Many like Eclipse Now are suggesting that CO2 is just a catalyst that amplifies the real forces of Global warming.

My questions are these;What are the real forces that change our climate?How does this CO2 catalyst influence them?Why does the concentration of the catalyst always lag behind mean world temperatures in the past and now have an immediate influence in the present?

Admiral von Schneider, I was prepared to engage with you on some issues of contention, Plimer’s article in general and climate change policy in particular.

Your riposte suggests you are incapable, for this I am sorry.

What is it with you Denialist zealots? What is your problem? Every reputable climate scientist in the world tells us we have a problem. Perhaps we might actually have a problem.

When I read hysterics like Ian Plimer, opportunists like Alex Deane and controversialists like Martin Durkin I wonder to myself, what would it be like if Quantum Dynamics suddenly became an area of concern? I can imagine clapped out geologists like Ian Plimer telling us that the gamma radiation levels on the Earth's surface have changed a great deal over history, and this sudden influx of deadly radiation is nothing unusual. I can imagine lawyers like Alex Deane telling us of his doubts about Dirac's uncertainty principle. Perhaps we might see John Howard telling us he is a photon realist, who doesn't think Einstein's theory of the photo-electric effect is the whole story. But most of all I imagine Martin Durkin telling us how Schrodinger's wave equations are lies, told to us to get more funding for Quantum physicists. For Christ's sake...

And what is going on with On Line Opinion? Why all the denialist articles? I'm sick of it being a site where denialists cluck in sympathy with each other over those silly green-housers. One more denialist article and I'm going to remove you from my 'favourites' list.

Phil01.Just address the simple questions I have posed,instead of this "Manifest Destiny" of a Global Catastrophy dished up to us as an environmental reality.

I defy any scientist or global warming zealot to address the questions I've posed in regards CO2 being the catalyst that instigates our planetary demise. If CO2 be the catalyst which spawns this cataclysmic end,then what are the determinators of the Global Warming Church that assumes "fait accompli"?

Phil01, I empathise with you but it is only 98.5% of reputable climate scientists that think we have a problem – thankfully the world’s leaders are into risk management!

Arjay comes across as someone who still refuses to understand the science.

They should go to a genuine climate science web-site (not "On Line Opinion") and sprout their questions there?

Global climate is determined by the radiation balance of the planet. There are three fundamental ways the Earth’s radiation balance can change, causing a climate change:

1) changing the incoming solar radiation (e.g., by changes in the Earth’s orbit or in the Sun itself),

2) changing the fraction of solar radiation that is reflected (this fraction is called the albedo – it can be changed by cloud cover, aerosols or land cover),

3) altering the long-wave energy radiated back to space (e.g., by changes in CO2-e concentrations, increasingly like what is happening now).

ALL of these factors play a role in climate change.

Coolings appear to be caused primarily and initially by increase in the Earth-Sun distance during northern hemisphere summer, due to changes in the Earth's orbit - the so-called Milankovitch cycling. Just as in the warmings, CO2 lags the coolings by a thousand years or so, in some cases as much as three thousand years.

Again, DO NOT make the mistake of assuming that these warmings and coolings must have a single cause. It is well known that multiple factors are involved, including the change in planetary albedo, change in nitrous oxide concentration, change in methane concentration, and change in CO2 concentration, GET IT.

The greenhouse gases are best regarded as a biogeochemical feedback, initiated by the orbital variations, but then feeding back to amplify the warming once it is already underway. The lag of CO2 of about 1000 years corresponds closely to the expected time it takes to flush excess respiration-derived CO2 out of the deep ocean via natural ocean currents. So the lag is quite close to what would be expected, if CO2 were acting as a feedback.

Nice summary of forcings.

Now Arjay, I did not say that CO2 is “just” an amplifier.
What I was trying to say is that all things being equal, more CO2 means higher temperatures. Sometimes other forcings will push in different directions, such as when we burnt dirty coal after WW2 and released stacks of Sulfur into the atmosphere, which increased Global Dimming and blocked out some of the sunlight. This led to a decrease in temperatures even though the CO2 was rising. The “Dimming” forcing was stronger than the CO2 forcing for a time. In the same way, sometimes Volcanoes release more “Dimming” factors and drive down temperatures for a while, or over longer periods of time, when the atmosphere has cleaned up but there’s still CO2 build up from the last big boom, then climate can see-saw back up again.

160 million years ago the oil formation period during the Jurassic had so much CO2 from an excessively busy Volcanic period that we entered a “Super-Greenhouse” that killed the oceans. Excessive tropical storms of acid rain burnt and washed excess NPK off the land, and over-fertilized the top layers of the ocean. Meanwhile, the bottom layers of the ocean went anoxic — no oxygen, due to there being no ice at the poles. (No icy poles = no oceanic circulation and no oxygen pumping down deep = dead ocean = species extinction on a massive scale.)

Co2 from an incredibly volcanic era (far more than our own) drove all that.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/

However, CO2 is not always the bad guy. It once saved life on earth from being extinguished by a super-freeze. Check out the Snowball earth theory!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_earth

Global Warming is not the end of the world or the end of humanity. The challenge is not to survive but to THRIVE. This is a self-induced problem that we can fix. But it does represent a profound challenge to our increasingly globalized and interdependent economy. People like Durkin do not help us thrive by spreading this misinformation.

“Durkin is jerkin his gherkin.”*

*For this quote, see letters at…
http://tinyurl.com/2f3jhe