There are a number of very good climate-related websites, including Watt’s Up With That, which lists a number of other sites which give a more balanced perspective on climate and the current fad of demonizing fossil fuel produced CO2 as the creator of global warming. This post at WUWT gives some basic information on the energy balance of the Earth’s atmosphere and surface and the role CO2 may play in that. CO2 is an insignficant proportion of the Earth’s atmosphere. It has certain heat-absorption and radiation features that allegedly lead it to play a more significant role in temperature. It appears that CO2 may a play a role in both heating and cooling processes in different layers of the atmosphere. Reading these posts, and the comments to them, gives you a sense again of how complex climate processes are and how there can be legitimate disputes over those processes and what their net impact is. (WUWT Post)
It is this complexity itself that causes me to be extremely dubious of the grandiose role climate hysterics assign to CO2. Seems more likely it is one of many, many factors that affect climate and climate trends. And this article, with authors including prominent physicists, buttresses that perspective. The authors rebut the simplistic notion that CO2 is the climate “control knob”. They also provide a broad critique of the International Panel on Climate Change, the primary work group for the climate hysterics, a group known for its cherrypicking of data and flawed analytic techniques. All these articles are worth a read, not because everything in them will necessarily be right, but they give you a balanced perspective on the issues. (SCG Article)
I fall into the Judith Curry camp on Global warming
A – the increase in CO2 is a contributing factor in the warming
B – the “climate scientists have confidence levels vastly exceeding the resolution of the underlying data
C – far too much is unknown.
D- in the paleo reconstruction arena – far too many proxies used in the reconstruction conflict with other known historical data – higher tree lines during the mwp, tree stumps dating from the wmp and the roman warm period uncovered by receding glaciers, glacier advances during the little ice age requiring 2c drop in temp vs 1c drop per proxy reconstructions, species of crops growing during mwp that require a equal or warmer temps than what are current day temps.
E – Climate sensitivity to increases in CO2 – which poorly reconcile with the changes occurring from 1750-1930. ECS supposidely in 2c-4c for doubling of co2. All of which point to something else being the primary driver of climate.