] this easy basic disproof.

The pressure to support it might be more along the lines of whether or not professional respect would be achievable without following evidence to its logical conclusions....

Why don't you point us at Evans, 2006...sounds like very interesting reading.

As it happens, A Google search on "Evans 2006" returned this abstract as the first result:

[URL]http://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100737.htm[/URL]

(The extended abstract is at ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/100737.pdf)

but that wasn't guaranteed -- none of the next 29 (at least) items is relevant.

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From the abstract:

[quote]The earth's climate system is warmed by 35 C due to the emission of downward infrared radiation by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (surface radiative forcing) or by the absorption of upward infrared radiation (radiative trapping). Increases in this emission/absorption are the driving force behind global warming. Climate models predict that the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has altered the radiative energy balance at the earth's surface by several percent by increasing the greenhouse radiation from the atmosphere. With measurements at high spectral resolution, this increase can be quantitatively attributed to each of several anthropogenic gases. Radiance spectra of the greenhouse radiation from the atmosphere have been measured at ground level from several Canadian sites using FTIR spectroscopy at high resolution. The forcing radiative fluxes from CFC11, CFC12, CCl4, HNO3, O3, N2O, CH4, CO and CO2 have been quantitatively determined over a range of seasons. The contributions from stratospheric ozone and tropospheric ozone are separated by our measurement techniques. A comparison between our measurements of surface forcing emission and measurements of radiative trapping absorption from the IMG satellite instrument shows reasonable agreement. The experimental fluxes are simulated well by the FASCOD3 radiation code. This code has been used to calculate the model predicted increase in surface radiative forcing since 1850 to be 2.55 W/m2. In comparison, an ensemble summary of our measurements indicates that an energy flux imbalance of 3.5 W/m2 has been created by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases since 1850. This experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.[/quote]

"The earth's climate system is warmed by 35C"
Yarrrr... How much it was the average "before"? Minus 10? I don't remember my grandpa wearing boots and gloves for all the year, including the summer time, even if in my country we had (and still have) terrible winters...

[QUOTE=LaurV;276961]"The earth's climate system is warmed by 35C"[/QUOTE]... compared to the hypothetical situation in which Earth's atmosphere has no greenhouse gases.

[quote]Yarrrr... How much it was the average "before"? Minus 10? I don't remember my grandpa wearing boots and gloves for all the year, including the summer time, even if in my country we had (and still have) terrible winters...[/quote]Such abstracts assume the reader has an adequate background for understanding the short references and assumptions in that compacted literary form.

In this case, "is warmed" was not intended to refer to a comparison of past vs. present or any other time interval. It's not "is warmer than it was ..." or "has warmed during ...". It's referring to the difference between the actual Earth situation and a hypothetical Earth situation in which the atmosphere has no GHGs.

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BTW, the extended abstract ([URL]http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/100737.pdf[/URL]) doesn't even bother mentioning the 35C figure, I presume because that's a very basic item known to anyone professionally working on GHGs. Perhaps the abstract's first sentence is a quote from the full paper's introduction.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;276964] It's referring to the difference between the actual Earth situation and a hypothetical Earth situation in which the atmosphere has no GHGs.
[/QUOTE]

In this case I am happy we produced all this damages. Where I live now April is the hottest month of the year, when the temperature is over 35 in average (and about 5 degrees higher then in any other "monthly average" period of the year), and there is a nice local saying, as follows:

Wanting to emphasize how hot it is, comparing with the rest of the year, local people say: "If you resist here in April, then the rest of the year you will feel cold".

But they have no idea that is exactly the situation for me, without any figurative speech. I feel good in April, and a bit cold the rest of the year. Especially now, November being the coldest month, today we had +16C in the morning... :D

I can't imagine myself living in a world with zero Celsius average.... I will go home, take the drilling machine and put a hole in my refrigerator's CFC tank, to help the global warming... I assume it has one, but I am not so sure, it is a new one, and these days you can't trust the new refrigerators, they all use substitutes...

[QUOTE=LaurV;276969]I will go home, take the drilling machine and put a hole in my refrigerator's CFC tank, to help the global warming...[/QUOTE]Please, please, don't. :) Think of the poor upper-atmosphere ozone, I beg of you!

[QUOTE=LaurV;276969]In this case I am happy we produced all this damages. Where I live now April is the hottest month of the year, when the temperature is over 35 in average (and about 5 degrees higher then in any other "monthly average" period of the year), and there is a nice local saying, as follows:[/QUOTE]We did [b]not[/b] produce [b]all[/b] this greenhouse heating. The vast majority of it was present a billion years ago. Water is a powerful greenhouse gas; non-anthropenic CO[sub]2[/sub] is a powerful greenhouse gas.

As for the
[QUOTE=LaurV;276969]I can't imagine myself living in a world with zero Celsius average....[/QUOTE] you don't need to imagine it. For a start, your 35C is not your annual average temperature, it's your average in the hottest month. Absent the earth's atmosphere, the average temperature would be well below zero. Secondly, there's a world nearby which is at the same distance from the sun as the earth and doesn't have any greenhouse gas to modify its climate. It's the moon and we know very well indeed what diurnal and annual temperature ranges it experiences.


Paul

"Biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases"

[URL]http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-jump-ever-seen-global-warming-gases-183955211.html[/URL]

(Warning: Some sources report amounts of carbon dioxide, but others report the amounts in terms of only the carbon contained in CO2. In the following article, both[B] carbon[/B] and [B]carbon dioxide[/B] are mentioned (I've boldfaced both), without any warning about confusing one with the other!)

[quote]The global output of heat-trapping [B]carbon dioxide[/B] jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of [B]carbon[/B] into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That's an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases.

. . .[/quote]Each molecule of [B]carbon dioxide[/B] weighs 3.67 times as much as just the [B]carbon[/B] atom in it. Always keep this in mind when comparing figures from different sources!

So, "564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of [B]carbon[/B]" means 2068 million more tons (1877 million metric tons) of [B]carbon dioxide[/B] in this context.

[quote]. . .

... the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the climate panel.

. . .[/quote]... continuing a steady trend:

Despite anti-AGWers' accusations of alarmism and exaggeration, real-world measurements continue to show that the effects of AGW are consistently [U]greater[/U] than the [U]worst-case[/U] projections from the IPCC.

Anti-AGWers' preference for believing a fairy-tale rather than reality is condemning their descendants to very uncomfortable climate changes.

[QUOTE=LaurV;276969]I feel good in April, and a bit cold the rest of the year. Especially now, November being the coldest month, today we had +16C in the morning... :D

I can't imagine myself living in a world with zero Celsius average....[/QUOTE]
It kind of depends on the situation. It was 46F (8C) when I was at the summit of Pike's Peak some time ago, and I wasn't cold at all. It's at 4300m elevation, so the thin air and strong sunlight made it feel at least 10 degrees C warmer.

Also, you can adapt to colder temperatures. In some winters, temperatures would fall below freezing every night for weeks. When the daytime temp finally got to the low 60s (~16C), it felt like a sauna and many people were wearing flip flops and shorts.