...any AGW'ers out there to brainwash my mind with their thinking and make me like them.
Make me believe AGW is happening.
Any takers?
No brainwashing required. Just some science. Namely quantum mechanics and the conservation of energy. If you "believe" in them, then AGW has to happen (unless you can discover some magic negative feedback, which no one has yet).
If you can demonstrate that either quantum mechanics or the conservation of energy is wrong, then AGW will crumble like a house of cards. You'll win a Nobel prize and you will be remembered throughout history along with other famous scientists.
The history of the discovery of AGW is told very well at this website:
www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html#contentsHere is a brief summary:
1824 - Fourier demonstrates that Earth is much warmer than a bare rock at our distance from the sun. This is the Greenhouse Effect
1860s - Tyndall demonstrates that water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases, that is, they trap outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR). He did this through laboratory experiments that have been repeated by others and published the results in a scientific journal. The science on this is settled.
(With this result, and what we now know about how CO2, water vapor and other greenhouse gases are produced and how they behave in the atmosphere, AGW is basically proven. The only things that aren't are how much the planet will warm, how fast, and what the impacts will be.)
1890s - Arrhenius provides calculations that shows increasing industrialization could lead to global warming. This is the first published paper on AGW, nearly a century before Gore, Hansen, Mann or any of the people deniers like to rant about published on the subject.
1900 to 1940s - Various objections to AGW, such as the belief that oceans will absorb all the CO2 people can emit (a variation on the common denier belief that the planet is too big for us to effect) or that water vapor already absorbs all the OLR, so adding CO2 wont make a difference, hold sway.
1945 - 1950s - US government (and Soviets too, probably) do a lot of research on heat seeking missiles, heat-vision devices for weapons development during Cold War. As a result, they find that the atmosphere isn't saturated with CO2, and water vapor isn't a big player in upper levels of the atmosphere (it tends to form clouds and rain out).
1956 - Based on research about composition of atmosphere done by the US military, Plass shows that increasing CO2 will increase the greenhouse effect, if the oceans aren't absorbing all of the CO2 we emit.
1957 - 1958 First International Polar Year. Weather stations established in Antarctica and first accurate measurements of CO2 are taken.
1960 - Keeling accurately measures CO2, shows it's 315 ppm and rising.
1967 - First computerized global climate models developed. Manabe and Wetherald make a convincing calculation that doubling CO2 would raise world temperatures a couple of degrees.
1968 - John Mercer, a glaciologist, publishes a paper that states if global temperature raises a couple of degrees, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would collapse. The first signs of that would be ice shelves beginning to collapse in the Antarctic Peninsula.
1970s - Some (not a majority) scientists argue that since the orbital forcings are trending toward a new ice age, the aerosols (pollution) that we are emitting will reflect enough sunlight that it will lead to global cooling. Stephen Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford, originally held this view. By 1974, when he re-ran his models, he had determined that increasing emissions of CO2 would overwhelm the aerosols and that we were heading toward global warming.
1979 - US National Academies of Science (NAS), commission report on global warming. They determine that global warming is a serious problems and the Earth could warm between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius if CO2 concentrations double from the pre-industrial amount of 280 ppm to 560 ppm.
1981 - James Hansen, NASA climate modeler, publishes that a global warming signal could emerge from the noise by the year 2000. Observations confirm this result.
1988 - IPCC established. Hansen testifies before Congress and publishes a paper based on new climate modeling using three possible emissions scenarios. His most likely scenario showed a warming trend of around 0.2 degrees C per decade. Observations have shown that warming since 1988 has been nearly 0.2 degrees C per decade, in pretty good agreement with the model.
1995 - Larsen A ice shelf collapses in the Antarctic Peninsula
1998 - Super El Nino, or El Nino of the Century. Highest temperatures in the satellite records (which are more sensitive to El Nino/La Nina events than the surface records) and in the HadCrut surface temperature database. This is the reason some deniers claim (wrongly) that temperatures peaked in 1998 and the globe is now cooling.
2001 - IPCC publishes third assessment report (TAR). TAR features a multi-proxy paleoclimate temperature reconstruction of the past 1000 years published by Mann, et. al. that becomes known as the "hockey stick" because it's mostly flat with a sharp increase in temperatures in the last 30 years (from AGW). Later studies, including a review of several different multi-proxy reconstructions, confirm the result that the decade of the 1990s was probably the warmest decade in the past 1000 years.
2002 - Larsen B ice shelf collapses in the Antarctic Peninsula
2003 - Killer heat wave in Europe. Tens of thousands of deaths caused by heat wave.
2005 - Record high temperatures in the NASA GISS and NOAA surface temperature measurements.
2006 - Gore produces documentary and book called An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), 110 years after AGW hypothesis first published by Arrhenius.
2007 - IPCC publishes Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Go here for the working group 1 report, the scientific background:
ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.htmlRead the report. It has discussions of the sun's influence on climate (including cosmic rays), the hockey stick, how the temperatures are derived, and thousands of references. It is a great summary of what we know about the atmosphere, ice sheets, ocean currents and other effects. Each chapter has an easy to read executive summary, and the text is footnoted with the references. You can use Google Scholar to find many of the references on line.
2007 - Record low summer ice melt in the Arctic. Ice melt way ahead of climate model projections.
2008 - Near record low summer melt in Arctic, despite cold winter and a deep La Nina during a very long solar minimum. Very little multi-year ice remains, and measurements of thickness indicate that ice volume reached a record low. Many scientists now think Arctic will be ice free in summer by 2030 (a few think as early as 2012). Previously, it was thought that would occur until sometime between 2070 and 2100.
2008 - Wilkins ice shelf (at 70S, the base of the Antarctic Peninsula), begins to collapse. For the first time the collapse continues through the Antarctic winter, a sign that the Southern Ocean is warming.
2008 - Despite a deep La Nina and a very long solar minimum, a top 10 high temperature. Nine of the last ten years have been the warmest since the 1880s, when records were reliably kept. 2008 was warmer than the last time there was a solar minimum, in 1996, and the last time we had a La Nina event, 1999 and 2000.
2008 - Australia in tenth year of drought. Government buying out farms that can no longer draw irrigation water, because there isn't enough.
Jan 2009 - Wilkins ice shelf continuing to collapse, now hanging on by a thread. Could collapse completely by March. Arctic ice extent on same track as 2007, when record low ice area was recorded. Extent is well below the 1979 to 2000 average, and has not recovered as some deniers have claimed.
Stay tuned for more...