Kerry Emanuel is, and has been, a well regarded researcher for over 40 years. He is pretty much the smartest guy in the room. I recall meeting him once at a conference and read his papers in graduate school and afterwards. Roy Spencer and John Christy are also researchers that are worth listening to. The fact that anthropogenic CO2 increases have caused some recent warming is not debated by anyone (who actually understands the science). The estimates are from 0.8 to 1.3C and are a perturbation on the longer term warming due to the fact that we have been in an interglacial period for about 12,000 years. We may continue to warm for the next 100,000 years (or so??) and sea levels, which have risen about 6 inches in the last 100 years or so, will continue to rise. The rate of sea level rise, however, appears to be accelerating. The concern is that anthropogenic CO2 increases will create several degrees of additional warming, over and above the warming from being in an interglacial period, over the next 100 years or so. The debate is whether we will be faced with a dire situation due to anthropogenic CO2 increases. Part of the problem is that the press and politicians have zoomed in on the 8.5 modeling scenario (the most dire modeling projection). I, and others such as Spencer and Christy, have doubts whether the 8.5 scenarios is the scenario that we should be focused on. That is a political issue. Spencer and Christy also point out that the models tend to run warm, particularly in the tropical troposphere. Back when I actually did productive work, I developed models for NASA and the NWS. It is a difficult problem. Model sensitivity to CO2 increases continues to be an area of research.
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Originally Posted by Taltarzac725
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