I toured the large BP research facility near me last month. Their introductory presentation clearly stated that BP believes that human-induced climate change is real and driven by greenhouse gas emissions. Stops included labs working on research on techniques to minimize carbon emissions from their refineries.
It's hard to understand the debate when one of the largest carbon-producers in the world acknowledges the science. It reminds me of the debate over the ozone hole in the 1980's. The big CFC producers weren't on board initially, but recognized the science before the political class did.
Ok, so some of it is human-induced. What percentage? How much of it is a naturally occurring phenomenon. That's the crux of the anti-climate changers - sure humans cause it but it's not the leading cause.
The consensus is "at least half of warming since 1950".
At least that's the official line when people cite the "consensus of climate scientists".
Basically Bloomberg is showing climate science as it was in 2005. And Jfern has been parroting the same stuff since 2005.
There is lots of debate on the effects of solar activity, aerosols, and volcanic eruptions on our climate (the latest science points to solar activity being a bigger player than previously thought and aerosols and volcanic eruptions being smaller players than originally thought... both of these newer scientific findings would reduce the greenhouse gas component as would using objective adjusted satellite data that doesn't have nearly the issues that the adjusted surface temperature data has.. like assuming temperatures for the entire Arctic.)
This is an example of a NASA GISS global temperature anomaly map that extends single weather recording stations outward 250km. As you can see, vast chunks of the globe including all of the Arctic (where warming is supposedly occurring the most), Antarctic, northern Canada, Greenland, the vast majority of Africa, the Amazon, and extensive areas of western and central Asia have no weather station coverage.
So what they do is a parlor trick... they extend the stations to 1200km. That's right... a weather station assumes the weather 1200km away. And in the Arctic, for example, that means a small handful of stations on the fringes of the Arctic are extrapolated to cover the whole Arctic ocean.
Then when they do "reanalysis" to fill in missing data in the past... they just plug in the expected temperatures based partially on the nearest weather stations available... but mostly making up temperatures that fit with the established global temperature pattern (which was determined without those areas in the first place).
This is not to discount that warming has taken place. It has. And the Arctic has warmed faster than the globe as a whole. But the satellite data which measures the entire global surface only goes back to 1979. And that data shows substantially less warming during the 1979-present period than the surface data which is diverging from the satellite data more each time they adjust them.
