Note: this letter from Dr. Jim Hansen of NASA GISS is reprinted below unedited, exactly in email as it was received by me, including the title below. You can reference a PDF version on his Columbia U page here I’ll have to agree with Dr. Hansen though, Cap and Trade is about the closest thing to the “Temple of Doom” our economy would face. No word yet from Harrison Ford if he’ll play Jim in the movie. What is most interesting is who he didn’t mention in the last paragraph.- Anthony
Worshipping the Temple of Doom
My response to the letter from Dr. Martin Parkinson, Secretary of the Australian Department of Climate Change, is available, along with this note, on my web site.
Thanks to the many people who provided comments on my draft response, including Steve Hatfield-Dodds, a senior official within the Australian Department of Climate Change. I appreciate the willingness of the Australian government to engage in this discussion. I believe that you will find the final letter to be significantly improved over the draft version.
Several people admonished me for informal language, which detracts from credibility, and attempts at humor with an insulting tone (e.g., alligator shoes). They are right, of course – these should not be in the letter. So I reserve opinions with an edge to my covering e-mail note.
My frustration arises from the huge gap between words of governments, worldwide, and their actions or planned actions. It is easy to speak of a planet in peril. It is quite another to level with the public about what is needed, even if the actions are in everybody’s long-term interest.
Instead governments are retreating to feckless “cap-and-trade”, a minor tweak to business-as-usual. Oil companies are so relieved to realize that they do not need to learn to be energy companies that they are decreasing their already trivial investments in renewable energy. They are using the money to buy greenwash advertisements. Perhaps if politicians and businesses paint each other green, it will not seem so bad when our forests burn.
Cap-and-trade is the temple of doom. It would lock in disasters for our children and grandchildren. Why do people continue to worship a disastrous approach? Its fecklessness was proven by the Kyoto Protocol. It took a decade to implement the treaty, as countries extracted concessions that weakened even mild goals. Most countries that claim to have met their obligations actually increased their emissions. Others found that even modest reductions of emissions were inconvenient, and thus they simply ignored their goals.
Why is this cap-and-trade temple of doom worshipped? The 648 page cap-and-trade monstrosity that is being foisted on the U.S. Congress provides the answer. Not a single Congressperson has read it. They don’t need to – they just need to add more paragraphs to support their own special interests. By the way, the Congress people do not write most of those paragraphs – they are “suggested” by people in alligator shoes.
The only defense of this monstrous absurdity that I have heard is “well, you are right, it’s no good, but the train has left the station”. If the train has left, it had better be derailed soon or the planet, and all of us, will be in deep do-do. People with the gumption to parse the 648-pages come out with estimates of a price impact on petrol between 12 and 20 cents per gallon. It has to be kept small and ineffectual, because they want to claim that it does not affect energy prices!
It seems they would not dream of being honest and admitting that an increased price for fossil fuels is essential to drive us to the world beyond fossil fuels. Of course, there are a huge number of industries and people who do not want us to move to the world beyond fossil fuels – these are the biggest fans of cap-and-trade. Next are those who want the process mystified, so they can make millions trading, speculating, and gaming the system at public expense.
The science has become clear: burning all fossil fuels would put Earth on a disastrous course, leaving our children and grandchildren with a deteriorating situation out of their control. The geophysical implication is that most of the remaining coal and unconventional fossil fuels (tar shale, etc.) must be left in the ground or the emissions captured and put back in the ground. A corollary is that it makes no sense to go after every last drop of oil in the most remote and pristine places – we would have to fight to get the CO2 back out of the air or somehow “geoengineer” our way out of its effects.
A more sensible approach is to begin a rapid transition to a clean energy future, beyond fossil fuels – for the sake of our children and grandchildren, already likely to be saddled with our economic debts, and to preserve the other species on the planet. Such a path would also eliminate mercury emissions, most air pollution, acid rain and ozone alerts, likely reversing trends toward increasing asthma and birth defects. Such an energy future would also halt the drain on our treasure and lives resulting from dependence on foreign energy sources.
What is it that does not compute here? Why does the public choose to subsidize fossil fuels, rather than taxing fossil fuels to make them cover their costs to society? I don’t think that the public actually voted on that one. It probably has something to do with all the alligator shoes in Washington. Those 2400 energy lobbyists in Washington are not well paid for nothing. You have three guesses as to who eventually pays the salary of these lobbyists, and the first two guesses don’t count.
I get a lot of e-mails telling me to stick to climate, that I don’t know anything about economics. I know this: the fundamental requirement for transition to the post fossil fuel era is a substantial and rising price on carbon emissions. And businesses and consumers must understand that it will continue to rise in the future.
Of course, a rising carbon price alone is not sufficient for a successful rapid transition to the post fossil fuel era. There also must be efficiency standards on buildings, vehicles, appliances, electronics and lighting. Barriers to efficiency, such as utilities making more money when we use more energy, must be removed.
But the essential underlying requirement is a substantial rising carbon price. Building standards, especially operations, for example, are practically unenforceable without a strong cost driver. The carbon price must be sufficient to affect lifestyle choices.
648 pages are not needed to define a carbon fee. It is a single number that would be ratcheted upward over time. It would cover all three fossil fuels at their source: the mine or port of entry. Consumers do not directly pay any tax, but the fee’s effect permeates everything from the price of fuel to the price of food (especially if it is imported from halfway around the world).
As a point of reference a fee equivalent to $1/gallon of gasoline ($115/ton CO2) would yield $670B in the United States (based on energy use data for 2007). That would provide a dividend of $3000/year to legal adult residents in the United States ($9000/year to a family with two or more children).
A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average would gain economically, if the fee is returned 100 percent to the public on a per capita basis. With the present distributions of income and energy use, it is estimated that about 60 percent of the people would get a dividend exceeding their tax. So why would they not just spend their dividend on expensive fuel? Nobody wants to pay more taxes. They prefer to have the money for other things. As the price of fossil fuels continues to increase, people would conserve energy, choose more energy efficient vehicles, and choose non-fossil (untaxed) energies and products.
Hey, does anybody know a great communicator, who might level with the public, explain what is needed to break our addiction to fossil fuels, to gain energy independence, to assure a future for young people? Who would explain what is really needed, rather than hide behind future “goals” and a gimmick “cap”? Naw. Roosevelt and Churchill are dead. So is Kennedy.
Jim
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So instead of cap-and-trade, Hansen prefers a new $670Billion dollar tax!
I do love his caveat though: “A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average would gain economically, if the fee is returned 100 percent to the public on a per capita basis.”
When does Washington EVER return 100 percent of a tax to the public???
It’s truly ironic that he says we can’t afford to spend our money on foreign oil then he proposes such a massive tax.
I read this with interest & not a little amusement. Being a bit if a history nut, much to my wife’s irritation, I imagined listening to this in an auditorium, decked top to toe with Greenpeasce flags & green uniformed supporters, with Mr H wearing a little black moustache & a swept down fringe, thumping the podium & ranting that he’ll give us the world, free of evil oil, coal, gas. I concur with others, this was a real rant by somebody on the edge of a breakdown. After all, if a bunch of half-baked half-wit eco-greenie-enviro-fruitloop psycologists can gather at a seminar in the south-west of England, to “discuss” denial of climate change as a “mental illness”, yes true my doubting colonial cousins, real 1984 stuff this, then it is good enough for JH to get the same treatment. (Give him back his toy somebody).
One cannot sack him now, it will only be seen as picking on him. Better to wait until the strain becomes so apparent, that he should be offered early retirement on the grounds of ill health, & given a course of six months counselling!
OT – Your UK correspondent regrets to inform the wider readership that a British (yes yet another one!) 3 man sailing expedition from Plymouth, Devon, to Greenland’s most northerly point was abandoned about 400 miles off the Irish coast. The expedition, which was going to communicate to local schools directly to keep them informed about all the ice melting & dead polar bears because of burning fossil fuels, was overpowered by violant Altlantic storms & high winds resulting in capsizing thrice, was rescued by a, err, err………………an oil tanker! All three are said to be well considering their experiences, & heaped paise on their resuers & the Irish coastguard et al. )It is unknown what they thought of the explorers)! The irony is resounding all over the place & at least the Catlin team got there initially – Catlin is next I feel sure! I am at times utterly embarrassed to be British, thankfully I have some Irish ancestry to turn to at these humiliating times.
Hansen is not satisfied with the democratic approach.
His letter clearly advocates an authoritarian approach.
Beware!
In fact there’s an upcoming conference in Essen, Germany, 8-10 June, dubbed: THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION – Climate Change as Cultural Change.
This Congress poses the question (I kid you not!):
“Democratic regimes are not well prepared for the level of participation that is required: Can free democratic societies cope with the effects of grave changes in the global climate, or might AUTHORITARIAN regimes possibly be better placed to enforce the necessary measures?”
Any wealth redistribution plan is tyrannical. People like Hansen and the politicians that support such approaches cannot publicly admit that, however, as it is political suicide.
Mark
bill (10:00:19):
“Can you suggest a way of conclusively proving AGW/GW [is not a] problem”? [I assume that is what you meant.]
That is an argumentum ad ignorantiam: The fallacy of assuming that something is true, simply because it hasn’t been proven false.
See, bill, you’ve turned the Scientific Method on its head again. It is not the duty of skeptics to prove anything.
Rather, the burden is on those pushing the CO2 = AGW hypothesis to demonstrate that their hypothesis explains reality better than the long established theory of natural climate variability, in which the climate oscillates around a gradually rising trend line within historical parameters. That theory has not been falsified, and it makes verifiable predictions.
But CO2 = AGW fails. How do we know? because the CO2 = AGW hypothesis can not make accurate climate predictions. The testable prediction is that anthropogenic CO2 is driving temperatures up. But despite the fact that both naturally occurring and human produced CO2 have been steadily rising, the planet is not warming. The CO2 = AGW hypothesis fails. QED.
Bill Illis is right that we absolutely need more evidence, because the current flimsy evidence is certainly insufficient reason to divert hundreds of $billions to $trillions from other needs such as improved sanitation, vaccinating against contagious diseases, world hunger, malaria, AIDS research [not to mention fixing the pot holes and bridges], toward correcting something that is only rank speculation at this point; where is your real world evidence that rising levels of a very minor trace gas will cause climate catastrophe? If you can’t answer that question, then how do you support huge spending proposals?
Only the most wild-eyed alarmists are claiming that the planet is going to hit some mythical “tipping point” and go into runaway global warming — something that didn’t happen when CO2 levels were more than ten times current levels. The planet itself is demonstrating that the fearmongers are wrong. It’s time to give up computer models, and accept reality.
“The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
— Marcus Aurelius
Pierre Gosselin (11:01:34) : The quote you just cited above, if i am not wrong i read it here in WUWT, not so long time ago, as from the ineffable JH.
“That would provide a dividend of $3000/year to legal adult residents in the United States ($9000/year to a family with two or more children).”
If Hansen gave me $10,000 I’d gladly give him a $9000 dividend. We could make a business out of it…
If you follow the trail of a gallon of oil or a cubic foot of gas from discovery to your gas tank or its equivalent to your electrical appliances it is the most taxed parcel of goods in the history of man. Taxes that pay for non-productives like Hansen to sit and pontificate in their ivory towers. His solution to a non-problem? Tax that little parcel of matter even more and use that tax to redistribute income from the productive members of society. This solution will destroy the Western economies at the extent of those who won’t apply these additional taxes.
Smokey (11:05:39) :
“Can you suggest a way of conclusively proving AGW/GW [is not a] problem”? [I assume that is what you meant.]
That is an argumentum ad ignorantiam: The fallacy of assuming that something is true, simply because it hasn’t been proven false.
The problem here is that there can be no proof EITHER way for the reasons in my earlier post.
Proof would be great if it were possible. It is only possible waiting 20years (a random figure) and seeing what happens if:
1 We do nothing. This, best case leads to fuel shortage (fossil fuel will run out some day) and worst case to a couple of deg C increase in temperature and fuel shortage.
2 Assume AGW is a fact. Worst case it is wrong and £1Gs will have been spent needlessly and the future will still have portable power. Best case temperature stabilises and the future will still have portable power.
To take option 1 you have to be VERY sure that AGW is wrong. This being the case you must have evidence the AGW is wrong (and usefully that fossil fuels are an infinte resource). It would be good if you could impart this evidence and gain a few converts, please.
“…all of us will be in deep do-do.”
Obviously, Jimbo doesn’t know “doo-doo.”
There’s some interesting stuff there, once you get past the argumentem ad caligam. But Jimbo assumes that there are still people who care what he says, other than a few pimply PhD’s in Birkenstocks. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Demorats have a lock on Congress; they have what they want. Jimbo has served his purpose; now it’s time to move on with the leftist agenda, full speed ahead, “Science” be damned. “The Revolution has no need for savants.”
Sorry Jim.
As a lot of people reading this website know, Hansen got his CO2 ideas by studying Venus and assuming Venus was a “twin” of the Earth and it was CO2 that caused “runaway greenhouse warming” on Venus.
These ideas of planetary origin and development have been almost entirely disproven (there will always be uncertainty). Yet, Hansen bores on.
Hansen is right about Cap & Trade — it’s a lobbyists dream for guaranteed life-time employment and politician financing. None of that actually generates weath — it’s completely redistributive. Corruption and cynicism would permeate the whole body politic, everybody from the shoeshine boy up would know the fix is in.
(The body politic could lose faith in the power of representative democracy in a republican form of government — the rise of the dictaor would be a real possibility, or a sham “democracy”, in name only, could develop, I don’t say this lightly.)
But Hansen is wrong about the science, and as stated his ideas arose from out-of-this-world!
No Cap & Trade, no carbon tax, the market and technological advance will solve a lot of the efficiency concerns.
Someone already stated it: This is about a command economy that will benefit the few at the expense of the many. This is a threat to the middle-class, not just in America, but all over the world.
Just say “NO” loud and clear and repeatedly, preferably right into the ear of your elected representative.
Pierre Gosselin (11:01:34),
The Germans are discussing authoritarian regimes again? How’d that work out last time?
Apropos of the “need” for something to be done about carbon dioxide, with timely papers coming out to scare law makers and enflame the public, I have another suspicion. We’ve had questionable alterations of data, fraudulent science and any number of interferences in the real picture that seem to be picking up steam. In examining the NSIDC and Cryosphere today, and the delay in publishing the latest world glacier monitoring (only the 2005 report has been released), I get the feeling that two things are happening in the AGW camp. First, things are being delayed so that the US Gov can get its CO2 act passed without distractions of a colder planet, and second, in following the progress of freeze -up it seems that as the graphs tantalizingly approach the 1979 – 200 mean, they start to swing asymptotically. Can some one who follows the raw data for such developments comment on this question: How much leeway (error leeway) can a graphmaker use to minimize growth in ice extent, speed up melt rate, etc. I am sure that an AGWer would tend to curb any progress of a metric toward a cooler earth. More directly on topic, who would have guessed that Dr Hansen would be the champion to come in to dismantle cap and trade! I know he wants much more, but it would take a decade for an alternative like he suggests and a few more cool years should win the day
Smokey, Pierre Gosselin Did you know this Hansen?:
http://www.balsi.de/Homepage-Generale/Waffen-SS/Hansen-Peter.htm
bill,
AGW is completely wrong. AGW is as wrong as the people who beleive Area 51 houses alien technology.
Bill
Absolutely incorrect. To introduce changes you have to show beyond all reasonable doubt (quantifiable proof) that the changes are necessary. There would appear to be far more doubt than certainty over AGW at the moment.
I’ll re-state what I’ve said previously. You can’t trust the judgment of a man with a combover.
http://www.iceagenow.com/Back_to_horse_and_buggy_days-without_the_horse.htm
In this link, it looks like America’s economy and family finances will be destroyed if cap and trade passes.
Pick which country the U.S will be like if this passes and is enforced, Somalia, Haiti, or Zimbabwe?
“648 pages are not needed to define a carbon fee. It is a single number that would be ratcheted upward over time. It would cover all three fossil fuels at their source: the mine or port of entry. Consumers do not directly pay any tax, but the fee’s effect permeates everything from the price of fuel to the price of food (especially if it is imported from halfway around the world).”
Ignoring that there are more than three fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas, tar sands, oil shales, methane clathrates) and assuming he’s just simplifying by combining some of them…
He is correct when he says “the fee’s effect permeates everything”.
Energy is a core input to prices. Energy, labor, capital, materials. That’s the core set of productivity inputs.
But energy is an input to materials costs and energy can substitute for labor via machines so it diminishes labor costs… And there is a virtuous feedback of lower energy and capital costs decreasing energy costs leading to even lower costs… The drill rigs of today raise more oil at less cost per unit of depth than ever before. Ditto coal mines where picks and shovels have given way to monster efficient machines due in part to: lower coal costs.
There is even a case that lower energy costs lowers the cost of capital since capital is the accumulated excess of productivity over costs (so lower costs for labor, materials, and energy manifest are more capital accumulation – both physical capital in buildings and machines and financial capital as gold, money, etc. and the increased supply of capital lowers it’s price / cost).
So a very very key metric for economic advance is the lowering of the costs of energy supplies and their increasing use to advance the society at large. I can not emphasize this enough. Re-read it twice…
That is why, after the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970’s we sent a boat load of economists over to OPEC to ‘splain to them that they could not significantly raise the price of oil in real terms over any long period of time, all they could do was ignite an inflationary spiral that would erase the value of their accumulated dollars. Which is more or less what happened. (Oil was $5 / bbl and a car cost about $4,000. Now oil is $50 / bbl and a car is about $40,000. Minimum wage was about 80 cents to a buck and now it’s about $10 ( $8 something to start, $10/hr in California after some small time). Bread was 35 to 40 cents now it’s about $3.50 to $4 a loaf. etc.)
So any increase in energy costs is doomed to fail for the same reason and in the same way. The laws of Economics are no more negotiable than the value of Pi or the laws of physics but politicians and physicists don’t think so. So they keep making silly laws to try to ‘control the economics’ and all they do is distort the impact on people (usually in a bad way) and break things. And they either never learn or they are cynically exploiting the side effects. (For a short period of time they can cream off some of the money that would have gone to the energy producer, via the tax, until a new equilibrium is reached).
Despite all the raises in the minimum wage, it still buys about 4 to 5 gallons of gas for an hour of work. Raise gas to $10 / gallon and the minimum wage will need to rise to about $40 to $50 an hour or there will be an imbalance. You can have that imbalance for a little while ( 5 years to a decade maybe) but eventually it closes. That is why OPEC will spike the price up for a year or two, then back it off again. To get what “juice” they can while avoiding the inflation to the extent they can (and killing off the competition that puts a lid on the max they can charge in the long run).
So if Carbon Cap & Tirade passes, you can count on the costs of everything to rise, for the wage rate to rise starting about 2 years later (so you get squashed for 2 years…) and for the unit of currency it’s priced in (dollars) to degrade in value shortly thereafter. There is a net loss to the economy during this transition time due to the dislocations and inefficiencies the broken price signals send, but eventually it works out.
FWIW, the way to handle this for your personal economics is fairly simple:
Invest in tangibles (homes, metals, land, antiques, etc.) especially if you can get a mortgage denominated in those shrinking dollars. Now would be a good time with interest rates spectacularly low… Refinance now.
Invest in other countries with other currencies and no C&T: Brazil, China, India, the whole “emerging market” that gets a free ride.
Do Not own Treasuries or Muni Bonds (or any other long term U.S. Dollar denominated debt). 1 to 3 year maximum maturity for any bonds. Also, since bond FUNDS never mature they can suffer a permanent loss of value. A 2 year bond can be held to maturity if the price drops and you get the principal back. A 2 year bond fund will be selling those bonds before maturity to meet redemptions and you will never recover that loss of principal value. So if you must hold bonds, do it as real discrete bonds, not as a bond fund (which is more nearly a raw bet on the direction of inflation and interest rates than a real bond…). Oh, and TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) have a nice feature where they adjust for inflation (so to the extent you can trust the government rubber ruler measure of inflation, you get a bit more protection). If you must own U.S. debt (bonds) make it TIPS.
Be skeptical of corporate stock priced in the inflating currency or domiciled in the inflating country. During times of inflation, companies have a hard time making money and stock markets often do poorly. You can find winners, but it’s harder. At inflation less than 4% it’s OK, over 8% it’s not going to happen. In between, it’s work…
Mining companies often do well, especially precious metals miners. There can be an initial boom in things like REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts) and house building stocks due to the inflating value of their assets, but eventually this stagnates in real terms, then the economic realities cause sales to fall off…
Do not hold cash positions in the inflating currencies. Move it to a metals fund or a stable currency. (One mouse click away these days… FXF and FXY have traditionally been stable currencies – Swiss Franc and Japanese Yen and even FXS the Swedish Krona.)
NOTICE: Right NOW we are having a bit of a deflationary push as everyone tries to cash out at the same time and the recession is putting downward pressure on land and wage prices. This will end, but it will take a while (1 to 2 years max, IMHO). I would not go running into the inflation trade right NOW, but I would ease out of any long term bonds and certainly dump any long term bond funds. Then refinance the house (since the Fed will eventually raise rates and this is about as sweet a deal as you can imagine or will ever see in the next few decades…) Then start ‘watchful waiting’ for the inflation trade to begin. Ease into some real estate positions, add 10% gold and gold miners to the portfolio, etc. And even if you can’t leave the U.S.A., your money can. Invest is countries with a more sane economic policy.
In order to avoid this kind of excesses, a good idea would be outsourcing all research NASA needs to private enterprises and/or private universities.
If possible to privatize NASA itself (remember the X prize winners, how they managed to build a many thousands times cheaper spaceship).
bill (10:00:19) :
“Bill Illis (06:50:33) :
But where will this evidence come from.
You do not believe models
You do not believe temperature reconstructions
You do not believe recorded temperature
Proxies are poxy.
Glaciers – unbelievable
CO2 does no harm”
Maybe you haven’t been around long bill, but that is my speciality – presenting the actual evidence on these things. I don’t care what it shows. I just want the facts instead of rhetoric and exageration.
http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/2626/tempobsrvvsco2ct4.png
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/6594/modeleextramar09n.png
For example, in Hansen’s latest paper he just takes a paleo-CO2 estimate from 35 million years ago of 1,400 ppm and he just changes it to 450 ppm and then says disaster will happen at 450 ppm.
http://img172.imageshack.us/img172/2464/tempvsco267m.png
In his climate models, he is using a huge negative Aerosols estimate (to balance off the unrealistic GHG impacts) which he recently said were more-or-less just pulled out of a hat – and he was NOT kidding.
http://img58.imageshack.us/img58/855/modelaerosolsforcingp.png
bill (11:25:29) :
Proof would be great if it were possible. It is only possible waiting 20years (a random figure) and seeing what happens if:
1 We do nothing. This, best case leads to fuel shortage (fossil fuel will run out some day) and worst case to a couple of deg C increase in temperature and fuel shortage.
2 Assume AGW is a fact. Worst case it is wrong and £1Gs will have been spent needlessly and the future will still have portable power. Best case temperature stabilises and the future will still have portable power.
27 years of failure is certainly long enough to wait.
1. There is no fossil fuel shortage – with the Bakken Oil Shale the US has at least 41 years of oil even at the currently projected increases in consumption.
2. Extorting money from people and then claiming you’ve done something big for them is fraud and robbery combined.
3. When the models have a better granularity than 100 Km grids, and the effects of vulcanism, and other inconvenient parameters are accurately included, and with these conditions paleomodels can be run, and if they then show any sort of predictive capability, maybe then there will be a basis for discussion. As of right now, there isn’t.
bill (11:25:29),
Again, you want skeptics to prove a negative. Science doesn’t work that way. Politics maybe, but not science.
It’s hard following your train of thought because you mix in different points. But I’ll try:
1. The free market will take care of declining fossil fuel availability through the price mechanism. There is no problem. When the price is high enough, alternatives will become competitive. The Luddites didn’t understand this, either. To repeat: there is no problem. None.
2. I don’t assume that AGW is a fact. The amount of CO2 emitted by the planet is many, many, many times greater than the relatively tiny amount produced by human activity. Arm-waving about “carbon” won’t change that fact.
I understand that in theory increases in carbon dioxide may raise the planet’s temperature, and I accept that. The question is: how much?
Real world, empirical evidence shows that CO2 forcing is wildly overestimated. Bill Illis is probably in the ball park [and note that much of the warming has already occurred]. Any putative forcing by CO2 is easily overcome by many other factors. That indicates that CO2 is a weak sister compared with other climate forcings. In other words, you’re worrying about something that is demonstrably insignificant.
Your last paragraph is again contrary to the Scientific Method [“…you must have evidence the AGW is wrong”]. No, bill. You must provide real evidence that AGW will cause the runaway global warming that you allege. You could allege that at noon tomorrow monkeys will fly out your butt unless I give you a thousand dollars today. You can allege anything. But without solid evidence, it’s just baseless speculation.
It is not the job of skeptics to prove anything that you feel like alleging is wrong. It is your job to provide falsifiable evidence that supports your AGW hypothesis. [That’s why AGW proponents hide out from debate, BTW.]
Since you lack empirical evidence to support CO2 = AGW, you always try to shift the burden onto skeptics, who are only saying: “Prove it. Or at least provide strong, empirical evidence that supports your hypothesis.”
We’re still waiting.
Ray (12:05:59) :
Or maybe also due to methane buildup.