The way forward is where I want this reboot to go. I am going to toss up some science links and provide commentary, but I see this morphing more into a climate change data dump with an emphasis on the nexus between climate change and politics. The incoming US president has some really scary people allegedly lined up for this dept. or that slot.
For instance, PE Trump has Myron Ebell heading his EPA transition team. If you open the link, you'll see a few of Trump's choicest global warming/climate change tweets as well as a host of other scary stuff.
Since I do not engage in ad hominem attacks, let us look at Myron(can you imagine the amount of time this guy spent inside high school lockers?) Ebell's scholastic training. Mr. Ebell has a B.A. in philosophy, and an M.Sc in economics. He states: "[I am] not a climate scientist. I'm just giving you the informed layman's perspective." He drops another pearl: "If science is going to be discussed in the public arena, then shouldn't people other than scientists be allowed to participate? Isn't that what a representative democracy is?"
I believe that all voices should be heard, but all voices should not be heard at equal volume. I have far more sci-cred than Mr. Ebell, but I too listen to real leaders in the field. One of my go to papers is Shaun Lovejoy's Scaling fluctuation analysis and statistical hypothesis testing of anthropogenic warming. While the paper's conclusions are clearly alarming, the figures and mathematics are delivered in the circumspect manner typical to most scientific papers.
Mr. Ebell is Fukushima and Chernobyl squared where acceptance of data sets that he is likely not well enough versed in physics and maths to understand without interpretation. He should be able to understand the statistical drill down of the various data sets, but unless you do this sort of thing on a regular basis, the gears get rusty. These is another set of thins that might be a bit of a hurdle for a non-physics person to need help with; and those are the symbol sets peculiar to physics.
<---//Begin digression I took two years of quantum physics baby courses, and the special maths one must know, in order to understand semiconductor limitations as process sizes shrunk and while I could pass the tests, I knew nothing of quantum theory until I was working afield..and then only after perhaps two years. Much like Feynman said, "One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much." Truer words have never been uttered. End digression//--->
So, I can do the math as I used it - or variants of it - for 30 years. I am over that now. See this bit of tripe.
It seems unbelievably short-sighted to back out of the weak Paris Climate Agreement. Paris is far too little far too late, but it is a start. It is like the US ACA(Affordable Care Act ofttimes derisively referred to as Obamacare) for the global climate. It is nowhere near being the best solution, but one has to start somewhere or we'll be Venus. Okay, not real Venus, no unaided lead melting, but a really bleak place to inhabit.
I was going to respond to a commenter in a piece concerning CO2 and periods of waxing glaciation(I'm too much a stickler for accuracy to call them 'ice ages'), but it is not my job to educate people. The gist of the commenter's argument was this: "How come there were ice ages when CO2 levels were higher than they are today?" To fully answer this gets into some speculative stuff, and the paleo-climate data gets hazier and hazier the further back in time one goes. How does one answer such a query? If I had answered the question I would have kept my answer limited to the last 800,000 years. This eliminates nearly all continental drift. No need to bring up Gondwana and/or Pangaea unless pressed :) I also tossed out the "Snowball Earth" period as that would have taken the reader back some 715 million years. I also rejected pre-photosynthetic earth as old Sol was pretty weak from 4.55 billion years ago, but there was likely more energy from radiation sources and impactors..too complex. Lots of CO2 in that atmosphere, but not germane.
My answer is here. I will use a link to this post the next time this comes up. First of all, the graphic below shows CO2 fluctuations over the last 800,000 years. This data has been gathered by sampling gas trapped in ice cores -- a very reliable method.
As you can see in the past 800,000 years, there has not been a time - until the present - where atmospheric CO2 levels exceeded 300ppm. I should note, that since this image was compiled, Mauna Loa(the CO2 station for the northern hemisphere) stays above 400ppm all year round. We are terrific stewards of the earth! Just great!
Here is a graphic displaying "ice age" temperatures and volumes - which includes interglacials - going back 450,000 years.
Lastly, I have this .svg file showing temperature and CO2 variations(blogger says no dice to my nifty graphic, so it is now a jpeg). Each image tells a different story; and when taken together make a compelling argument that we have, and will continue to, pee in the only pool in which we can swim.
There you have it. A nice correlation. Even if the collective "we" stopped putting CO2 into the atmosphere today, the earth's troposphere(the air we breathe on terra firma) would continue to warm for approximately 40 years. Why? Because the world's oceans would release all the heat absorbed since the start of the industrial revolution..and maybe even earlier. So let us agree on 50 more years of warming if we ceased dumping carbon into the atmosphere now. It would still get a lot uglier before the climate levels off and then perceptibly makes the transition back to pre-industrial temperatures.
What fun!
I am more concerned about saving biodiversity than about saving humans. With 7.4 billions of us here I imagine a few will survive. I cannot fathom a planet with people, rats, mice, ticks and mutant bacteria. No thanks! What a pale world that would be.
Is Elon Musk seriously considering Mars? His eco-friendly stuff is to be lauded, but humanity needs to see that this rock remains habitable before pooping an another rock. He almost had the right idea. Smart buses with smart routes would be world's better for the earth to produce. That is a topic for another day.
In closing, I was championing mass public transportation in 1983. The ozone hole was becoming a 'thing,' and I gave impromptu talks to anyone that would listen about the crushing mass of humanity. I read The Population Bomb while in junior high school as well as Carson's Silent Spring before I was 14. I was a weird kid.
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