What experiments could I do at home that would prove (to even the most skeptical) that our actions are causing a change in climate?

If I measure the amount of heat absorbed by CO2 in my bedroom with an IR sprectrometer. Does that prove that CO2 is responsible for global warming? It proves that my bedroom has high (or low) CO2. But this doesn’t tell us much about CO2 concentrations elsewhere. Also, where does CO2 even come from?

If I collect the exhaust gases from burning gasoline. And determine the amount of CO2 released with a bicarbonate indicator. This could tell me the amount of CO2 produced by running my car on gasoline. And I could guess that my car is similar to most others, and extrapolate to calculate the output of all cars worldwide. But does this imply that humans are causing climate change? No. Why would a small amount of extra CO2 heat the atmosphere? And anyway, don’t plants absorb CO2?

If I collect data the temperature, rainfall, humidity, atmospheric CO2 concentration, of my backyard for the next 50 years. And see a positive correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration. Does this prove anthropogenic climate change? And can we generalise these results worldwide? No. Correlation does not imply causation. And geography is a confounder.

The point is. It is not possible for a skeptical individual to prove anthopogenic climate change. Although it is easy to disprove. If any of the experiments above fail, then anthropogenic climate change as we understand it is unlikely to be true.

  • If CO2 doesn’t absorb large amounts of infrared radiation, then it cannot act as a greenhouse gas, and will not heat the planet.
  • If burning gasoline (and other fossil fuels) doesn’t release CO2 then the attribution of human activitiy as the cause of global warming is tenuous.

Causation does imply correlation. So if there was no correlation between CO2 and temperature, then we can disprove anthropogenic climate change.

So then, what evidence do we have for anthropogenic climate change? (that cannot be easily gathered by an individual)

  1. Historical data from ice cores and geological samples telling us about Earth’s climate tens of thousands of years ago, before humans were up to much. This data tells us the ‘natural’ range of global temperature, which we can compare to now.

  2. More recent data measuring global temperature average, ocean acidification, atmospheric CO2 concentration, sea levels and ice sheet mass, gathered by satellites and weather stations around the world tells us that the Earth is warming, and that this warming is correlated with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

  3. Our knowledge of the effects of many physical processes, solar flares, volcanoes, … allows us to remove these as confounders of a correlation between temperature and CO2 released by humans, us. Meaning, we can, with more confidence, claim a causal relationship between CO2 release (via say burning gasoline) and global temperature.

  4. We understand the lifetime of CO2 in our atmosphere. While CO2 is absorbed by oceans, by trees, even by some rocks, we understand the rate at which each process occurs. This allows us to predict the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at any given time, and compare this to the amount of CO2 released by humans.