Your missing why he is doing this. He is acting like a professor giving a lector in that interview and being redundant. The important take away is how to talk to the slowest person in the room or in this case the million+ people watching that interview.
PS: I wish more scientists would act this way when interviewed. Global worming, simplest explanation for the 100+ million direct and indirect measurements of atmospheric chemistry and temperature we have taken that fits in with the basic physical laws. Don't agree with it? How do you discount the discrepancy of absorption spectrum as you change atmospheric chemistry etc?
> Global worming, simplest explanation for the 100+ million direct and indirect measurements of atmospheric chemistry and temperature we have taken that fits in with the basic physical laws.
Umm, you're missing an important detail. The additional absortion is orders of magnitude too small to produce the predicted temperature increases. The predicted temperature increases are based on feedback and some other effects, which took a decade off.
No, direct retention of radiated infrared energy is vary important. There are plenty of feedback cycles, but they don't all warm the planet so it really does take a lot to shift each of those 0.1C increases. People are directly responsible for ~1/4th of all carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is not exactly a minor change. (We are around 391ppm and adding a little over 2pmm / year.)
> People are directly responsible for ~1/4th of all carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is not exactly a minor change.
That huge change in CO2 is not a huge change in the atmosphere's ability to retain energy because (a) CO2 concentrations are fairly low and (b) other gasses have a much larger effect.
Note that the atmosphere's ability to retain energy is not dependent on where the CO2 comes from.... I mention that because the earth has had much higher CO2 concetrations.
Climate change is a better term to describe the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry. It's more accurate since most scientists agree that the long term effects are extremely difficult to predict.
