On Aug 20, 7:33 pm, Al Bedo wrote:
Roger Coppock wrote:
Here, from Hadley Centre, are the global sea surface
temperatures from 1850 to 2006. Please see:

http://members.cox.net/rcoppock/HadSST2gl.jpg
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt)

Of course the SSTs warmed at the fastest rate from 1910 through 1945
with very little help from GHGs. The most recent thirty five
years warmed at a lesser rate, even with lots of reputed GHG forcing.

Al - maybe this is a dumb question, but why was there necessarily
"very little help from GHGs" between 1910 and 1945?

The global depression of the 1930s would very likely have reduced
emissions of GHG's by shutting down heavy industry across the
capitalist west during this period - granted.

But the period 1910 - 1930 was generally an era of rapid industrial
growth, I believe, and virtually all of that growth was powered by
fossil fuels -- more coal in the early years, but with an increasing
shift to oil in the later years.

The world's commercial shipping fleets and its naval fleets both were
powered by fossil fuels in this era -- again, with more dependence on
coal in the early years and a gradual or not so gradual shift to
petroleum over time.

The world automobile industry, and especially the US auto industry,
also saw enormous growth in this period, admittedly from fairly small
beginnings: Henry Ford's invention of the Model A and Model T and his
establishment of the first automobile assembly lines, beginning a
little before 1910, made a huge difference in how common gasoline-
powered automobiles became in the US over the next two decades.

So why wasn't there a significant "anthropogenic greenhouse effect"
even before the end of World War II?

I recognize that western industrial capitalism, plus Soviet-led
industrialization in Eastern Europe, plus Third World industrialism
all soared dramatically after 1945, and that the global auto industry
and the airline industry saw especially spectacular growth. So
global CO2 emissions after 1945 were undoubtedly far greater than
before.

But on the other hand, all of the major industrial powers by 1910 had
been undergoing coal-powered industrial growth for decades, at leat,
and in the case of Great Britain, coal-based industrial growth had
been underway for around two centuries.

I would expect that in the AGW science is valid - which I think it is
-- the legacy of all that coal burning would have some cumulative
effect on the climate by the 1920s.

Of course coal-based industrialization also contributed large volumes
of carbon particulates, sulfur-dioxide aerosols and other pollutants
to the air over Europe, Britain, Japan and parts of the US, which may
have had mixed effects on the climate.

Has anybody in either the AGW Camp or the AGW-Denialist camp studied
this issue, I wonder?
I mean, it isn't as if by 1910, the western industrial countries were
existing in some pristine state akin to the mythical Garden of Eden.
Some of them -- eg. the UK - were already quite polluted.