Climate Policy

[Concillian]

nature is not all that predictable either.

It certainly seems that something is changing. People probably have had some level of impact, and maybe jostled the equilibrium. Or, maybe there is some other long wave explanation for an increase in temperature, which is also resulting in a proportional related decrease in CO2 fixation. That scenario also seems to have merit. It is easy to show statistical causal relationships, but this does not mean it is actually true. For example, chart the expansion of deserts over the past 300 years to populations. Are we the cause?

It's not predictable, however:

when you have an event (invention of the steam engine, start of the industrial revolution) ca. 1770 or so
Then after that event you see a statistical anomoly (CO2 levels rather significantly higher than in recent history (500k years or so)
And the response makes sense from the standpoint of physics (steam engines burn fossil fuels and emit CO2)

Why would you ignore that and instead think it's really just a coincidence that all this has happened at exactly the same time (give or take a decade) that mankind started burning fossil fuel en masse?

I found a better graph that illustrates the point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon...400kyr.png

Note the inset, which demonstrates the inflection point right around the start of the industrial revolution.

Now I think there is room to argue that CO2 is not as significant a contributor to temperature rises as some currently believe (* check note later). However, the data I've seen is pretty conclusive on mankind being the primary contributor to recent CO2 PPM levels. To argue any different is basically arguing a 1 in a billion type of probability is what we're experiencing. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if I'm making policies that decide the fate of millions of people, I'm banking on the cause and effect relationship and our current understanding of physics rather than some massively improbable coincidence that mother nature decided to start out on a natural statistical anomoly ±10 years from the start of the industrial revolution.
(*)
I think if you look on longer timescales than the previous million years (more like the last BILLION years) you can find examples where CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was nearly an order of magnitude higher than now, but climate was similar. I'm not completely sure what other concentrations in the atmosphere were like at that time, I've seen some data that I haven't been able to verify the source of showing oxygen under 5% like half a billion years ago too, I'm not sure I want to use that kind of data as a basis for governmental policies, but at least there is some actual data around that doesn't rely on throwing scientific methods out the window and assuming this is all one big coincidence.