That is close, but what I described seems more like the basic assumption in an atmospheric model based on ideal gasses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_models

Well, Pressure is not constant throughout our atmosphere...

Pressure varies based on height and temperature, according to the equations laid out in that piece on the scale height.

Edit: More specifically,

Temperature is determined experimentally, at that point, they can get the relationship between pressure and height (related to volume, since you can think of this as applying to a column of air)

So the heat content of the atmosphere is one of the assumptions of the model, the model won't perform very well to determine the temperature change.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

I assume that can be integrated out so that the important relationship becomes the relationship between Mass and Temperature with Mean Mass being the most affected by increased levels of CO2 due to its relatively high mass.

EDIT: it isn't an inverse relation ship.

The mass change of the atmosphere due to increased carbon is minimal. You'll see basically no change in the scale height based on that. The important part is the change in the "opaqueness" of the atmosphere.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

@shapenaji: don't feed the trolls.

But the atmosphere can just undergo free expansion, so the perceived temperature is still about the same, even if it traps energy, except for the minimal effect due to the change in mass.

Ok, just so we're clear. Scientists and the IPCC have been good on this and it's the shallow, alarmist, ill-informed media that have been stoking things. Well, then I'm going to be alarmed because careful, cautious, thorough scientists who don't make outrageous claims and aren't in the media all the time seem to be rather alarmed as well. Yesterday the scientists were secretive and manipulative, so that's a change, but it's a big field, so ok. And while the noise factor and the difficulty of defining or measuring "extreme" weather make attribution of causation hard, I've heard nobody reputable except the weather channel hurricane guy saying they can conclude the extreme events that were predicted and have happened are _not_ due to climate change.

The hurricane guy ... and now you. I can see perhaps why you don't want us to use google. You used it and seem to suggest we form a conclusion about the time distribution of extreme weather from two media-style top ten lists, including one of no relevance. Snowstorm severity, and I'm not googling so I could be a bit wrong, is not driven by cold air but by warm water. Yes, more cold wind other things equal may produce more snow, but blizzards that wind up on top 10 lists come from warmer than usual water. A few years back when we had some very heavy snow in the States, Sen. Inhofe went out and built an igloo or snowman or something in DC to mock Al Gore and to have a media event decrying media manipulation that was twisting the climate discussion. Look at all this global warming, he said, pointing to the snow. That winter was not drastically colder than other winters, but the Atlantic was warmer (and Canada and much of Russia drastically warmer btw), causing there to be plenty of moisture for the lake effect to dump masses of snow. Of course, we can't attribute that to global warming, but the water, as predicted decades ago, was warmer, and the winter winds, by a mechanism known for a long time, dumped it up and down the East Coast as snow. So the Oklahoma oaf is perfectly likely to have been right. All that snow mounded around him _was_ global warming. We'll just have to wait 20 years to form a conclusion.

You seem to have formed the opinion that between this uncertainty and all the others, we owe it to our children not to try to modify our economy.

I personally am hesitant to question global warming, because I feel reducing reliance on fossil fuels is a good idea anyway, many scientists may also feel this way.

Al Gore's work is pretty good. It is alarmist but he is right to be alarmed and he is a politician, not a scientist, so, yes, he has an agenda. I would way, way rather people got their information from scientists and dispassionate policy analysts and not from Al getting weepy and showing pictures of polar bears. Trouble is, people ignored scientists and analysts. For years. You want dry, careful guys with pocket protectors? We've got legions. For a long time, scientists and analysts went up against media guys from the other side and, in America anyway, lost. Politically, nothing worked and nobody paid attention until Al shaved, worked out a bit and hit the road. So successful was it that the other side (and it is a side) tooled up and got busy, continuing to belittle Gore and all the scientists you seem to say you'd rather pay attention to.

And his work is not drivel. It is been gone over frame by frame, not only by interested hobbyists but by paid lobbyists, parliamentary committees, courts and who knows else, and none of the flubs they found were substantive, not even CO2 lag. But if you feel it is drivel, then please pay attention to those quiet scientists. If you want to know how much reliance I think we should place on Al Gore's conclusions in deciding what policies if any to implement, I say zero. If in the meantime, he wins some arguments that no one else could, fine.

Al Gore's mistakes, by the way, bear no comparison to the crackpot stuff from the other side, Ian Plimer or Joanna Nova or Sen. Inhofe or Lord Wosname of Wherzifrom or James Delingpole or most of them.

And if anyone ever suggested that we "stop using fossil fuels" in anything less than a century and without some alternative, you could rightly dismiss them as a lunatic. No use of fossil fuels --> most of us die soon. This is why trying to figure out and respond to the consequences of fossil fuel use is crucial. The most radical alarmists have been trying to get is for us to stabilize our use of fossil fuels in the next few decades and invent alternatives as rapidly as possible. Reducing fossil fuel use is something to be looked at for 2050 and later. But any effort to argue even slowing down our use of fossil fuels is met simultaneously, in the US anyway, by earnest arguments that it is not that big a deal, that the science is uncertain, that the science is also certain that there isn't a problem, that every single possible move one could make is counterproductive, that absolutely no change is possible in future emissions, that money spent on innovation is wasted and shut up and go away. The trouble is, it was met with that in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s as well as now. We lost at least four and maybe five presidential terms of useful small scale efforts, terms we spent subsidizing oil exploration instead of doing scientific research.

Indeed the problems are not simple, but your initial question was not should we stop using fossil fuels; it was is global warming a serious problem. Clearly it is. You've tried to cast doubt on many alarmist arguments and media hype, but said little about whether or not it is a serious problem. Look, if I suggested we make large scale changes to the world's economy because Ian Plimer was a dolt, I'd be wrong. By the same token, if some politician attributes Hurricane Sandy to climate change, or Al Gore says rhododendrons vent methane (he didn't) or some other nonsense comes out, it has no bearing on the seriousness of the problem. Do you believe that global warming is _not_ a serious problem? Is there a positive standard of proof climate scientists could meet that would justify in your mind even a modest policy response? Does the impossibility, in your mind, of ever modelling climate mean we can take no action, nor counsel any inaction, with any hope of a useful result? Is even Lomborg's recommendation outside the pale?

Last question: I gather you're in Germany. Do you think the weather there will be warmer in July than it is now?

The way I see it, there are two sides of the equation, both highly politicized for their own reasons:

1. "Global warming, yadda yada, man made, yadda yadda, we all gonna die!"
2. "No problem, yadda yadda, lets keep polluting, yadda yadda, lets make few more quick bucks!"

Both sides spew disinformation no a global scale, both use scare tactics, and both pour millions into advancing their respective political agendas. Both are largely financed by this or that group lobbying in favor of their own short-term profits. I hope we can all agree on that, at least.

But does it really matter? The fact is that the we ARE influencing the planet in a very bad way, just look around - not even the anti-global-warming fanatics disagree with that! And so a decent thing to do, I think, is to try to figure out how to do things differently. Regardless of the political agendas involved, regardless of your personal belief systems, the side that screams for protecting the environment, global warming or not, is pushing in the right direction.

If people become too skeptical, like you, saying "I don't buy it, its just political, all the problems are oh so hard, it does not matter until everybody does it, and blah blah" - then what you are doing is exactly what one of the political sides wants you to - NOTHING. In a sense, you are no less of a sheep follower than those misguided ones buying everything Al Gore sells.

Besides,doing NOTHING is most likely the wrong thing to do in the long run. What's worse, by trying to convince others of your views, regardless of their validity today or tomorrow, you are helping prevent some good things from happening. And this is bad.

So... in the absence of firm and conclusive evidence one way or another, confused by all the scientific and political dung flying around, I'd say that the proper thing to do is to err on the side of caution and try to figure out how to do thing more cleanly. If that means some companies will have cut their profits slightly, I see it as a sacrifice I am willing to make.

Your mileage may vary...

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Well, I can see that there are big powerful companies who have a vested interest in the status quo, and for whom denying climate change and not cleaning up CO2 would favor their own short term profits. But I fail to what the vested interest is in spending extra effort and money in cleaning up a waste product (CO2). What big companies are favoring their own short term profits by supporting stringent measures on CO2 emissions?

Yeah, the constant game of Tic Tac Toe: Climate Science Edition, while an improvement on the original, is still boring. These debates have been going on ad nauseum for decades.

We need to consider the motivations that drive people's behavior and think about this in terms of risk.

For starters, that immediately tells you that journalists are a red herring. They're just normal people trying to do their job and sell copy in a world full of noise. It's well known that 7 Things THEY Don't Want you to Know About Climate Change is going to get more clicks, likes and eyeballs than On Planetary Climate Systems Part XVII, Appendix B will...

Firstly, beyond Science and how it's being communicated, there are two competing conspiracy theories here:

1. A loosely connected group of scientists around the world are trying to manipulate and manufacture scientific consensus in order to bring about some sort of communist utopia.

2. Large companies with a vested interest in maintaining the value of their current business model and existing assets (both in terms of infrastructure that could be left stranded and access to highly valuable yet-to-be-extracted-and-sold resources) are trying to sabotage the debate and the political process for their own short term gains.

(Let me know if I've not summarized one of these conspiracy theories adequately)

For each of these theories, what's the probability of the theory being more or less right? Who stands to gain from behaving in such a way and how much do they gain from it?

Secondly, there are several possible outcomes where humanity gets this wrong. Two of them are:

a) It was all a big lie and we're left with a whole lot of renewable energy sources and efficiency measures that we needn't have developed at all.

b) We continue on with a business as usual approach and most of the predictions scientists are now making turn out to be accurate.

How would you evaluate the total risk to humanity posed by each one of these scenarios? And what would the costs of being wrong be?

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David

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This doesn't seem like a hard question. Maybe these guys?
http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-generation/renewables/wind-power/?stc=wwecc120838
http://www.ccsassociation.org/ (includes a big list of members including oil and energy companies)
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/financial-services/investment-banks-to-cash-in-on-new-tax/story-fn91wd6x-1226189383070
http://energy.aol.com/2012/11/01/big-banks-await-us-carbon-trading-while-focusing-on-core-energy/
A view from an ecology web site which I've not really checked very much: http://www.econexus.info/publication/carbon-market-dream
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/world/asia/incentive-to-slow-climate-change-drives-output-of-harmful-gases.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I'm sure the nuclear industry would be on the list if they weren't resigned to having lost all public support, but there are manufacturers of solar panels - the European ones seem to all have gone bankrupt though.
Or see this: http://www.foeeurope.org/agrofuels/Briefing_beware-vested-interests
Here's a report (unfortunately from a few years ago) on government spending on climate change: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/omb/fy05_climate_chg_rpt_to_cong.pdf. Expenditures on climate change technology (during the Bush administration) are on the order of $3 billion annually, and it is naive to believe that there aren't industries interested in getting a slice of that pie. (Climate change research is another $2 billion, and I leave it as an exercise to the reader how that might generate conflicts of interest that affect research results). Other world governments spend similar amounts (e.g. AUD$3.7 billion total over four years according to http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/strategic-reviews/index.html). This also disproves the claim that we are not doing anything; these are not exactly paltry sums.

In contrast, Greenpeace want us to be outraged about oil companies funding skeptical scientists to the tune of, wait for it, $76000. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/campaign-blog/revealed-exxon-secret-funding-of-global-warmi/blog/25605/. Apparently that's the kind of money sloshing around in the well-funded denier machine that everyone is so utterly convinced exists and is scuttling all our efforts (there would be another story to tell here about climate scientist Peter Gleick and his phishing operation against the Heartland Institute that came up so empty that he had to leak a fake document as well...).

One thing that I hope is clear from some these examples: some of the actions we are taking are misguided and harmful in themselves. Biofuels were mentioned earlier, I consider carbon sequestration a crazy and dangerous idea (compare possible side effects with those of fracking), and the articles about the effects of the carbon trading scheme should make it obvious that there will be side-effects (some of which may or may not be intentional to funnel money to industry interests). Companies will exploit every opportunity to make profits, and if there is large government spending on climate projects, this is where they will go - but you are correct that their interest does not lie in saving the world, but in making a profit. This is why I think it is vital that we are honest with ourselves about the actual expected effects of climate change as well as about the likely side-effects of attempts to limit emissions.

Use Google all you want. That comment was in response to a claim that Hawaii would be flooded, and I wanted to know whether the poster actually knew current or predicted (by consensus science) sea level trends.

If even one person here starts using Google to ask questions and seriously consider data from all sources, then I'll consider my involvment in this thread a success.

@crux: I ask for large vested interests, and you give me a list of small players emerging mostly in response to carbon reduction initiatives. Where are the large powerful companies that had a vested interest in reducing carbon emissions *before* the climate science forced governments to invest increasing amounts of money in it?

You specifically asked "What big companies are favoring their own short term profits by supporting stringent measures on CO2 emissions?", not what companies would do without government intervention. And if you consider Siemens or investment banks small players, well I guess our worldviews can't be reconciled. That's EOT for me.

Here are some examples:

--- Companies invested in 'clean' energy... wind, solar, etc. There is potentially a LOT of money to be made if we as a country/world seriously go this way. Each time there is a lot of money to be made like that, somebody will be interested in it and willing to push for it, regardless if it is good for the planet or bad (its good in this case, but it might just be a lucky accident.)

--- Sometimes it might be even inter-company 'squabbles' - I've seen it in one of the places I worked at, when different division would spend money on widely opposing plans to maximize their own bottom line. Think of car companies and their competing lines of regular cars, hybrids, and electrics... I am absolutely not sure about this one, but I think its a likely scenario.

--- There are also interest groups (non-profits, etc.) whose board members make fortunes from donations, for example, and they only get the donations as long as they keep pushing (and getting results), for better or worse...

And so on.

Its just guesses on my part, but ones that fit well within my view of the world.
I can see millions of bucks spent on both sides. And I am skeptical enough to think that most (if not all) of this money is given available for these purposes out of self-interest rather than some ideology. Each time I see massive money like this getting spend, I see somebody getting rich or hoping to get rich. Not sure why this particular issue should be any different.

But I might be wrong, it has happened before.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

So here's the rub:

Folks who promote the science of climate change who have a vested interest in the importance of alternative energy development could be doing so for a couple reasons:

1) They may ACTUALLY believe in climate change, and that new technologies need to be adopted

2) They may be a damn, dirty, lobbying entrepreneur

On the other hand, the coal magnates have only one possible explanation for their behavior

1) They're damn, dirty, lobbying entrepreneurs

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This is all pretty arbitrary though, any time there's a movement like this, there are going to be people making money off it, that's just capitalism.

But I will point out that the coal boys have had it easy for years, and that coal is artificially cheap.

The problem with fossil fuels is that they pay none of the external costs of doing business. They profoundly effect the environment we live in, but they don't pay for any of that, and so they get to have a cheap product.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...