Solar radiation, atmospheric aerosol concentrations, anthropogenic greenhouse gases, global warming?
Question:
Answer:
That's the trillion dollar question.
Just a caveat: the key about solar radiation is the word "variation", which you added. Solar radiation will ALWAYS have the most impact on warming and cooling, When dealing with a minute change as we are today, there is a lot more opportunities for forcings such as aerosols or GTGs.
Anthropogenic greenhouse gases have accounted for about 80-90% of the warming over the past 40 years.
I'm gonna go with that one.
Your question sounds very
important and ethereal but
doesn't make much sense.
First of all, who is to say that
any of your possibilities are
impacting the climate change?
Climate change is caused
by many factors in varying
degrees. Your question is
very general and uses a lot
of big words to get a bigger
grade?
See page 4 of the link, the force factor chart answers your question. CO2 has the largest effect, solar one of the smallest.
I am sticking with attribution to any individual effect still remains unknown.
I see that people are still insisting on pointing out that CO2 has the largest forcing number (thanks to Grizz for the link), but they neglect to point out that the level of scientific understanding of all the other forcings is medium to low. Thus, we cannot say which factor will have the most impact at this point in time.
This is very important. Poor models leads to poor decisions by those least able to understand the models (i.e. politicians). Acting on the precautionary principle is only asking for a preventable government-induced disaster. Reducing CO2 by 75, 80, 90% will plunge the world into a deep economic depression that has not seen since the Great Depression.
There is an interesting parallel here that may be lost on those that do not like history. The Smoot-Hawley tariff act precipitated a trade war across the globe, this bit of American protectionism was the last piece of governmental interference needed to really drive the stake into the heart of the worlds economies. After it, trade virtually ceased and the depression deepened. The Kyoto Protocol has the potenital to do the same thing, only the mechanism will be different. Economic ruin will come from exorbitant energy prices and a virtual elimination of the manufacturing sectors in most western nations.
Sadly, the ruin that can be caused by poorly informed government intervention will likely be much worse than the ruin caused by slowly rising temperatures over the course of the next 100 or 200 years.
Aerosol concentrations.
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