Testimony of Climate Depot’s Marc Morano at Congressional Hearing on Climate Change

Morano can be over the top at times, but whenever he speaks he makes the warmists roll their eyes back in their heads and swallow their tongues while making strange gurgling noises. That alone is enough for me to cheer him on. Go Mark!!! Somebody’s got to be willing to carry the fight to the enemy!

sorry, not slowing down to spell check…
They just called my location as central to path- may have no home to come back to after I evacuate (any time now)… will hang as long as possible.

Storm chasers getting boxed in- tornadoes forming all around them- catching debris.

milodonharlani- below ground shelters are best- reports of some deaths last week in reinforced structure which would have been ok except for high speed impact of vehicle being tossed like popcorn.

Storm chasers getting hammered w/debris- it’s coming right at me (dang) but still time to dodge.
funnels popping out of a 4- mile radius area- debris flying everywhere

He is very hard hitting, and not diplomatic. But I guess it is coming to that. It will be interesting to see the lies it generates from Trenberth and the team.

I understand many sceptics concerns about Marc Morano, in particular his apparent lack of scientific acumen. However Mr. Morano does provide some valuable contributions to the AGW debate.
The first of course is the entertainment value. Marc Morano appears to be able to talk underwater. Some might suggest that he has been genetically re-engineered with hidden gills, allowing him to breath without interrupting a verbal barrage. If Marc allows an opponent to get a word in edgeways, that is simply so they can give him more ammunition. Marc is devastating against those who would seek to debate using politics, spin and lies. Who can forget James “Chicken of the Sea” Cameron fleeing from debate in a cloud of yellow feathers and panicked squawking? The Internet doesn’t, and this is my second point.
Sceptics may prefer to debate the science, but Marc Morano is a political animal. He understands that the “issue” is never the issue in politics. His political antennae have detected that AGW was not about science, but rather pseudo science seized on by a huge number of fellow travellers for profit and to advance political agendas. He has used the Internet, lame stream media and his political connections to ensure that at no point in the future can any of the promoters or profiteers claim “they weren’t told”. Further to this he keeps a record of all those involved in the hoax and lets them know he is keeping the record.
The SS Global Warming has hit the iceberg of truth and is sinking below the waves. Squealing in panic, the rats are trying to escape. More scientifically inclined sceptics have destroyed all the life boats. Marc Morano is ensuring that all the hatches remain firmly welded shut. This may seem somewhat cruel. However, sceptics who object to Morano should ask themselves the question – do you really want any of these rats escaping? Do you really want them washing up in the Bay of “Biocrisis” or on the shores of “sustainability”, clinging to their rafts of soggy grey literature? I, for one do not. I applaud Marc Morano for his efforts.

Anthony,
You seem to damn Morano with your faint praise.
Morano says that “Temperature drives CO2” for three different scientific reasons. Here is a link to one of his reasons. Even Jeff Severinghaus (one of the EPICA researchers) admits that temperature drove CO2 over the last eight glaciation cycles:
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/the-dog-that-did-not-bark/

” As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.
With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.””
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/when_peer_review_becomes_mates_rates/

Good luck Luther.
Stay safe.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 1, 2013 at 12:35 am

…
Thus Morano is right about that temperature did drive CO2 over the past 800 kyr, but that doesn’t apply for the past 160 years.

How do you know? There are a number of things that correlate better with temperature rise than the increase in CO2. So how do you know temperature DIDN’T drive CO2 over the past 160 years?
Didn’t we have a temperature increase as the earth was pulling out of the LIA, THEN CO2 increased?
Looks like it to me.
If you have diagrams showing CO2 increased first followed by the temperature rise from the LIA, please produce them.

Dave says:
June 1, 2013 at 6:15 am

The problem with Morano is he has no scientific credentials.
That makes him the worst possible type of person to personify the skeptical movement.

Yes, but the most heard voices in the climate debate are those of the media people. They’ve got McKibben, we’ve got Delingpole, etc. etc.

Sorry Dave, but nobody who buys into CGWA (even if the resist calling it that) cares a hoot about science. They just dress up in it.

Dave says:
June 1, 2013 at 6:15 am
The problem with Morano is he has no scientific credentials.
That makes him the worst possible type of person to personify the skeptical movement.

I totally disagree. Here’s why. How many sceptical scientists talk like him? He is a political attack dog, this is what he does best. He knows the layman’s language and puts it forward simply and confidently. He knows not to go into the nitty gritty, it would bore people. In this great climate war different soldiers bring on different skills. Delingpole is good at what he does and won the bloggies. Anthony Watts is not a climate scientist and won the bloggies. These three people have done more damage to the good ship global warming than most of the sceptical climate scientists combined.

Ahhhhh.
These four people have done more damage to the good ship global warming than most of the sceptical climate scientists combined.

It is NOT the good ship global warming!

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 1, 2013 at 11:20 am
“Thus in my informed opinion, most of the CO2 increase is caused by humans burning fossil fuels.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
Temperature accounts for almost all of it, and the superficial affine resemblance between emissions and atmospheric concentration is diverging as global temperature rise takes a holiday.

Symantec reports:
SWF_DLOADER.ZTS [Trend], SWF_DLOADER.YVN [Trend], SWF_DLOADER.YVM [Trend]
When accessing this thread.
I have had similar reports accessing other threads the last few days.

Marc, you are a fact filled tireless warrior. Keep it up.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says: June 1, 2013 at 12:35 am
“BTW, Henry’s Law gives an increase of about 16 ppmv/°C for seawater, ”
We appear to have reached similar conclusions. Glassman explains the relationship between temperature and CO2 concentration here:
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
You will find a curve in my “dog that did not bark link” that looks a lot like the link you sent. The “Keeling Curve” created from ice core data. If CO2 drives climate change as suggested by Al Gore you would need a sensitivity of 16 Kelvin per doubling for the last 800,000 years and then after 1850 the sensitivity would have to fall by an order of magnitude (to 1.6 Kelvin per doubling).

Ooops! I messed up that link to Kirk Sorensen’s LFTR presentation:

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 1, 2013 at 1:28 pm
“…needs either 12°C higher average global seawater temperature or 12°C lower average global temperature at the moment that the waters were sinking…”
This is incorrect. You are still imagining a static situtation. If a quantity of water which downwelled long ago at higher CO2 concentration upwells today, it will give that excess up to the atmoshere. You could then claim that, that water had given up all it could.
But, tomorrow, there will be a whole new quantity of ancient waters upwelling. And, the next day. And, the next. Every single day, more goes into the atmosphere in a continuous accumulation. It only stops when an equilibrium is reached, or a regime change in the CO2 content of upwelling waters occurs.
“The main problem is that he uses one time constant that should fit all changes, while in nature several mechanisms with different time constants are at work.”
It isn’t a question of time constants, it is a question of high pass and low pass transmission. What you are suggesting is that the temperature input is high pass processed (filtered), and so has no long term effect, while emissions are low pass filtered, and so account for the low frequency characteristics. This is implausible for the following reasons:
A) It requires dismissing the near perfect match of both long and short term components here as mere happenstance. That is highly unlikely.
B) It requires that the high pass process which removes the low frequency components of the temperature response has essentially zero phase lag across the spectrum, so that the plot at the preceding link exhibits no discernible differential phase lag between components. That simply does not happen in natural systems.
C) It does not explain why the long term emissions and concentration are currently diverging. If this divergence continues, and it will as long as temperatures fail to increase further, then it will not be long before you have no correspondence, superficial or otherwise, to hang your hat upon.
“…these have a too high 13C/12C ratio…”
There are far too many deconstructions of this argument readily available on the web for me to take the time to refute it. Simply put, there are many ways in which this observation could come about. It is consistent with the narrative, but not proof of it, and it is not inconsistent with other possibilities.
“That the latter is flattening only shows that nature now is a larger sink for CO2, still not a source…”
This is the same fallacious “mass balance” argument you have been making forever, and it is wrong at an elementary level. I thought I had finally gotten through explaining it to you at one point, but you appear to have regressed.

Bart says:
June 1, 2013 at 9:25 pm
If a quantity of water which downwelled long ago at higher CO2 concentration upwells today, it will give that excess up to the atmoshere.
The amounts released depend on the partial pressure difference between pCO2 in water and pCO2 in air. The former depends of concentrations, pH and temperature. The latter on concentration only.
The concentration of the upwelling waters depend of the CO2 concentrations over the downwelling waters (as far as not mixed with the bulk of the deep oceans) of long ago and their temperature. While the temperature in general might have been different (but not at the downwelling places which are near freezing), the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were 100 ppmv lower than today. Seen in ice cores with a resolution of ~20 years over the past 1000 years.
Worst case, the concentrations were 8 ppmv higher (for 1°C warmer during the MWP), that would give an increase of 4 ppmv today, not 100 ppmv.
Every single day, more goes into the atmosphere in a continuous accumulation.
No. As CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, the pCO2(air) increases and the CO2 flux at the upwelling places decreases (the CO2 flux is directly proportional to the pCO2 difference between water and air). At the poles, the increased pCO2(air) increases the CO2 flux into the downwelling waters. With an increased pCO2 of the upwelling waters, the resulting increase of CO2 in the atmosphere increases with halve that increase and is again back in equilibrium.
It requires dismissing the near perfect match of both long and short term components here as mere happenstance. That is highly unlikely.
The short term match is real, the medium term match is based on an completely arbitrary baseline.
It requires that the high pass process which removes the low frequency components of the temperature response has essentially zero phase lag across the spectrum
Again, you are thinking in one process that fits all. In the real world the fast processes and the slow(er) processes are near independent of each other. The fast processes are temperature dependent, but quantity limited, the slower processes are far less temperature dependent, but near quantity unlimited.
It does not explain why the long term emissions and concentration are currently diverging.
As the seawater temperatures around the equator didn’t change much in the past years, the main possibility is that the larger open area near the North Pole absorbs more CO2 in an extra amount of sinking waters and/or that vegetation had a growth boot for unknown reasons. That doesn’t change the fact that nature still is a net sink for CO2, even a larger sink, not a net source.
There are far too many deconstructions of this argument readily available on the web for me to take the time to refute it.
None of the arguments I have heard of hold water. There are no huge sources of low 13C/12C on earth except from the current biosphere or the fossil biosphere (except some probable abiogenic methane, but methane levels are quite stable in the past decade). The current biosphere is net growing, thus not the cause of the 13C/12C decline. And again, the too high 13C/12C ratio of the oceans effectively excludes them as source of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is the same fallacious “mass balance” argument you have been making forever, and it is wrong at an elementary level.
The mass balance must be obeyed at all times, as no carbon can be destroyed or created in the whole system. And human CO2 isn’t preferentially absorbed at a different rate than natural CO2.
Take that the oceans are the main source of the increase, at a 90/10 ratio with human emissions. For the two endpoints of the Mauna Loa era, that gives (with the estimated natural flows at start):
For 1960 (all expressed in GtC):
increase = human emissions + ocean emissions + vegetation emissions – ocean sinks – vegetation sinks
1.4 = 2.6 + 90 + 50 – x – 50
Before 1990, vegetation was observed to be more or less in carbon balance. That gives:
x = 91.2 and the oceans show a net uptake of 1.2 GtC as CO2.
For 2011 (atmospheric increase approximated):
4.3 = 9.4 + 325 + 50 – x – 51 (vegetation is a net growing sink since about 1990)
x = 329.1 and the oceans show a net uptake of 4.1 GtC as CO2.
In all years of the past 50+ years, the oceans were net sinks for CO2. The only result of assuming an increased CO2 release from the oceans, is that the throughput of CO2 from oceans via atmosphere back to oceans increased some 3.6 times and still is net decreasing the atmospheric CO2 levels. The alleged increased throughput is not observed in any measurement.

I dislike his presentation style — indeed, I would consider it disastrously inappropriate for the U.S. Congress, as likely to work in the opposite direction to what he intends — but his analysis of the facts is spot on.
Sadly, this isn’t the way to present something convincing to people who are uncertain and who have other supposedly competent advisors telling them the exact opposite. I just don’t understand why nobody articulates this well. As a single example, he talks about energy poverty in the third world and the impact of global warming policy on it, he quotes (quite correctly) a Japanese scientist who asserts that deliberate or not, European energy policy keeps the third world “barefoot” and in economic shackles (and as I pointed out, isn’t too good for the European economy itself, either), but he doesn’t present a simple, factual, cost-benefit analysis that shows the real costs right now of ameliorating the imagined CAGW “catastrophe” 87 years from now. They are enormous. Truly stupendous. We could have ended world poverty with the money pissed away on this already, especially if we threw in the money pissed away in the Iraq war (indirectly part of the same energy constellation, at issue global control of Iraq’s oil resources).
We also could have done something constructive about the use of fossil fuel resources to hedge our bets in the meantime, if it weren’t for the demonization of nuclear power and the unjustifiable promotion of wind based power. This entire issue lacks an articulate spokesperson, one who can fairly balance both sides of the issue and focus on weighted risk and cost-benefit, not whether or not the predictive science one way or the other is right.
SLR is a perfect example of how a rational argument can proceed. Hansen makes egregious claims. The actual data fails to support them. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t or won’t eventually be correct, but it is nevertheless quite clear that we shouldn’t be basing current public policy or spending current public money building seawalls now against a possible 1 meter or more SLR in 80 years. Even if the sea level does rise, it isn’t going to go up a meter overnight — there will be plenty of time to build seawalls and so on once it accelerates the way Hansen predicts that it will. And if Hansen is actually completely wrong, batshit crazy, and self-serving in his predictions and passion — whether or not you believe that this is likely to be the case, it is hard to argue that it would be good not to have wasted all that money on what would prove to be a monument to fiscal idiocy over the ages in the event that this SLR fails to come to pass.
Precisely the same thing is true for global temperatures and so on. It has been 16 years or so since we have had any discernible warming, and most of the warming we did have over the last 40 years was discrete and associated with a single event, the 1998 super-ENSO. Most of the “climate change” we have observed is more likely correlated with or explained by secondary phenomena such as solar state and/or the phase of other multidecadal oscillations. Humans affect many atmospheric parameters associated with climate change, some warming, some cooling, and we cannot yet meaningfully predict or explain observed global temperatures on the time scale of centuries at all. CAGW might or might not resume at some point — we don’t know why if it is a true hypothesis in the first place, and if it is we don’t know why it stopped and so cannot predict when it might resume — but if it does it probably isn’t going to just jump up to disaster, because the Earth has an enormous heat capacity and buffering system. In the meantime, as is the case with SLR, perhaps there will be catastrophic warming, perhaps not, but at the moment there is no warming at all and it is difficult to see how the lack of warming can be disastrous. Surely we are better off spending our money on sure things — reducing energy poverty and the real, ongoing catastrophe in our time of millions of preventable deaths, billions of lives lived in uncomfortable poverty.
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@Konrad
May 31, 2013 at 7:55 pm
What a lovely turn of phrase, “soggy grey literature”. Right on. Exactly: it is all wet.

Bart says:
June 2, 2013 at 10:20 am
To make the difference in ideas clear, here the basic graphs:
Here from Bart
and the same data (as yearly average increases) plotted in the same units for all variables:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em2.jpg
If one plots the data in the same units it is clear that the emissions were larger than the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and that nature was a net sink for CO2 for every of all 50+ years. There is no way that nature can have been a substantial net source of extra CO2 over that period without violating the mass balance…
The variability in increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by temperature variations. Temperature influences the net sink rate of oceans and vegetation, the main natural net sinks for CO2.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 2, 2013 at 12:26 pm
“There is no way that nature can have been a substantial net source of extra CO2 over that period without violating the mass balance…”
A true mass balance, yes. Your absurd pseudo-mass balance, no. In a dynamic system in which feedback increases or decreases the size of the sinks in response to the rate of influx, your simplistic accounting does not work.
We have been over, and over, and over this. At one point, you seemed to have seen the light. What happened?