My deleted comment on the blog post by Joshua Halpern (a/k/a “Eli Rabett,” @EthonRaptor) about Granger Causality
Try #1:
ncdave4life said...
The climate debate is not about whether emissions of CO2 and other GHGs have a warming effect. That's a strawman. The debate is about whether the effects are net-harmful or net-beneficial.
● We know that rising levels of GHGs cause warming, from physics. E.g. CO2 causes the "big green notch" in the Earth's emission spectrum, around 15 µm:
• https://sealevel.info/learnmore.html?0=physics#physics
• https://sealevel.info/slide16_excerpt2_FTIR_data_from_a_satellite_tropical_western_pacific_annot12.png
● We know that the warming it causes is slight, from measurements:
• https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1336701210468945923
• https://sealevel.info/twitter_BerkeleyEarth_1265595986942058497_screenshot05.png
● We know that it's beneficial, from experience. That's why scientists call the periods of warmest climate, including periods warmer than now, like the Eemian Optimum, Climate Optimums: they are unambiguously better than cold periods. Here's an illustration from a 1974 CIA study about the looming threat of global cooling. It shows how cooling temperatures adversely affect food supplies:
• https://sealevel.info/CIA1974ClimateReport/CIA1974_excerpt10a.png
That's about the indirect benefit, of milder temperatures. But higher CO2 levels are also directly very beneficial:
•
• https://sealevel.info/negative_social_cost_of_carbon.html
Dave Burton
