Reddit mentions of Global Warming: The Complete Briefing

Try to understand that the hearing you saw was political theater. It's a gimmick orchestrated by the majority party to try to drum up headlines on partisan media, galvanize the hardcore issue-followers from their base, and make snarky comments. The purpose of a hearing like this is most emphatically not to dig into the heart of an issue and try to come to a better understand of it. It's also an opportunity for trying to re-frame political discourse; bear in mind that a the very moment of this hearing, the ADP was convening to finalize the penultimate text of the COP21 and Paris Agreement.

It's very worrisome to me that you came away from this hearing with the impression that there are two sides to the climate change issue. There are not. There is not competing, alternative explanation of modern climate change, and there is no serious, scholarly debate about broad swaths of the field. What you saw at the hearing were manufactured controversies - misdirections which prey on the lay person's unfamiliarity with the science. For instance, Senator Cruz insisted - multiple times - that the satellite temperature record is the "gold standard" for recording temperatures and documenting potential climate change, and that we can't trust the surface temperature record because the data isn't available. That's, without any question or minimization whatsoever, absolute horseshit. In reality, all of the data and code necessary to reproduce the surface temperature record is available freely for anyone to download, and old records are archived in their original format. On the other hand, the satellite record is not freely available - it's privately maintained by both RSS and UAH. UAH has also - for two decades now - refused to release the code used to produce their dataset. That's a major problem, given the complexity of trying to infer temperatures from what satellites measure. In fact, it requires simplified atmosphere/climate models validated against the surface temperature record. So you can begin to see the problem here, and the insidious goal of this hearing - to invert the idea of which dataset is more reliable.

If you want to learn more about climate science, then stick to your textbooks. Some very good ones for geosciences students would be "Global Warming: The Complete Briefing" by John Houghton and "What We Know About Climate Change" by Kerry Emanuel. I'd be happy to recommend further resources from there.

But if you're looking for a head-to-head debate about climate science you won't find one, because there isn't a serious contrarian side on the issue.

This is actually a pretty obvious fact to people who are into this kind of of stuff and he probably didn't feel the need to cite it. The amount of energy needed to go into meat is incredible. I am far too lazy to come up with a source but I was an environmental minor and took a few courses on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of what I know came from this textbook "http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0521709164.jpg" among others. Also cement is a huge CO2 emitter, who would've thought.

Global Warming: The Complete Briefing

>Not in the slightest. I'm merely restating what a massive body of evidence supports. But I don't think you even know what you're talking about, here.

Yes I have read through dozens of papers since I first got interested in this topic. I have a inkling of what I'm talking about.

>What is this theory, exactly? Can you point me to any of the scientific literature on the subject? Can you be precise about what this theory entails?

Can you link to anything beyond Green House Gas Effect? Yeah I thought not.

>That estimate of climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 was 5-6 C; almost double the modern 'best estimate'.

The current modern estimate is .8-1.5 degree Celsius per doubling of CO2 without positive feedback (depending on the study). You are using a forcing that includes positive feedback that is much greater than negative feedback. Including in immediate feedbacks you get 5-6 C per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This paper for instance shows that the feedbacks are quite inconsistent when building the combined CO2 forcing from historical data.

http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/8/4923/2012/cpd-8-4923-2012.pdf

The following book from Professor Houghton who is advocating for immediate action on global warming gives gives the direct forcing for CO2 to be 1.2 degree Celsius.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0521709164

The IPCC has listed a 3.7 W/m^2 forcing per doubling of CO2. This value also gives roughly the same answer as Professor Houghton of roughly 1.1-1.2 degree Celsius per doubling of CO2. This is of course before any feedbacks are included.

>I could easily point to dozens of papers on the topic of climate feedbacks; can you point to any actual peer-reviewed science supporting your claims?

I haven't made a single claim. The facts are quite clear on this. I'm sure you could link to the IPCC report and feel like you have done yourself a service and that is the extent of your experience on this topic. You are throwing out numbers without any context for which they stand for.

Feedbacks vary largely based on the study you look at. And there is no defining scientific finding that shows positive feedback is much greater than negative feedback. So claiming there are mountains of scientific evidence is disingenuous to say the least. As it stands if positive feedback == negative feedback the warming caused by CO2 is not dangerous, but is worth keeping track of.