Greenhouse Gases Now Most Significant

Below is a breakdown of climate forcings, changes in energy provided to our planet's climate system. The 6 most important forcings are listed. There are many other less significant forcings that would not even rate a percent here: solar particles, cosmic rays, global geothermal, and supermodels in thong bikinis.

(Best viewed in Courier font.)

How the hell do you know they are insignificant?

Hansen lists various changes but does not touch changes in planetary albedo, because it is not well known, even though changes in albedo can easily swamp all the listed changes.

If you have evidence that any one, or even all of, 'solar particles, cosmic rays, global geothermal flux, and supermodels in thong bikinis' produce more that 1 W/M*M please present it here. Currently, anthropogenic greenhouse gases account for 2.8 +- 0.5 W/M*M, so they dominate the causes of recent climate change.

If you have a 150 year data table for planetary albedo changes showing global mean forcing changes in W/M*M, then you are more than welcome to post it here. Until you do post some data here, we should not confuse your statements with the facts.

That is in fact the nub of my gist.

No one has a 150 year table of albedo, nor can one give a precise value for albedo for today or this year, or how albedo varies over the course of a day, year, or century (Though we say around 30% and call it good).

So, because it necessarily lacks albedo, I would say your list from Hansen is still incomplete.

I am assuming you have ALL the data proving beyond a shadow that they don't and that no other explanation is possible. Please, no urls which leaves everything dangling. Just an honest answer will suffice.

Roger, thanks for the info. Could you explain where you got it?

Atheist, albedo is not a forcing.

'Land use' is in fact land surface albedo forcing so it's already accounted for.

Cloud and ice albedos are components of the climate system rather than forcings. (The reflectove properties of open ocean

People have been looking for other forcings for a long time. A watt per square meter isn't something you'd likely miss if you and thousands of other people were looking for it.

In short, the significant external forcings are probably known, and anthropogenic greenhouse forcing dominates now and will increasingly dominate in the foreseeable future.

Some people find this so threatening that they'll tear at the fabric of science to avoid believing it. The latest effort is that they are desperately looking for other solar properties besides energy flux.

That way you can stop looking at those tiresome outmoded old watts and instead look at, well, some sort of undefined magical mojo. You'll need some very exotic physics to make that one work, but any straw that can be grasped to say 'you people don't know anything at all', right?

Implicit in that statement is that albedo doesn't change.

That may be.

But why do you believe it so?

Not completely. While albedo is certainly the primary concern, large-scale land-use changes affect everything from heat fluxes to surface friction. I'm not sure how much impact, if any, these other factors would have on a GCM with a nominal resolution in the hundreds of kilometers, but that doesn't mean that in the real world they do not have an impact on climate. Land surface schemes may well parameterize these smaller effects, but that would be model dependent.

Contrast Tobis' assessment with the following excerpt from a 2005 report by a pair of National Research Council Committees