Trig all I can say is science is a two edged sword ...careful what you wish for.
There is no wishing in science - just results. And, according to my old PhD supervisor, there is also no crying in science, but that's another thread...
Second I am working on several in SoCal, Las Vegas, Hawaii, The Bay Area and Arizona ...I get around ...
It really boils down to this I do not believe that a gas which comprises 4/100ths of 1 percent of our atmosphere is the culprit behind the obvious warming which has been going on since 18,000 yrs ago.
Nor is it. The post-glacial warming has been due numerous factors, including solar output, albedo, GHGs and potentially cosmic rays (although that hypothesis is considered to be largely incorrect at the moment).
The warming over the last century is another can of worms. Intense warming - far more intense then anything in the climatic record. And only one factor which even correlates with the warming - GHG concentrations, largely CO2.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that the earths atmosphere is so sensitive to gas rearrangement such that a lesser gas like CO2 can change the ballance of the Climate....just my opinion ...yet nobody wants to address this issue
Firstly, science is not a matter of belief, but rather what you can prove. The very issue you claim has not been addressed was dealt with by scientists several decades ago. First, the greenhouse effect was used to explain the climates of Venus and Mars - both of which are significantly warmer then one would expect based on solar incidence and albedo alone. Laboratory experiments looking at near-IR absorption by CO2 confirmed that hypothesis.
Eventually the same calculations were done on the earth, where it was found that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere (circa 1960's) accounted for about 18C of the earths surface temperature - meaning that if we scrubbed out that "tiny" amount of CO2 from the atmosphere the temp would drop to an average worldly temperature below freezing. Even though CO2 was (at the time) in the 300ppm range.
When you get down to it, CO2 has the unfortunate characteristic of having an absorbance curve that overlaps with the energetic range of the earths black body radiation, meaning that on a molecule-by-molecule basis it has a huge warming capacity.
All of that is pretty basic science, and science which was preformed during the 1950's through 1970's.
You'd think before arguing about this stuff you'd at least read up on the basics.
...Furthermore I am quite sure that eventually the culprit will be found in the output of the sun ... but that too is my opinion.
And completely unsupportable by the existing data. Solar output has varied greatly since the GW was first proposed - nearly three 11-year minimums/maximum cycles, plus at least one longer cycle (sorry, name escapes me at the moment). And even with these large fluctuations in solar output our earth warmed continually. This also represents the first time in the climatic record where the temperature of the earth no longer waled in lock-step with the output of the sun.
In my learned opinion the Sun is a very big source of heat and CO2 is hardly measurable compared to O2 and N.
But since N2 and O2 are not GHG's, and do not absorb significantly in the near-IR range, they are not a significant part of the global temperature equation. When you get down to it the insulating effect of our atmosphere is generated almost entirely through the insulating properties of a few trace gases - CO2, water vapor, methane, and a few other trace gases.
Bryan
If the ppm of CO2 increases, then something else decreases because ppm is a measure of concentration. A percentage or a ppm is a ratio, not an absolute quantity.
