“But ABC”

Reducing climate change to Anything But CO2.

Examples

Climate change — it happens, with or without our help.
(Roy)

Read my lips: Climate change is a common planetary phenomenon that has nothing to do with people and cars.
(SteveT)

Objections and Replies

Attribution. We don’t know how much is our fault & how much is—
☞ The A in AGW is likely 93%–123% of the observed 1951–2010 change.

Cause. CO2 does not cause temperature to—
☞ It influences solar radiation, which in turn affects temperature.

Climate changes. Climate doesn’t stay the exact same forever—
☞ Our carbon dioxide has prevented the next ice age.

Coolant. CO2 is used as an industrial coolant—
☞ Because it’s cheap and mostly harmless, not because it’s efficient.

Correlation. CO2 follows temperature in both short and long time scale—
☞ If CO2 was all there was in the atmosphere, you’d have a point. Science is about explanation, and CO2 is the best one we got for current warming.

Cycles. This period of warmth is not different from prior periods—
☞ Current warming is occurring roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

Entropy. The Earth has cooled from a molten state to its present—
☞ That heat flow is too small (less than 0.1W/m^2) and has been constant over millennia, so it can’t explain current increases (H/T Entropic Man).

God. God controls the weather—
☞ But She does not control climate.

Implication. That CO2 is a GHG in no way implies that increasing CO2 must— ☞ That the Sun has risen today does not imply it will rise tomorrow either.

Natural. The warming could be 100% natural—
☞ Over the past 60 years, natural forcings have had a cooling effect.

Nights and Days. Each hot day it freezes at night—
☞ Climate is a long term average.

Ozone. Warming is driven by changes in ozone—
☞ Great! Quantify your new theory and publish it. Please mind your units.

Pluto. There’s global warming on Pluto—
☞ Natural death does not exclude murder. If humans could not contribute to Nature’s ebbs and flows, they would be pure spirits.

Rotation. We discovered the Planet Surface Rotational Warming Phenom—
☞ Is that you, Christos?

Teh Sun, Stoopid. No one recognizes solar output—
☞ Quite sure physicists heard about the Sun.

Volcanoes. Massive eruptions at Kilauea for four months in 2018, but nary—
☞ Every single day humans release a Mt Pinatubo eruption’s worth of CO2.

Water Vapor.
☞ Water vapor fluctuates daily whereas CO2 used to vary on geological times scale.

Wood. R. W. Wood disproved the GHG theory —
☞ There are at least two problems with Wood’s logic.

Notes

{} Second Law. There are lots of arcane discussions about the Second Law of thermodynamics. Unless you like to play #ButSemantics (it’s all about what warming means), stay away from them and defer to physicists. It takes expertise to diagnose misunderstandings.

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