Sunday, December 14, 2014

I"ll See Your Reasons, And Raise You Measured Data

I found it.
Actually I just ran across it accidentally while reading the econoblogs and following links, but I had been wondering if there was a simple presentation of this somewhere.

A Facebook friend of a friend had commented on my friend's post saying that volcanos produce way more carbon dioxide than humans.  This was in the context of global warming isn't real because, you know, reasons.  There was a strong suggestion that she believed that the thousands of climate scientists around the globe over the last several decades had somehow failed to account for the amount of CO² produced by volcanos, and possibly other natural sources, in their measurements, and that, since she knew about this and they didn't, that she had knowledge superior to the so-called experts.

Okay, that sounded a bit more contemptuous than I intended, but I'm going to let it stand.

My reading last night led me to this article, which had the following graphs.
  The black line in each graph represents actual measured temperatures, and the red line in the top graph represents the median temperature predicted through modeling.  The top graph represents both natural and man made contributions to greenhouse gasses.
    The bottom graph removes the man made contributions from the equation, the blue line representing the median temperature predicted through modeling.  This chart would cover everything natural, like volcanos, cow farts, and forest fires.
   So yes, it seems that someone has indeed taken the time to figure out how things would be if we weren't around to screw things up.

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