What do "deniers" actually believe?
I see the fervent commentary in here - much of it implying some vast conspiracy regarding climate science and I find myself really curious what the average AWG "denier" does believe?
1) Do you believe that carbon dioxide is a "greenhouse gas?"
2) If yes, to 1) is this an issue of doubting the degree of energy retention?
-or if no to 1), are you aware that Venus's atmosphere is 98+% CO2 and without an energy retention effect, it wouldn't be anywhere near as hot as it is - or that similarly the Earth's average temperature would be around freezing without said effect? (Alternately, were you aware that 40 years of satellite data show that the energy reflected back into space by the Earth has declined over the past 40 years and similarly that surface instrumentation on Earth shows increasing downward infrared radiation over the same period??
3) If you believe that CO2 does help the Earth retain solar energy, but question the temperature changes predicted because the current temperatures don't appear to have increased as alarmingly as predicted are you open to the possibility that our oceans are acting as a big heat sink and sooner or later said sinks will fill up?
I ask these questions seriously and not to be deliberately argumentative, but because I am really trying to understand the hard pushback? I get that attempting to thwart AGW is perceived to be economically disruptive - although I've always observed that there is always profit to be made in changing markets. What I don't understand is the absolute heels in the sand reaction. If we identified an asteroid and 97% of astronomers polled said that it appeared to be on a collision course with Earth in 30 years, would we wait to see if the 3% were right? Or would we work on contingency plans in case the 97% actually have it right?
I'm obviously in the camp of believing that humans impact climate, but I am certainly not a climate scientist. I am pretty comfortable with the understanding that CO2 (like water vapor) is really good at absorbing infrared energy around 15 µm. It seems pretty logical to me from knowing that, that it will act as a greenhouse gas. I am also pretty comfortable with that energy is neither created nor destroyed thing. Consequently if CO2 absorbs infrared and the amount of CO2 is rising in the air then I would expect the amount of energy retained is going to increase (assuming a constant solar output - which obviously is inaccurate, but for the sake of basic logic an arguably reasonable assumption to make for clarity), If our climate models are doing a poor job of predicting the effects of said retained energy then the models need improvement. (for example they may not be adequately accounting for ocean's as energy sinks.) That doesn't however negate the fact that more energy is being retained by the system than previously - we can't expect that to continue without impact can we?
But even if I take what I assume to be the denialist position that the rising CO2 levels won't cause the temperature change predicted, should we ignore the demonstrably proven ocean acidification associated with increasing CO2 levels? Unlike complex computer climate models CO2 acidification is pretty easy to demonstrate with chemistry - as are the realities of ocean acidification with regard to broad groups of ocean life - personally a 30% increase in H+ ion concentrations in the past 250 years isn't something that I think should be ignored - especially when one looks at the human population increases accelerating over that period of time and when one realizes that at least a billion humans rely on fish as their primary source of protein. So what about that - what if the climate scientists are 100% wrong about CO2 based temperature change and we are still drastically harming ocean organisms that rely on calcium carbonate - and the organisms that feed on said organisms, and the organisms that feed on them... and... etc. etc. etc. (all the way back to us).