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There was a third way to dispute greenhouse gases - “the planet would heat up”.
If you if you believe (1) greenhouse gases exists (2) we are pumping a lot of them….it does not guarantee (3) in a complex system. Or more importantly that (3) will be significant versus other modifications like population moving slightly north etc. Or taking other steps that mitigate problems.
The weakest part of the global warming argument was always the create a climate model that is accurate while knowing (1) and (2) are correct. We are simply not good at modeling those things. One thing that has some similarities is the human digestion system and we’ve never been able to model that correctly or entirely explain why humans are getting fatter. And throughout my life on this earth I’ve seen incredible changes on “this is the healthy food you should eat”. The current thing seems to be that I should only eat protein perhaps cooked in beef lard. Sometime in the not so distant past you were suppose to avoid eating red meat.
Well, it's pretty easy to explain why humans are getting fatter, it's because we're eating too much. In fact the changing fad diets all seem to be based on the idea that you can somehow eat your way into not being fat. I suspect this idea might hold some blame as to why people are getting fatter.
Regardless one and two does indeed imply three and adapting to a warmer planet has no bearing on whether the planet is warming, on the contrary it kinda requires it.
(1) and (2) does imply (3) but it’s not always true. Natural systems can have mean reverting systems (or breakout) systems. The amount of food you eat does not strictly translate to getting fatter because most people’s metabolism increases when they eat more so there is a naturally mean reversion. Especially since the AGW story was sold on runaway temperature rises and not something that would have system in place that could cancel out a rising temperature.
You actually do need a nearly flawless model of the earths system to make prediction on more CO2 leading to runaway temperature growth and I have not see evidence that we have really good models on the earth.
I am just point out that (1) and (2) does not mean problematic climate change. That actually takes far more complicated science.
I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it. As far as I can see if it wasn't dug out of the ground and burned then it doesn't contribute to global warming in a meaningful way. Main reason I'm skeptical about the agriculture stuff on that pie chart I linked.
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They don't really say anything about the magnitude of three though -- unless you have a good model of the system as a whole, which we don't.
Luckily with that you can just check vs reality to see the magnitude. CO2 levels are currently at 427 ppm over the 280 is was before the industrial revolution, and temps are at about 1.5℃ above pre-industrial. So pretty damn close to 0.01 degrees per ppm.
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