Most claims about climate change and sea level rise are due to a combination of ignorance and innumeracy. The rest are due to malfeasance and evil.
There is a relationship between CO2 emissions and global mean temperature increase which is almost never discussed (unless it's lied about), however it is pretty well established and it alone does quite a lot to dismantle the climate change narrative.
So what is the nature of the relationship of inputs to outputs in this system? Is it, as some have ridiculously claimed, exponential? Not by a long shot, that would have spiraled out of control long before we were here. Is it at least polynomial, meaning a constant in the exponent instead of a variable as in the exponential case? It's not polynomial. Okay, well then surely it's linear, temperature increases scale right with CO2 emissions? Not even linear. The indisputable fact is that the relationship between inputs and outputs in this system is logarithmic.
If you've ever seen a plot of ln(x) you know what this looks like, early on you will see massive changes in the dependent variable, in this case temperature rise, due to small changes in the independent variable, CO2 emissions, but very soon it plateaus out and it actually gets very difficult to get more increase, in fact you have to double the input to see a linear increase in the output.
We will soon hit a point where in order to squeeze another fraction of a degree centigrade increase out we would have to double our global CO2 emissions, which would be impossible for all practical purposes. It's one thing to go from a pre-industrial, agrarian society to where we are now, a lot of doublings took place in that time, it's quite another thing to go from where we are now to literally double the capacity to CO2 output, never will happen.
The run away climate change models rely on specific assumptions about feedback mechanisms which we don't know to hold true and the consensus we hear about among climate scientists is with these assumptions granted. If those assumptions don't hold, and more than a few claim that they don't, there will be a point at which temperature increases flatten out.
None of this even takes solar activity into account, which is about to start waning by some accounts, which if it does we actually would have hoped to get as much warming in as possible, because solar minima are correlated with decreased agricultural output and falling populations.
Well, it is something of a Plato's cave situation where we're looking at shadows on the wall and trying to infer what's going on, for at least a few different reasons. One is that it's true that weather and climate are complex, chaotic systems so there's a lot of noise just due to the nature of the phenomenon, another is the sheer number of data points and papers and sources out there (due likely to how much money there is available to produce such things) that search is a problem, and of course there is an overriding orthodoxy which drowns out and outright censors any countering view points. Still, there are shadow movements that we can read which point to this fact that I'm describing.
One key fact is that the first person to describe the greenhouse effect, Svante Arrhenius, famous for temperature dependent reaction rate equations, some of which are logarithmic, himself noted the logarithmic relation, though it's in the form of table data. Another way is to look into climate sensitivity, going even into the belly of the beast itself Wikipedia, which is essentially Pravda, all you need to do is search for the word "doubling" and you will find that the way in which climate sensitivity is measured in doublings of CO2. Another way is to merely search for attempts at debunking climate skepticism and you will find that this fact is conceded. Probably the best way is to look up plots of radiative forcing which shows a logarithmic relationship; here's a not so great source: http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/radiative-forcing.png
Another: https://climate.mr-int.ch/images/graphs/ts_forcing_by_co2.png
Here's a discussion from a better source which assumes this: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13829/why-is-radiative-forcing-from-co2-logarithimic-and-not-a-decreasing-exponential
I think I'm probably taking a leap in my post here, I lead off claiming that this relationship shows climate alarmism to be unfounded; I should perhaps instead endeavor to simply point to the fact that the relation logarithmic and hopefully the reader can work out what that means and then with that in mind one can turn to the feedback stuff and deal with that separately.
This point of view that I've come to, as someone previously convinced of the orthodoxy, could still be wrong, it could be that the feedback models really do make this thing work, but at least we should know that really the whole thing is founded on feedback, the actual relationship between CO2 and temperature is logarithmic, and the fact this isn't widely known, that I never knew it, is kind of suspicious to me.
Another thing that is suspicious is the fact that chasing this down is a Plato's cave situation; why is it so difficult to find the simple equation that relates CO2 and temperature? I have decided that I will take some time and look closer at the Arrhenius equations and see if I can find a general way to relate concentration of a gas and its ability to trap heat (the equations deal with any reaction rates and temperature) and I will just search more to see if I can find such an equation, it definitely exists.
But again, why is it so hard to find? Because of this I have also decided that I will run my own experiments to get some data. I appreciate the challenge you've given me, and I hope you, anonymous stranger, will be around and willing to look at my results in a month or two because you're the impetus for this exercise.
Here's what I want to be able to do: derive an equation for the relationship between CO2 and temperature based on empirical data.
Here's my idea for how to design the study: build an enclosure which will house a glass vessel and some incandescent light bulb array, 3D print an airtight cap/lid for the vessel which will allow for a vacuum to be created and maintained in the vessel and also allow for temperature and pressure sensors to be lowered into it, control ambient temperature, pump all air out of the vessel (after calibrating sensors and ensuring vacuum is maintained) and take a number of temperature readings, then slowly introduce small, regular amounts of frozen CO2 (dry ice) and, after sublimating and equilibrating with ambient temperature, take readings, repeat for increasing masses of CO2, and repeat the entire process several times to shake out noise. An alteration or addition to this may involve taking readings with the light source on but also turning if off and measuring the ability of the gas to hold temperature after, as this may be a more sensitive measure.
It could be that feedback as proposed in the models is valid, that's a different discussion, but at least I want to show that this relationship is true, as I have come to believe it is, and if it's hard to find this equation then I'll derive it myself.
An excellent reply. I appreciate it.
I am curious about other research of course, but I have no time to do any myself, even as a review, nor to expose a larger truth of climate change. There is simply too much to do and I have bigger fish to fry. I looked into climate science models a few years back (15?) and found them to be all completely incompetent, many were outright fraudulent. They were all models based on easily proven false or misapplied axioms, most not even clearly stating their axioms, faulty logic, and/or all leaving out essential elements. As example, no one seems to talk about Earths prominent mode of CO2 sequestration as I mentioned above, where CO2 sequestration (plant life) is proportional to CO2 concentration, which then increases O2, etc..
As for your experiment, I don't know that a vacuum is required or desired (nor is it really possible). If you reduce your container to say, 0.01 atm all you've done is given yourself an environment for an increased partial pressure of CO2 v. air, but really, studying the partial pressure of CO2 in air at 1 atm wrt heat would be a more applicable measurement imo. It is also possible that the resulting curve is linear in some portions, logarithmic (or log like) in others, and exponential in others on a [CO2]/[air] v. heat retention (or whatever you are measuring) graph.
So if you say, take out some air, and add in some solid CO2 to bring it back up to 1atm, and vary that over a reasonable range wrt what's actually possible in our atmosphere, it would, I think, give more applicable results.
You could make another dimension to the graph (T(K) axis) which could also add interesting information.