Mjp2: cum hoc ergo proctor hoc literally means "with this, therefore because of this", which is fallacious, and therefore does not apply. I was agreeing with you that correlation does not imply causation. The IPCC claims to have a very poor understanding of cosmic ray and geomagnetic effects. If you have poor understanding of your inputs, then you cannot have confidence in your model outputs. All the "90%" confidence refers to is the range of output permutations of the models. you can quite happily say that 90% of model runs demonstrate a particular range, but if your inputs are crap, so will your outputs. If you throw 100 darts at the board in the pub and 90 of them hit the barman in the eye, you can be 90% confident in your aim, but that doesn't help you much.
Redux: Jopo linked to the source data, you can easily verify it yourself, as I have done. I obtained my magnetic field data from Geoscience Australia (
www.ga.gov.au) going back to 1985.
Pearson correlation co-efficient between Hadcrut4 temperature anomaly and north magnetic polar wander = 0.82 vs 0.86 for CO2 over that period and -0.80 for total field strength.
Spearman correlation = 0.71 for polar wander, -0.77 for field strength and 0.84 for CO2
If we just look at the last 15 years, temperature correlation drops to -0.2 for polar wander, which implies poor correlation, however it also drops to 0.50 for both field strength and CO2, which certainly shouldn't be the case in CO2 is the main causative driver of climate change.
Ferronium: 97% of climatologists DON'T agree that GW is mostly man made, and even if they did, that still wouldn't be a valid evidentiary argument. But if you're referring to the 2013 Cook and Nuccitelli paper that claimed that 97% consensus, are you aware that a follow up peer reviewed published paper demolished that work showing that only 0.3% of the papers reviewed by Cook and Nuccitelli explicitly supported the anthropogenic CO2 cause? 0.3% Many of the authors subsequently interviewed even stated that cook took their work out of context, and Cook's rebuttal was so poor that it wasn't deemed worthy of publishing?
Mjp2? What evidence that CO2 is a primary causal mechanism are you referring to? and what observations over 50 years are you referring to that support it? Back in the Ordovician period when CO2 was 20 times higher than today, we didn't have acidic oceans, At the end of the Ordovician, when we had global glaciation, CO2 was drastically higher than today. At the start of the Holocene period between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, the world was warmer than now, with much lower CO2, and so idyllic for humanity it prompted the agricultural revolution and the commencement of civilisation. Subsequently we have had periods of global warming and cooling not dissimilar to current trends. In fact through all of history, pre-history and geological record, we have had wide and rapid variations in climatic conditions, for which there is no evidence what-so-ever that CO2 was a causative agent, but we're somehow to believe now that because we humans have added a mere 15 parts per million of additional CO2 to the atmosphere the world is going to end? don't make me laugh.
The fact is, We still don't have any predictive understanding of the natural causes of climate change, which throughout history and pre-history have dwarfed any current changes, and without understanding the natural causes, it is simply incorrect to say that we are confident that this time around it's all our fault.
Yes, CO2 absorbs EM radiation in the 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometer wavelengths, increasing CO2 will therefore increase the opacity of the atmosphere to these wavelengths, the physics is not in dispute, but there is SO much more to our complex and chaotic atmosphere than this. CO2 has never driven climate in the past, and I've not seen ANY evidence to suggest that it does now.
