Climate change "lukewarmers" tend to accept CO2 lab experiments suggesting doubling CO2 levels in the air will cause +1 degree C. warming in real life.
They may also believe in mild positive or negative feedbacks that increase or decrease the warming from CO2 alone.
Anyone who believes that CO2 lab experiments describe real life, owes it to listeners to include a sentence like this one:
-- A 2 ppm CO2 increase every year would increase the average temperature only + 1 degree C. in 200 years, excluding feedbacks, which are currently unknown.
The only important difference I see between the conclusions of a "lukewarmer", and a "CO2 is Evil Cult" member, concerns the unknown feedback effects.
I consider "lukewarmers" to be people who stand in the middle of the road, proud of themselves for being 'moderate' compromisers.
But I think they are more dangerous than "CO2 is Evil Cult" members.
The cult members typically have little or no climate science knowledge, and the "scientists" involved are government bureaucrats paid to play computer games and make scary climate predictions every year.
---- They have no idea of exactly what causes climate change, or what the future climate will be, but claim they know both with great certainty.
The "lukewarmers" have some, or much, climate science knowledge.
---- They also have no idea of exactly what causes climate change, or what the future climate will be, yet will often provide a guess ... when they should have said "I don't know".
The biggest problem with modern climate "science" is too many people making wild guesses and/or implying they know the future average temperature.
I believe a good "Climate Change 101" type of article
MUST answer some very basic overview questions
BEFORE getting into the science:
(1)
Is there anything unusual about the current climate ?
- The current climate is wonderful.
Based on only one variable, whose data measurements are very rough, the average temperature changed very little in the past 150 years ... and has been unusually steady since the early 2000s, in spite of large CO2 increases since then.
(2)
What does "climate change" mean to the "believers" ?
- To the "CO2 is Evil cult", climate change means humans burning fossil fuels will cause runaway global warming that will eventually kill all life on Earth.
(3)
What is the "climate change" prediction based on ?
- Some CO2 laboratory experiments that suggest harmless warming from CO2 (perhaps one degree C. warming in the next 200 years), which is then tripled by a hypothetical positive feedback theory that is backed with absolutely no scientific evidence.
(4)
How much do we know about what causes climate change?
- The knowledge of exactly what causes climate change is weak.
Many questions.
Few answers.
Many unproven theories.
Real climate science must start with a correct list of variables that affect the average temperature, and how much each variable affects the temperature.
If a small percentage of all the variables involved caused a large percentage of the temperature change, it may be possible to develop a useful climate physics model.
A useful climate physics model could be the foundation for a prototype global circulation model (GCM).
The prototype GCM could be used for average temperature predictions.
If a protoype GCM made predictions that were grossly inaccurate, like the current GCMs do, we would be confident the prototype was NOT a model of the real climate change process -- and the climate physics model was probably wrong too.
Failed prototypes do not deserve to be treated as real models, or called models, no matter how much time and money was spent on them.
(5)
If CO2 was really the "climate controller", what would the warming be like, and how does the theory compare with reality?
(a) Slow steady warming
Did not happen in real life in the 'era of manmade CO2' since 1940:
--- Cooling from 1940 to 1975
--- Flat trend from early 2000s to 2015
(b) Biggest warming effect on Arctic and Antarctica
Did not happen in real life:
--- Arctic warmed
--- Antarctica did not warm
(c) Maximum warming in the tropics would be six miles up in the air
Did not happen in real life:
-- No tropics "hot spot" ever found