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Poland blocks any action on climate change [569]
No. Real and projected temperature rises are much faster than found in the geological record.
No. Try and follow along. The debate is how CO2 is warming the climate, generally referred to as climate sensitivity to CO2. We know for a fact how much direct warming CO2 will cause and we have good projections for how much CO2 we will put in the air. These give us a rise in roughly 1 degree Celcius over a century. And just for one century(which we are already a decade or two into) since putting more CO2 in the air has diminishing returns as far as how much warming it causes. Each additional bit of CO2 causes less warming than the bit preceding it. So after a century we won't really be putting enough carbon up to cause noticeable changes.
Climate sensitivity refers to the overall feedback in the climate system. Alarmist predict a sensitivity of 2-4 (or even higher in some cases) so that each degree of temperature change due to carbon will cause an additional 1-3 degrees of warming from positive feedback. Skeptics say that the climate sensitivity is lower than that or even possibly less than 1, due to the contributions of negative feedback. If we only warm by about 1 degree it won't be a problem and humanity and the planet will have no problem adapting. The economic damage caused by a few people having to relocate, adjusting which crops are grown in some areas, and other assorted adaptions will not be particularly large. Even if we get to 2 degrees the cost of adapting is still reasonable. It is only when you start getting above that that the term catastrophic starts becoming more applicable.
Fortunately comparing actual temperature data with the predictions of the studies touted by alarmist it looks like they are all uniformly way overshooting actual warming observed. So it looks like a climate sensitivity in the range of around 1, or maybe a little but higher, is pretty reasonable. When you consider how until fairly recently almost all of those studies made only minor attempts to model the effects of the ocean, largely due to the lack of good reliable data discussed earlier, it is no wonder that the models would all be rather inaccurate. It is also worth noting that with each additional IPPC report the predicted climate sensitivity keeps creeping downward. Already their lower bounds are basically in line with many skeptics positions.
Finally I would just like to throw out that if we were to reduce CO2 output in the way that alarmist say we need to then we would have to all go back to a pre-1900 standard of living. And even then they say it still wouldn't prevent most of the warming they predict. The cost of adapting to climate change is many times cheaper than the cost of preventing change even if the worst of the climate change predictions are true.
