[Vision2020] 10-18-19: Greta Thunberg speaks at Edmonton climate action rally "...our main enemy is physics."

[Ted Moffett]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwNWt-iaXx0
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“We cannot allow this crisis to continue to be a partisan, political
question. The climate and ecological crisis is far beyond party politics
and the main enemy right now should not be any political opponents, because
our main enemy is physics,” she said.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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plus 70 years, Ted Moffett.  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce
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Greta Thunberg is not the exploited for a political agenda naive too young
stooge some assert.
She explicitly attempts to avoid stereotyping efforts to address climate
change as a partisan political or economic agenda.

Her comment about physics regarding anthropogenic global warming instantly
reminded me of the following 2007 Realclimate.org commentary by Oxford
climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert:
https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/pierrehumbert

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/les-chevaliers-de-lordre-de-la-terre-plate-part-ii-courtillots-geomagnetic-excursion/#more-504


Les Chevaliers de l’Ordre de la Terre Plate, Part II: Courtillot’s
Geomagnetic Excursion
raypierre @ 18 December 2007

Prelude: It’s the *physics*, stupid

…which of course is a paraphrase of Bill Clinton’s famous quote regarding
the economy. We put the last word in small letters since we’ve learned that
it is not a good debating technique
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/adventures-on-the-east-side/langswitch_lang/sw>
to
imply (even inadvertently) that those who are having trouble seeing the
force of our arguments might be stupid. What we wish to emphasize by this
paraphrase is the simple fact that the expectation of a causal link between
increasing long-lived greenhouse gases (like CO2) and increasing
temperature does not rest on some vague, unexplained correlation between
20th century temperature and 20th century greenhouse gas concentration.

The anticipated increase in temperature was predicted long before it was
detectable in the atmosphere, indeed long before it was known that
atmospheric CO2 really was increasing; it was first predicted by Arrhenius
in 1896 using extremely simple radiation balance ideas, and was reproduced
using modern radiation physics by Manabe and co-workers in the 1960’s.
Neither of these predictions rests on general circulation models, which
came in during subsequent decades and made more detailed forecasts possible.

Still, the basic prediction of warming is founded on very fundamental
physical principles relating to infrared absorption by greenhouse gases,
theory of blackbody radiation, and atmospheric moist thermodynamics. All
these individual elements have been verified to high accuracy in laboratory
experiments and field observations. For a time, there was some remaining
uncertainty about whether water vapor feedback would amplify warming in the
way hypothesized in the early energy balance models, but a decade or two of
additional observational and theoretical work has shown that there is no
real reason to doubt the way in which general circulation models calculate
the feedback. When modified by inclusion of the cooling effect of
anthropogenic aerosols, the theory gives a satisfactory account of the
pattern of 20th and 21st century temperature change.

No other theory based on quantified physical principles has been able to do
the same. If somebody comes along and has the bright idea that, say, global
warming is caused by phlogiston raining down from the Moon, that does not
make everything we know about thermodynamics, infrared absorption, energy
balance, and temperature suddenly go away. Rather, it is the job of the
phlogiston advocate to quantify the effects of phlogiston on energy
balance, and incorporate them in a consistent way beside the existing
climate forcings. Virtually all of the attempts to poke holes in the
anthropogenic greenhouse theory lose sight of this simple and unassailable
principle.
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