More than all of the warming is due to anthropogenic causes.  This is because without the anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, Earth would have cooled, not warmed.

I've heard quite the contrary .
https://judithcurry.com/2015/05/06/quan ... heric-co2/
This is a bit heady with statistics and charts but I respect your opinion and ability to decipher all of this.

Final outcome: Projected contributions of natural and anthropogenic emissions to the long-term global accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.

More than all of the warming is due to anthropogenic causes.  This is because without the anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, Earth would have cooled, not warmed.

This is extremely difficult to verify.
This more than 100% of the observed warming due to humans causes some confusion.  That is, "is most of the observed warming caused by humans?" and "are human factors more important than natural for climate change?" two very different questions.

Gnargenox:

Sure.  The analysis is an attempt to characterize changes in carbon sources and sinks over time, by which to determine how much of the CO2 in the atmosphere is attributed to humans or by nature, and how these concentrations change over time and in the future. 

Sounds reasonable enough, and the graphics are nice.  Unfortunately, the methodology is based on assuming that the concentration and isotopic ratios in the Arctic are representative of the dynamics of sources and sinks everywhere, and that is a really poor modelling assumption. There are a lot of important carbon sources and sinks around the planet which depend on conditions differently, and it simply is not possible to understand carbon cycling by looking at one region in isolation. To think about it, simply consider how land use change will affect the modelling assumptions.  Land use change is one of many important spatially and temporally dependent changes in carbon cycling.

A further cause for concern is that the results of this analysis strongly contradict what we know from paleoclimate evidence, where we've seen how carbon cycling changed, as well as how it affected the temperature.  (Think of the PETM).

At any rate, I'm not particularly interested in spending a lot of time reviewing a blog as a substitute for academic research into a scientific matter.  If the source is associated with a well cited journal article, coupled with a review of other literature in the field, then that would be another thing.  That is how a scientific community builds a strong base of knowledge and with confidence behind it.  The study of carbon cycling and its implications to climate change is an entire field of research in itself, and it is well reviewed through the IPCC.  We're not likely to arrive at a good understanding of it by looking at a blog article or even a single paper.

-------------------------

So, back to the question at hand.  How do we know how much of the warming is attributable to anthropogenic causes?  (This is for Midtskogen, too). 

The way we look at this is to examine the balance of energy into and out of the Earth system (essentially, applying the laws of thermodynamics and radiation).  Things which affect change in that balance are called "radiative forcings", meaning they act to change the effective flux of radiation from the Earth's surface to space.  It turns out that the greenhouse forcing has been the most significant of these forcings, and more so through the 21st century under high emission scenarios.


You said you haven't seen much technical discussion of this subject, which is really surprising to me because studies relevant to it appear regularly on it in scientific journals, for example the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.  Or as described earlier, a good synthesis of all knowledge in climate science lies in the IPCC reports and summaries, which are free to view.

Let's look at a figure from Chapter 10 of WGI:

I completely understand your desire not to get bogged down in the view points of a single paper or study of a single area as a source of carbon. I appreciate your graphic as well, yet I don't understand the reasoning of placing natural causes in blue and both natural and man made causes in red, when most people are interested in man made contributions solely. I also wonder how we managed to warm up the northern Pacific Ocean the most out of all areas shown.

I don't spend much time reading IPCC reports, as I've noticed many times their results seem implausible and are sometimes completely disingenuous, remaining unchecked for many years before they are corrected. For example, the Himalayan glaciers are supposed to completely disappear by the year 2035, as they stated in a 2007 article, but that was not redacted until 2 years later. Credibility is also shaken when emails discussing withholding data is revealed, much like the recent claim by Dr. Bates that NOAA has done the same. That is not to say they are full of rubbish, just that everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt. They need to be more scrupulous in their claims if they are to be the ultimate source of scientific information and their decrees to be used to formulate global economic policy. Too many times they have had to change their predictions, and many times observational data was seen to be less influential than first claimed. It alllmmoossttt seems biased.

A well referenced blog discussing such:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/01/ ... nal-draft/

I tend to follow NASA data more often than NOAA data reports
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files ... iefing.pdf

The NIPCC tends to contradict everything the IPCC says, from whether or not CO2 is beneficial or harmful to agriculture to what sources flooding and storms will come from. Again I tend to lean away from government funded panels that influence economic policy and prefer non-governmental panels to provide other view points.
NIPCC homepage: http://climatechangereconsidered.org/


I think this forum is a great place to discuss climate change as well as changes though out the solar system. Here are some recent links about places other than Earth that are undergoing rapid change from what we have seen. Admitidly the window of time we have been making observations is minuscule.

●Venus Winds: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space ... ing_faster
●Venus Rotation: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space ... fting_gear
●Mars Warming: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... rming.html
●Jupiter Stripe: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... oststripe/
●Red Jr: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... mar_redjr/
●Jupiter Radio Emission: http://www.science20.com/news_articles/ ... iter-93369
●Saturn Superstorm: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... turnstorm/
●Uranus Auroras: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ce-hubble/
●Uranus Storms: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.01309v1.pdf

I ran across 3 dozen other links about Solar influences on Earth's climate but since there are so many I'll leave that for everyone to research themselves.

I completely understand your desire not to get bogged down in the view points of a single paper or study of a single area as a source of carbon.

I'm not sure if you do.  It's essentially the same thing as not desiring to spend my time analyzing proposals of the "electric universe" posted on popular websites.  Sure, the argumentation sounds reasonable to a layperson, but it's wrong, and it takes time and effort to explain why. If I had to analyze all the ideas proposed outside of academic circles for correctness, it would be a full time job and I would have to charge money for it. :)  What I am happy to do is take a quick look and see if it appears credible or if there are significant misconceptions involved, and if it passes a first look I'll pursue it deeper.

That's not to say everything posted in a blog article even among skeptical circles is going to be wrong (sometimes they do hit on very important things and even help the climate science community that way), but if that is your primary source of information then you risk a greater abundance of misleading information.

The most important lesson here is that for the typical interested reader, a good skill to have is how to determine the reliability of information on the internet or other sources.  Anyone can make a nice analysis from a convincing-sounding string of arguments and post it on the internet.  What separates an academic journal article from that is that the flow of logic is continuously supported through in line references to other work in that field -- essentially, a review of previous knowledge by other people before them, and statements of how all this work ties together. 
 
What are good source of information for climate science?  Same as any other field of science:  Journals, dissertations, literature reviews.  You can be happy to look at blog articles, and I often do, too.  But understand what you're getting into and that these should supplement your knowledge by serving as a comparison with other sources, instead of being your primary source for information.

Does that make sense?

I appreciate your graphic as well, yet I don't understand the reasoning of placing natural causes in blue and both natural and man made causes in red, when most people are interested in man made contributions solely.

The difference of the two curves and their comparison to the observations reveals something about the attribution of global warming to human causes. The temperature evolution that we observe is consistent with natural + anthropogenic forcings, and is not consistent with natural forcings alone.  In other words: anthropogenic forcings are necessary and sufficient to explain the warming that we observe, because without them, the temperature would remain essentially flat over this interval.

Why was most of the warming in the northern Pacific?  Short answer is that it has to do with the transfer of heat between the ocean and atmosphere, which involves the ocean circulations and ENSO.  The Pacific -- particularly with the deep ocean water -- is a very large reservoir for heat, and so whether the ocean puts out warmer or cooler water than usual matters a lot for the transfer of heat to or from the atmosphere.

I don't spend much time reading IPCC reports, as I've noticed many times their results seem implausible and are sometimes completely disingenuous, remaining unchecked for many years before they are corrected.

The IPCC does not perform research!

What the IPCC does is present a synthesis of all available literature in climate science.  Since climate science is an ongoing field of research, you can expect that knowledge to be updated. So if you say you don't spend time reading those reports because you think the results are questionable or whatever, then you're saying you have issues with climate science itself.

I ran across 3 dozen other links about Solar influences on Earth's climate but since there are so many I'll leave that for everyone to research themselves.

This idea goes back decades.  The Sun does influence the Earth's climate, but the current warming is not due to the Sun.  You can demonstrate this fairly easily (I'll walk you through the math if you're interested), by considering the change in flux at Earth due to solar variability -- it is too small to explain the changes that we observe, and the direction of the changes don't correlate anyway.  In general, the solar variability is small on short timescales (thankfully for us), and while it is big on very long timescales, the rock weathering cycle beats it on those timescales.

It became popular to look at how the Sun might affect climate by modifying clouds, and there is a connection there, but again, it's not what explains the current warming, or even climate changes in general throughout Earth history.  People have also looked at sunspots, cosmic rays, interstellar dust, frequency of ship pirating...

but the one thing that that does fit observations, has a clear basis in physics, and successfully connects to our understanding of change throughout Earth history, is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

lol, short and concise, I love it! and the photo too!

I don't spend much time reading IPCC reports, as I've noticed many times their results seem implausible and are sometimes completely disingenuous, remaining unchecked for many years before they are corrected. For example, the Himalayan glaciers are supposed to completely disappear by the year 2035, as they stated in a 2007 article, but that was not redacted until 2 years later.

The glacier claim came from WWF, who cited someone, who cited an informal speculation.  The claim should never have made it into the report, since it had not gone through any proper review.  This can happen when a report is written by many persons.  Also keep in mind that these reports are the result of committee work, which usually means that people tend to focus on smaller parts of the text, have agendas, reach consensus through "I'll vote for your paragraph if you vote for mine", etc.  The whole of the report will receive less focus than it should.
Besides, science needs decades to mature.  A couple of years is nothing.  Of all scientific papers published last year, expect very few still to be cited in 30 years.  Most scientific papers are quite forgettable. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate science, scientific papers are politicised before the ink dries.  Of course, in the case of alarming findings, one cannot always wait until the scientific hypotheses and theories mature.  If somebody publishes a paper predicting a 10 km asteroid impact Earth in 10 years, the wait will be too late if the paper's prediction is correct.  But shouting that the science is settled, therefore we must prepare for the asteroid, is likely not going to be helpful.

That's not to say everything posted in a blog article even among skeptical circles is going to be wrong (sometimes they do hit on very important things and even help the climate science community that way), but if that is your primary source of information then you risk a greater abundance of misleading information.

It should be noted that some of these blogs are written by qualified people, like Judith Curry, Roger Pielke, Roy Spencer, and in the other lair a number of scientists are writing for realclimate.org.

Thanks midtskogen, I understand the nature and necessity of peer reviews and that the IPCC is only a mouthpiece, not a research group themselves. I also understand the process of science and how it can indeed be politicized way too soon. Knowledge is something that grows, through the process Watsisname mentioned and I know it can be difficult to maintain with so many poor sources trying to spin things the way they see fit.

I am not actually even questioning the statements thrown about by the media before its time, as I say I take it all with a grain of salt. Its the people that don't understand that, that are crying "the sky is falling" and the ones saying the public doesn't need to know all the facts, the public would be bogged down in the weeds with too much info. Then you have the media claiming climate deniers won't listen and therefore the debate should just be laid to rest. Well, the misunderstanding is no one knows or can or wants to say, how much of the change is anthropogenic. That number actually is buried in the weeds, purposefully it seems, in order to confuse the ignorant public, for some unknown agenda. The "its really complicated" answer just frustrates me and others, to the point that I am adamant public policy not change until we have the data we need or want that supposedly justifies taxing the air I exhale. Basically if we can not say to what degree humans are responsible how can we ever hope to say mankind can fix it properly and fairly without being alarmist?

The glacier claim came from WWF, who cited someone, who cited an informal speculation.  The claim should never have made it into the report, since it had not gone through any proper review. 

Yeah, unfortunately these things happen.  Sometimes sloppy studies make it through peer review, or are referenced before being reviewed at all.  We like to think peer review is a gold standard for separating the credible from the fluff, but it is not a perfect system.

Another issue is that media attention any particular study receives is poorly correlated to how important that study actually is to the field. A good example was a study which used mathematical fits for arctic sea ice decline and concluded that we could expect ice-free summers in just a few years.  It was an enormous outlier of a prediction, and the scientific community thought it was implausible based on the more sophisticated modelling work. But it nevertheless received a huge amount of press for being more dramatic.

It's things like these which I think confuse popular perception of what the confidence and uncertainties in these subjects are -- not just in climate science but in a lot of fields.  Another good example is the paper which announced lower confidence in accelerating expansion by supernovae data, which caused all kinds of public confusion about our understanding of dark energy and confidence thereof.  (PBS Spacetime did a great review of that.)
With all these difficulties in the interface of science and the public, it can be difficult for the curious person to figure out what constitutes reliable information and how to digest it.  The best answer I can give is to look at as wide a range of sources as you can and check how those sources compare with each other.  For the scientist, it means comparing sources with the academic literature -- is it published in journals, are those articles well cited, and are they consistent with a variety of other studies?  There is a metacognition involved with reading a paper as well -- what is the motivation and methodology, how thorough is their literature review, how do they determine and report the uncertainties, does each step logically follow, and so forth.

Well, the misunderstanding is no one knows or can or wants to say, how much of the change is anthropogenic. That number actually is buried in the weeds, purposefully it seems, in order to confuse the ignorant public, for some unknown agenda.

It's a dark magic that is held closely secret.

Come one now, you've just been shown how much of the change is due to anthropogenic versus natural causes, and how that answer is obtained.  Characterize the balance of energy into and out of the Earth system, what things affect that balance, and how their magnitudes have changed.  Run models with and without the anthropogenic forcings and see how well each compares with observations.  Summaries or details of this work are freely available for any curious person.

Much media attention focuses on the more extreme impacts of global warming.

This study is interesting for doing the opposite -- looking at how warming (in terms of radiative forcing) affects the frequency of mild weather. ("Mild" in a meteorological sense, as of course different people have different ideas of what is comfortable weather).  The result helps to visualize the non-uniformity of the impacts of climate change, and in particular the variation with latitude and season.

I think there is a certain weakness to the paper in the sense that the extent of increase or decrease in mild days depends a lot on the definition for mild temperature thresholds.  Even so, the results are consistent with what other studies have found in regard to change in the number of heating vs. cooling days, dew point temperatures, arability of land, and so forth.  It is also consistent with observations of how these factors actually have changed in recent decades, meaning that what we expect to happen on the regional scale due to global warming is indeed happening.

There is a very real problem of bias in science, especially when it has political implications as is the case in climate science, and if data were indeed wrongly manipulated to exaggerate an effect then that should be the end of that scientist's career.  This has happened before.  Of course the popular thing to do these days is hack emails to try catch evidence of a scientist doing wrong by their communications.  But one of the more powerful cases, which sometimes happens, is when someone takes the time to check how errors propagate in the calculations, and find that in order for their error bars to be as small as they are, some of that scientist's measurements must have had negative uncertainty.  Oops!  
 
That being said, I think also important not to let the scope of that problem cloud judgement on the scope of our understanding of the science and the extent of the uncertainties.  The nature of the pause is pretty well understood as an effect of heat transfer between different parts of the Earth system (particularly between atmosphere and deep ocean water), and not so much a problem of our understanding of global warming as a change in the radiation balance between Earth and space.  Corrections to the projections of future warming based on these internal variations aren't negligible, but it still doesn't change them much.

I have way more issues with corporate funded "science" than anything else- especially when it comes from the pharmaceutical industry and big ag.  Remember the whole Vioxx controversy with Merck?  And Monsanto paying people to give speeches in their "favor"?  As well as the fossil fuel industry trying to push fracking in the plains states, where it has caused swarms of earthquakes in Oklahoma.  I converted to full solar awhile back and haven't looked back.  I also oppose corporate dumping of toxic waste in superfund sites (something Monsanto is being sued for in San Diego and Seattle- and now they're trying to merge with Bayer, creating an even bigger pesticide monopoly, even worse for the planet- and for us- since we're a part of it), better treatment of animals (no hormone usage or antibiotics on farms and free range, eventually weaning us off of them being used in the lab- with cloning of organs, the usage of lab animals is outdated and unnecessary.)

We went through all this with the Tobacco Industry too.  If you want to hear about the unholy corporate-government connection you only have to look back to the 774 Guatemalans that were used as test subjects by Bristol Squibb Pharma along with Johns Hopkins Hospital (they were intentionally infected with needles with syphilis- there's a 1 billion dollar lawsuit ongoing about that.)  Then we have the Agent Orange saga in Vietnam (amongst other bad things we were doing there, like the landmines that are still killing children there and in Laos, and tacit support for genocide in Indonesia, drone warfare that has hit hospitals and schools and jailing of journalists for reporting on that in Yemen, etc.)  The rise of the surveillance state and police militarization (and megamergers causing mass media to not pay enough attention to it) are all closely connected.  Big city pollution leading to more cases of asthma as well as pollution intake by pregnant women causing more cases of autism and ADHD and cancer from processed food and the addictive chemicals intentionally inserted into fast food as been well documented (particularly by NY Times Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Michael Moss) as well as lead and other pollutants (including pesticides) being found in the water of dozens of municipalities and big cities (and ineffective detection techniques with water companies letting the water run for several minutes before testing it to ensure a lower toxicity count)  and overconsumption has made America more obese and prone to diabetes than our counterparts in Western Europe (particularly countries rated as being the best democracies- Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland- who all have universal health care and much higher life expectancies.)  Meanwhile rising levels of stress have led to overmedication with sleeping pills, antidepressants, antianxiety pills, etc- with a whole host of worse side effects than what they are purported to be treating, especially with children, who get introduced to these medications (particularly antidepressants and stimulants) far too early and which have been implicated in the rising tide of school mass shootings.

In the end I think we'll find that a lot of the problems we face whether it be climate change or misuse of the environment or conflict is due to the fact that there's simply way too many people on the planet and that has given rise to the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history.  At some point (probably within the next 200 years) we'll have to start colonizing space, and probably within another 200 years after that those colonies will become self-sufficient and our population will stabilize.

I think it's a neat fact that much of the mass of a tree is actually from carbon sequestered out of the air.  So planting new trees does help mitigate some of global warming.  This also happens without our help -- for example more trees are growing in the Arctic as it warms up and ecological zones shift poleward.

The problem is that there is only so much viable area for which new trees can realistically grow, and it's not enough to deal with the magnitude of our emissions for decades to come.  Another problem is that as the world warms, a lot of systems which act to remove carbon from the atmosphere become less effective at doing so, or even become net carbon sources.  The classic example is that warmer oceans store less CO2.

The most viable solutions to the problem are multifaceted -- we can improve the efficiency with which we use our energy, transition to renewable energy (and different energy sources are more useful in different areas), and perhaps use carbon capture techniques on a larger scale.  There is also a balance in terms of how much do we want to focus on limiting the warming versus how much do we want to focus on increasing our resilience to the effects of warming, and over what timescales.  It's not very viable to stop all of the warming right away, nor is it very viable to continue following high emissions and deal with all the impacts, so there is some more optimal path somewhere in between.  

These different pathways, and the details for what we would have to do in order to follow them, are the essence of the RCP scenarios.

I care a lot about this issue, especially with how much of a mess the fossil fuel industry has made across a large portion of America (fracking quakes in Oklahoma, dirty pipelines bursting, etc.,) but one of the greatest mindblowing things is the coral reef bleaching going on and how the Great Barrier Reef is disappearing.  I feel sorry for humankind.  In its capitalistic shortsighted way they have screwed themselves.  We destroy the environment but we forget we are a part of that same environment so we are only hastening our own destruction.  The good thing about it is the planet will get its revenge and will go back to the way it was after we're gone.  Those species we are killing off won't come back but many new ones will replace them.  My only sadness is that we probably won't be around to see if there are any other species out there like us- hopefully not, because if they are, they'll also likely cause their own destruction.

acording to the town weather website there was warming of +0.74c since 2001.
http://www.02ws.co.il/station.php?section=globalwarm.php&lang=0
you can see that the year 2010 was extremly hot.
+2.5c anomaly

I think it's a neat fact that much of the mass of a tree is actually from carbon sequestered out of the air.  So planting new trees does help mitigate some of global warming.  This also happens without our help -- for example more trees are growing in the Arctic as it warms up and ecological zones shift poleward.

The problem is that there is only so much viable area for which new trees can realistically grow, and it's not enough to deal with the magnitude of our emissions for decades to come.  Another problem is that as the world warms, a lot of systems which act to remove carbon from the atmosphere become less effective at doing so, or even become net carbon sources.  The classic example is that warmer oceans store less CO2.

The most viable solutions to the problem are multifaceted -- we can improve the efficiency with which we use our energy, transition to renewable energy (and different energy sources are more useful in different areas), and perhaps use carbon capture techniques on a larger scale.  There is also a balance in terms of how much do we want to focus on limiting the warming versus how much do we want to focus on increasing our resilience to the effects of warming, and over what timescales.  It's not very viable to stop all of the warming right away, nor is it very viable to continue following high emissions and deal with all the impacts, so there is some more optimal path somewhere in between.  

These different pathways, and the details for what we would have to do in order to follow them, are the essence of the RCP scenarios.

There is an answer but a lot of people won't like it- involves geoengineering and will cost a lot of money.  I do think we need to stop all use of fossil fuels by 2050.  That should be the hard limit.  The effects to the environment are far too great from fracking quakes to coral reef bleaching to the ice melt in the Arctic to the sea level rise (which could reach 8 feet by 2070.)