Tom Nelson makes me laugh

Don’t forget the musical accompaniment!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061203453.html
I don’t know – this pap says we can’t afffect the “warming” that has already occurred…..what am I to think? LOL
Hunter -great video!

Imagine…
(Warning… this video contains the “D” word.)

hmmm interesting correlation.

I’m sure they’ll have to ‘adjust’ the number of carbon offsets sold
Or find the right proxy.
How about the number of vehicles sporting ‘This vehicle is carbon neutral’, or similar, stickers.
That will conclusively show an expotential rise in the number of offsets sold.
Multiplying by the IQ of the driver will make doubly sure they have the right proxy.

Mike Bryant,
Abso-friggin-lutely hilarious video.
M4GW is a great group, and I hope to hear more from them.

To my feeble mind Carbon Offsets are a wonderful invention and marketing opportunity.
When you close down a plant you can sell the carbon offsets.
When you go broke you can sell the carbon offsets
When you get a permit to build a plant and don’t you can sell the carbon offsets
Your country can go broke and the politicians can sell the carbon offsets, several times if they wish.
Check how many times the Ukraine has sold carbon offsets.
Carbon offsets are the highest quality marketing opportunity.
– They never existed!
– They have no identification marks!
– They have no serial number!
– They can be sold many times!
– And most important – There is no reputable regulator!!!!!
– Asset Backed Paper is a better investment opportunity. (If
you want to get some money back)
PSST – You wanna buy some carbon offsets???? I’m gonna someday plant an acre of trees and I’ll sell you the carbon offsets now real cheap.

Tom in Texas,
The climate treaty is pointless because there is no problem for it to save us from.
Imagine being rail roaded into a dangerous brain surgery for a cancer that was not there. And then you are told that the surgery was not radical enough to help.

Tom in Texas (20:32:53) “Gordon Ford, CARBON FUTURES”. And there you have the reason that no one is going to stop the Cap & Trade and carbon offset economy. It is too juicy a plum, an avalanche of “green ” as it were. No self respecting business man would pass on an opportunity to forge down this path to that cash cow (which does not even require an exchange of goods for that cash), which I believe is the point Gordon Ford was making. Makes me wonder if the modern day hippies realize they are responsible for lining the pockets of businessmen who claim to be able to fix this “climate problem”. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that a business should be profitable and capitalism is great and all, but paying money for what amounts to nothing (as nothing is returned other than the promise that some shlub is “going to plant some trees somewhere” . Then those trees will uptake C02 and produce oxygen over the lifetime of that tree ( that is what they tell you they are doing). The dollar signs are flashing in the eyes of the business juggernaut, and it seems unstoppable at this point. Poor maligned carbon (dioxide). Framed and sentenced to life for a crime it did not commit,…………

Tom in Texas
I’m afraid there will be no changing of minds in Copenhagen even if we could skate across the Atlantic to attend. These guys are real upset about the horrifically cold winters lately and they don’t like being cornered. They are staring out at a forest of accusatory immobile windmills just offshore and not far away to the north of them there were a brace of Nobel prizes handed out. I understand that the prizes were left over from the bunch printed up for Arafat, Peres and Rabin for bringing peace to the Middle East and for Koffi Annan for preciding over the Rawandan Massacre and “Iraq Oil for Graft Program” run by his son, and there is no way to back out gracefully. I can’t see any other way out for them but to put together a mean wrathful document. Like the Global Warming, its too late to do anything to cool them off now.

I believe I have discovered a way to make carbon sequestration plausible and save the economy at the same time. It’s simple really. Every man, woman and child in the world buys a 12 pack of Coke and buries it in the backyard. Think of the impact of 96 billion cans of Coke being sequestered underground. Not only that, but at, let’s say, 33 cents a can, that’s a whopping $32 billion in incremental sales for the Coca Cola Company. Think of the jobs! And gosh knows it’s available. If there’s any country outside of North Korea that doesn’t have Coke I’d be stunned. OK, maybe everybody can’t afford it – those of us lucky enough to have luxury of feeling guilty can buy two 12 packs. A sure ticket to heaven.
The real genius of course is that when the globe cools everyone can go out to the background, pop open a now frosty one, and help to warm the planet with all that buried CO2. It works, or doesn’t, both ways. Is next year’s Noble prize still available?
[REPLY – Bury the Pepsi instead and I’m sold. ~ Evan]

Dear Anthony, I kow this is O/T but are you aware of the latest book from New Zealand titled
AIR CON The seriously inconvenient truth about global warming by Ian Wishart.
I have just finished reading it and it’s the best reference to climate realism I have come across.
WUWT and CLIMATE AUDIT are mentioned frequently and a number of your surface station photos are shown.
If I had the money, I would send a copy of this to each of your congressmen to put a stop to this nonsense.
The publishers are “Howl at the Moon Publishing Ltd” and their Email address is
editorial@investigatemagazine.com
Kind Regards
Dennis George
REPLY: Haven’t seen it yet. – Anthony

These internet trends are extremely important as they reflect reality.
Here is the fractions of US population who believes that global warming is mainly due to human activities:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/usgraf.gif
(pct jan 2008 from Gallup, the rest from Rassmussen)
Giss global temperatures has since 2002 got very much hotter than RSS (and UAH).
In this period the trend is 0,2Kelvin / decade.
This is a huge number compared to the global warming of the 20´th century, 0,6K.
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/gisshotterthanrss.gif

Mark Miller,
Who cares where the carbon came from, if the AGW models about what it is doing are wrong?
AGW is not about CO2. AGW is about using CO2 to impose changes on society.
We had an experience with what happens when a social movement highjacks science and gets a lot popular support.
It is called ‘eugenics’
Eugenics turned out really, really badly.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Q8bTWCJMqAQC&pg=PT347&lpg=PT347&dq=eugenics+catastrophe&source=bl&ots=fcPdGnXi2N&sig=MFJgBRMreHIWRIpTrEChdH79SJ8&hl=en&ei=dvE0StjhMojwMr_-iZsK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2

chip (22:50:54) :
The mind boggles at the franchise opportunities. You have my vote for a WUWT honorary MBA.

You know, the more I read, the better this carbon offset biz sounds! To think I’ve been pulling seedlings out of the yard, and I can now throw em in a pot, and sell them off for Millions! The value of pine nuts is gonna skyrocket!

Carbon offsets are for wimps. I am issuing guaranteed certificates good for one degree of global cooling per 100 years for a paltry $10,000. Think of it for a $100 a year you can reduce the worlds temperature. For less than $2 a week you can have the peace of mind of knowing that you have done your bit to save the world without any risk. If after a 100 years the global temperature has not decreased acrording to my scientific mathematical model all you have to do is to present your certificate in person to our head office and we will give you a 100% refund
Sign up now

Thanks for the response about my carbon sequestration plan. Before I substitute Pepsi for Coke, though, I need to ask the Obama administration which brand they want to favor with a subsidy. I’ll bury whichever one nets me the most from the gov. I like this idea – it just seems to be getting better and better.

I may be letting my desperation for any glimpse of light at the end of this tunnel lead me to speculate beyond the evidence, but there may be signs of positive developments in this Google trends search. If you look at the list of the top ten cities in the world for Google hits on” WUWT”, http://www.google.com/trends?q=+%22carbon+offsets%22%2C+%22watts+up+with+that%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1,
the second city on the list is Washington, D.C.. This could hopefully indicate that, even inside the Beltway, people are finally awakening to the notion that inflicting grievous harm on the economies of America and the world in response to unsupported speculation is not the political win-win situation they’ve envisioned. Unfortunately, in the mode of every silver lining come wrapped in a black cloud, on the top ten list for Google hits for “carbon offsets” D.C. comes in first.

hunter:
The reason I asked about the C-14/C-12,C-13 ratio is my understanding has been that CO2 from industrial sources has been so tiny as to be background noise, about 5% of the 383ppm CO2 concentration. If as this “professor” (that’s still my operating assumption) said this ratio shows that the CO2 increase we’ve seen is due (perhaps solely–he suggests that) to industrial activity, then that changes what I thought I knew about this aspect of the debate, and it might change my POV on the AGW issue. For if the CO2 increase was solely due to industry then that means the amount of it could continue increasing ever upward, and we could project that while CO2 hasn’t had an effect on climate in the past, it would in the future with higher and higher concentrations. I was just trying to clear that up for myself.
The information I had initially indicated that natural variability was the controlling factor, and if that’s the case then trying to control it ourselves is futile.
I’m always willing to question what I know if I’m given good reason to do that. If this information about carbon dating turns out to be inconsequential, then that’s another idea on the trash heap as far as I’m concerned.
Alan F:
I’m not sure if you were referring to what I said, but I was the one who used the term “believe”, not the person I was talking about. He is quite convinced he has the evidence to back up what he says, though getting him to talk about the evidence has been like pulling teeth.

Air Con at Amazon:
Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming

Robert Austin:
I have heard of this logarithmic temperature response to increased CO2. Bob Carter talked about it, and he said “This is not controversial”. Your factoid about there being vastly more carbon held in sedimentary rocks than in fossil fuel reserves does help me put this in perspective. The alarmists keep talking about the “limited carrying capacity” (that’s my term) of various carbon sinks.
The reason I got into this at all was over a 5% figure I used for industrial contribution to the CO2 in the atmosphere. I remember hearing at least one non-alarmist climatologist giving a figure like this.
I tried getting this “professor” (I’m assuming) to look at contrary evidence, such as the Medieval warm period, or the temperature decline from the 1940s to the 1970s (while CO2 concentration was rising), and he ignored it every time. He kept going back to a “time correlation” between the rise in non-radioactive CO2 to the rise in temperature, as if that proved the whole thing. He used terms like “scientifically proven” and “fact” for this.
At first he didn’t even talk about the “carbon dating” technique. He just said it was “reasonable” to link the two (rise in CO2 with temperature), and that there was a 21% increase in CO2 from the 19th century up to the present day, and that it was totally attributable to industrialization. I said that statement was just as valid as the Aztecs saying that the Sun rose because they made a human sacrifice to it every day. I thought the analogy was very apt–correlation with human action. It’s scary to think that there might be scientists who think like this. My science teachers in school taught us to be wary of drawing conclusions from correlations. Apparently he didn’t get that.
Anyway, the thing about “carbon dating” proving what he was talking about grabbed my attention, because I had never heard of it before. After getting some clarification on here I think he was confused about the terminology. I was looking at information on carbon-14 measurement (which is what one would naturally look for when looking up “carbon dating”) when I should’ve been looking at the ratio between carbon-12 and 13. I did find an article on “Real Climate” that talks about this ratio (at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87). This may have been where he got his information. It draws the same conclusion about time correlation, and references some (offline) journal articles that talk about the data.
Thanks to all. I got a lot more helpful and accurate information from you guys than I did from the “professor”.

Well there is more to C14 abundance than just fossil fuel burning. It so happens that C14 is manufatured in the first place by cosmic rays, out of nitrogen. It used to be assumed that c14 production in the atmosphere was absolutely constant. Thatw as the whole basis for radio-carbon dating.
Well the bristlecne pines of eastern California proved that C14 production is anything but constant; and world histories were rewritten as a result of that re-calibration of the C14 time scale.
So c14 variations could be nothing more than the now known wide variation in cosmic ray flux on earth.
Also the C12/C13 isotope mix doesn’t prove that all the increase in atmospheric CO2 is from fossil fuel burning. ALL that it shows is that a newer source of carbon, that may have an anomalous C13/C12 ratio, is being introduced into the atmosphere. There’s no way to prove that any specific C12 or C13 molecule came from a fossil fuel or from soem other source.
If we started burning a new source of fossil fuel that contained 5% of Argon, and we just vented the argon, then the atmospheric argon abundance would increase; which doesn’t prove that all of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere comes from our new fossil fuel/argon source; just that we are burning some of it.
Besides fossil fuels are supposed to be old plants aren’t they; so why would they have a carbon signature that is different from modern wood or other natural sources of carbon.
Isotope ratios get a lot more hype than they deserve. The isotope carbon ratio in carbonate rocks should reflect what was in ancient oceans and their ancient aquatic life forms.
Which does not mean that I don’t accept that human use of fossil fuels may be increasing atmospheric CO2; but by how much compared to other sources like the mediaeval warming period 800 years ago.
All of which is irrelevent anyway, because CO2 from whatever source has very little to do with the climate of the earth. so who cares where it comes from.
CO2 sequestration is also oxygen sequestration.
Besides anew study shows that the earth is slowly running out of cO2, and eventually the CO2 in the atmosphere is going to be so low, that plants and eventually all life on earth will simply sufficate. They are proposing to reduce the earth’s atmospheric pressure to create a higher altitude atmosphere in which we apparently can get by with less CO2.
This new CO2 suffocation disaster, will hit the planet between 100 million and 1 billion years from now. So we better get ready for living with a lower atmospheric pressure.
George

George:
I read the Real Climate article and I was disappointed, because I thought of the same thing you did: How can one say that the lower C-13/C-12 ratio can be isolated to the burning of fossil fuels, except by the coincidence of timing as they claim? I thought they were going to include C-14 in the analysis, but they didn’t really.
The way I’ve picked out good scientific theories in the past is if the scientists presenting them can connect the dots: “A leads to B leads to C”. They can show the chain of cause and effect, either based on known phenomena or measurements. I’ve never seen this with the AGW crowd. What I’ve proposed to them is if they really want to prove their point they should measure all of the outputs both man-made and natural. This could be done in a statistically valid way since measuring every single source would be next to impossible. With the man-made sources they could look at inputs of fossil fuels (they could look at historical company records) and calculate outputs of CO2. They could check the output calculations against the actual measurement of CO2 to see if they’re conception of outputs is good. They could look at the Earth as a giant operating system, and take that sort of analytical approach to it, accounting for and isolating specific carbon categories. I agree it would be complex, maybe too complex for us humans to analyze. Maybe computers could help, but not in the way they’ve been used, which is just fooling ourselves. If and when they got this right then they could say that X% is man-made, and Y% is natural. By only looking at the C-13/C-12 ratios it seems to me they’re only looking at effects that could be caused by a number of factors, but they assume (again) that it must only come from one source. I wouldn’t know unless I actually look at the papers. Some of the science may be good in terms of adding some knowledge to what we know, but the conclusion sounds suspicious.
I’ve run into the same thing you’ve talked about that “there is no unique signature for industrial carbon” when talking to others who believe in AGW. Several years ago I ran into this curious argument about how ethanol was “carbon-neutral”, which has turned out to be the biggest joke, because it’s anything but, due to the amount of energy that goes into corn ethanol production. But before the ethanol subsidies went into place I finally asked these people, “Why is ethanol more carbon-neutral than oil? Plants can’t tell the difference between carbon that comes from ethanol and what comes from fossil fuels.” I didn’t get an answer. It all turned out to be marketing hype.