Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Interesting debate

Uninteresting rhetoric

1. Earth's climate changes, sometimes drastically in a short time.

2. Scientists don't have a frigging clue exactly why.


We know why. What is uncertain is the quantatative how. #2, which IS #2, supposes that all the denialist scat you've subjected your mind to is done from the standpoint of an honest inquiry. Just cause it's now a standing wave in the echo chamber doesn't make it true.

It's really sad you know. The sad thing is that we do know and that there are ways of determining that climate will change.

Consider the piping hot cup of coffee as an overly simplistic example. It's sitting there, cooling on it's own by evaporation at it's free surface. One could say that it's in a cooling trend.

If one slowly pours cold cream into the coffee it's a dynamic process of mixing that occurs. The mixing and heat exchange are very chaotic and it it difficult to predict what exact state the coffee will be in at some future time. The thing that IS known is that the coffee, as a whole, will be cooler due to the addition of cold cream. A coffee cooling denialist could say that the cream will help the coffee from evaporatively cooling, but it's still being cooled by the addition of cream.

In the same way, greenhouse gasses trap more IR in the atmosphere. Heat is being added in increasing quantities. The Earth's systems may respond dynamically but the heat energy will keep coming with the GHGs.

And you're trying to tell me that it's not reasonable to expect warming?

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