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My apologies (again) Matt. I really did not mean to offend - only to be honest. I should try harder not to over share.
My first job in industry I was making contrast agents for magnetic resonance angiography. I was a medicinal inorganic chemist, and we would on occasion be asked to review articles for journal submissions (in the technical area). One article was an in silico study of the structures of gadolinium complexes based upon empirical data from crystallographic studies. The authors claimed to have developed a predictive model and showed that they could match in silico the observations made crystallographically for certain known metal complexes. They went further and made predictions about structures they believed were unknown. The whole thing smelled bad to me. At the outset, I knew they were mistaken about the "unknown" structures. The structure were know, and their predictions in silico were wrong. Their methods were poor, and I criticized them bitterly for it. That part of their paper was redacted prior to publication.
I guess that is my really long winded way of saying that, like you, I am rather skeptical of the in silico modelling. I come by my skepticism honestly and from first hand experience. I am especially skeptical of efforts to model the whole damned planet. Have you ever calculated how much energy is released (potential to kinetic) over the course of an hour worth of rain? It is a surprisingly large amount. Where does it all go? Don't ask me. I cannot begin to guess. This modeling business seems like a really daunting task, and I don't have the time or the talent to evaluate these models.
I have no idea why one should expect the upper atmosphere to warm first. Maybe that makes sense to you. I don't know and someone would need to take a good long time explaining to me why I should care what warms first.
The part that disturbs and convinces me is the empirical data and the timing.
I assume that we are all in agreement that change is happening. The only debate among us is what is causing this change and is it anthropogenic or not. These observable changes are a rather recent phenomenon, coinciding with industrialization.
When I think about how humans influence the environment in ways that other animals simply never have, the two that seem likely to be the biggest insults are burning fuel to produce electricity and industrial farming. There's no disputing that we have been releasing a lot of CO2 and fixing a lot of nitrogen. I suppose that with ranching we are also releasing a lot of methane, but shouldn't killing all the buffalo even that part out?
When I think about this problem, I ask myself what is the likelihood that non-anthropogenic climate change should occur at exactly the same time as these rather dramatic changes in how humans live. If the change were part of some natural cycle, it could have happened at any time. But it didn't - and that seems much too coincidental to me.
And this is the part of the show where Ellery Queen turns to the camera and says "now I know who made a mess of the planet. Do you?" Answer after the break: it was you and me and everyone we know.
On the preponderance of the evidence I find that CO2 is, more likely than not, responsible for recent deleterious changes in the earth's climate and related hooliganism involving the acidity of salt water. We cannot let CO2 escape culpability based solely upon the testimony of a model none of us believed to begin with.
And that really is my final two cents on this topic.
Best regards,
Jeff