Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement, calling it a ‘corrupt social phenomenon’.
He writes this in an essay on science trust issues plus adds this powerful closing passage about climate science:
And there is a thorough critique of the science as band wagon trumpeting and interested self-deception [4]. Climategate only confirms what should be obvious to any practicing scientist: That science is a mafia when it’s not simply a sleeping pill.
Now he thinks that fossil fuel burning isn’t a problem of significance based on the scale. Excerpts below.
Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?
by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.
After all, the Earth is a planet. Is even the presence of humans significant on the rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?
We certainly make every effort to see ourselves as significant on this spinning ball in space. We like to point out that the lights from our cities can be seen from our extra-atmospheric “spaceships” at night and that we have deforested continents and reduced the populations of large wild mammals and of fishes but is all this really significant in the planetary web known as the biosphere?
INSIGNIFICANCE OF FOSSIL FUEL BURNING ENERGY RELEASE
The present (2010) historic maximum of anthropogenic (caused by humans) fossil fuel burning is only 8% or so of global primary production (GPP) (both expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y). GPP is the rate at which new biomass (living matter) is produced on the whole planet. And of course all biomass can in principle be considered fuel that could be burned with oxygen (O2) to produce CO2 gas, H2O water, energy, and an ash residue.
This shows the extent to which anthropogenic energy production from fossil fuel burning is small in comparison to the sun’s energy delivery to Earth, since biomass primary production results from the sun’s energy via photosynthesis.
…
In summary, the total amount of post-industrial fossil fuel burned to date (and expressed as kilograms of carbon) represents less than 1% of the global bio-available carbon pools.
More importantly, bio-available carbon is a minor constituent of the Earth’s surface environment and one that is readily buffered and exchanged between compartments without significant consequences to the diversity and quantity of life on the planet. The known history of life on Earth (over the last billions of years) is unambiguous on this point.
…
This ocean acidification side show on the global warming science bandwagon, involving major nation research centers and international collaborations, is interesting to compare with the 1970s-1980s hoax of boreal forest lake acidification. [1][2]
More importantly, scientists know virtually nothing about the dynamic carbon exchange fluxes that occur on all the relevant time and lengths scales to say anything definitive about how atmospheric CO2 arises and is exchanged in interaction with the planet’s ecological systems. We are barely at the point of being able to ask intelligent questions.
…
For left progressives to collaborate with First World governments that practice global extortion and geopolitical wars in order to pass carbon schemes to undemocratically manage and control the developments of non-First-World communities and sovereign states is obscene, racist, and cruelly cynical.
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Here’s a video interview:
@mkelly
Perhaps you missed something. In “Deteriorata” National Lampoon was lampooning “Desiderata”.
Here is Desiderata
http://plodplod.blogspot.com/2006/07/desiderata.html
And then Deteriorata
http://plodplod.blogspot.com/2006/07/deteriorata.html
I enjoy a good parody and found Deteriorata quite humorous and not at all misanthropic. Cynical, yes, but not misanthropic.
@jim G:
‘The concept that the planet is totally changed by man is an east and west coast idea coming from big city folks who have never been out much. People are very much concentrated in cities in most of the world. And that is in itself part of the problem as thier thought processes are dependency oriented.’
Quite. The planet is a lot bigger than people who live in crowded hot cities seem to imagine. When you travel by air, you easily forget how much of the earth’s surface you’ve crossed in a relatively short time. Ask a Roman legionary, marching from Britain to Syria at maybe 15 miles a day, how big the planet is; or a 17th century sailor heading to India from Europe.
Amino Acids,
You made one statement which doesn’t clarify which of my statements you feel needs proving. 🙂
To increase signal-to-noise, it’s probably best to just ask a question directly and/or provide counter-evidence, if applicable.
-bbt
“…you still have to face the fundamental physics which says, if that past time in history had as much GHGs as Today, it would have been warmer than it was… The theory of AGW doesnt strictly preclude the existence of warmer periods in the past. What it says is that the current warming we see is best explained by increased GHGs. ” -Steve Mosher
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So what you’re saying is that we need to emit more CO2 in order to avoid the next ice-age.
Is the Earth sensitive to CO2 in the atmosphere?
Arrhenius estimated that a halving of CO2 would decrease temperatures by 4-5°C and a doubling of CO2 would cause a temperature rise of 5-6°C. In his 1906 publication, Arrhenius adjusted the value downwards to 1.6°C (including water vapor feedback: 2.1°C). Recent estimates from IPCC (2007) say this value (the Climate Sensitivity) is likely to be between 2 and 4.5°C. But Sherwood Idso in 1998 calculated the Climate Sensitivity to be 0.4°C, and more recently Richard Lindzen at 0.5°C.
Is there a positive feedback on H2O from CO2 or a negative feedback?
According to many climatologists and the IPCC climate models, there is a positive feedback action amplifying the CO2 effect to be much more potent, but this theoretical effect has not been actually measured in practice.
His cost for speaking up!
[mod note – perhaps this would be better under Tips & Notes ~ac]
To what significance is Human fossil fuel burning to the warming of the globe?
If you were to drop a lit match in a 1 acre field that is already on 1/2 on fire, well, there you go.
It’s all your fault.
I have the proof right here. Apparently, Hitler, Stalin and Mao weren’t efficient enough exterminators –
http://www.prisonplanet.com/global-warming-alarmist-calls-for-eco-gulags-to-re-educate-climate-deniers.html
wolfwalker says:
September 20, 2010 at 9:29 am
That’s enough right there to put him firmly in the “nutcase” category. Humans have devastated the natural order of things over most of the globe.
Where does all of this self-hatred come from? Why is every effect we have on the environment a negative, to be avoided?
60 million or so buffalo once roamed across this country, do you really think they didn’t mess some stuff up? I’ve even heard it argued that the buffalo and the prairie are a chicken and egg argument. So, buffalo helped sculpt our landscape.
How many nature programs have we seen where there’s a beautiful sequestered island, usually up north, surrounded by sea-each year it’s COVERED in birds, walrus’, or some other animal. They spend months there, defecating on this beautiful island. Ever seen what a hippo does in his water home after eating his fill on-shore? But, no one complains about any of this, why it’s ‘Mother Nature at work’, the very definition of beauty!
Dr. Rancourt mentioned ants. They, along with earthworms and a variety of other critters have transformed the world! How about grass, a fairly recent addition to planet Earth? How many animals have come to rely on it? Haven’t these lowly plants and animals transformed our world?
Of course we change the world! We bring order to it! Sometimes we make messes, but we are learning to clean them up.
Give us a break while we grow up, we’re trying.
Jim G wrote: “The concept that the planet is totally changed by man is an east and west coast idea coming from big city folks who have never been out much. People are very much concentrated in cities in most of the world.”
Today, yes. Ten thousand years ago, no.
One of the ways in which modern humans’ arrogance manifests itself is in thinking that “primitive” means “inconsequential.” Stephen Budiansky wrote a book about this a few years back, Nature’s Keepers, documenting some of the ways in which even primitive humans can and do manipulate their environment in massive ways. For example:
* Whenever humans move into an area for the first time, they permanently alter local flora and fauna by their activities. It’s generally accepted that humans played some role in the extermination of several regions’ megafaunas over the last 50,000 years, more or less — all through the Americas, Australia, New Zealand…
* The Serengeti of modern legend, with its fantastic show of wild ruminants and the predators that prey on them, is a direct result of human activity. For centuries the local people routinely burned the plains to stop natural succession and provide good grazing for their herds of cattle. In the late 1800s, epidemics devastated the natives, and soon they and their cattle and their fires were largely gone. The populations of wild ruminants exploded, as did their predators. That’s how we got the golden age of African big game hunting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
* North American Amerinds also used large-scale burns as a method of controlling vegetation. It’s now known that much of the ‘untouched wilderness’ that white American settlers found as they moved west across North America was highly unnatural, a result of Amerind land management practices followed by distorted succession when the Amerinds vanished and the areas went wild again. Much of the great American prairie of the Great Plains, grasslands stretching as far as the eye can see, was entirely artificial. When the fires stopped, the grass retreated and the trees and brush moved back in.
* In northwestern Europe, humans cleared old-growth forest from huge tracts of land, tens of thousands of acres, in a few decades, and replaced it with open land suitable for grazing cattle and sheep. The loss of so much forest seems to have had noticeable long-term effects on regional climate and wildlife.
* Every time humans move into a previously-uninhabited region, they bring invasive species with them — animals, plants, microbes. These invaders permanently alter the local ecosystems.
* As Yellowstone Park’s inhabitants found to their sorrow, even attempts to protect the land from human disruption typically lead to greater disruption, as in the “fight every fire” doctrine of the National Park Service which led directly to the catastrophic firestorm of 1988.
It’s true that, given enough time, an ecosystem will always rebuild itself. But what gets rebuilt is rarely if ever what was there before. Man’s fingerprints remain, even centuries later.
Northbound says:
September 20, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Reply;
Thanks very much for posting that video! This is exactly the same reasoning I have applied to my life long study of ALL things scientific as I came into contact with new ideas and data bases. It is not about what others think you might know by the BS you are able to put out!
Knowledge that encompasses many different fields of study to the depth you have been able to manage to investigate for your self, is much more valuable than opinions learned by wrote memory from single sources in an attempt to present a grade average for employment.
There are many overlapping disciplines that need to be understood well before you can see the option that incorporates all of the differences between them to understand the total complexity of most natural system problems.
Tis better IMHO to have a good grasp of everything I have come in contact with, and further researched from there out of interest, as often as is possible than to specialize in one concentrated area of a field, and become mired in inflexibility, that results in low creativity, boring routine workload, that ends up producing no new knowledge base.
Things that promote the progression from assimilating data, history, ongoing research, application of related solutions in related fields, into innovations that transform understanding by way of a break through, are more valuable to me than money, prestige, or “political” ideal-isms.
Seeking truth just for the sake of knowing what was not known before, to enable not just the increased depth of understanding in a field, but to form connections between seemingly isolated facts from separate areas of scientific endeavor, that increases the connectivity of the whole understanding of all of the natural world, to the point that relevance of my living my life is not wasted just eating and crapping.
To what end is it to spend all of my life learning, if what I learned is not left for others to absorb more easily, than for them to go through the same struggle I had to go through to learn it? Depth and breath of knowledge combined is more productive at being innovative, than just proficiency in a dead end job.
To the person bemoaning his 128 “IQ” test. Dr. Benjamin Fine’s 1976 Classic:
“The Stranglehold of IQ”, should nicely dismiss any worries about IQ.
“IQ” is quite as bogus as AWG.
Sorry, but learning this is very important. Remember the L.A. yacht yard worker called out to haul down the “upside down” flag on the yacht, which the club members who owned the yacht had put up not only upside down but also JAMMED a rather simple mechanism…the yacht belonged to the L.A. Mensa club. One of the methods of getting into the Mensa club: An IQ test of 130 or above. Sanford and Binet would be so proud!
wolfwalker says:
September 20, 2010 at 9:29 am
“Is even the presence of humans significant on the rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?
Hmm… Seems like he meant this as a serious question, not a rhetorical one.
That’s enough right there to put him firmly in the “nutcase” category. Humans have devastated the natural order of things over most of the globe. With the possible exception of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps, there isn’t a square mile of land that hasn’t been seriously affected by human action, going back at least two thousand years and probably more than fifteen thousand.”
The earth just “is.” It has no conciousness. Humans might might have an interest in not fowling their own nest, but the earth could be vaporized tomorrow and that would be just as much the natural order of things as was snowball earth or ‘tropical’ earth.
The “natural order of things ” is exactly the state of the earth at any given instant.
George E. Smith says:
September 20, 2010 at 3:01 pm
so does somebody have a citation to such data ?
George, I followed your link and found another link to the temperature graph.
Looks like it states “Paul Fomat Project”.
Nothing turned up on Google.
Having been a student at that University while Dr. Rancourt was there. I think it was perhaps necessary that WUWT mentions that he was a former professor because he was fired what has been termed by some as academic misconduct. He was not a climate researcher and perhaps people on here have the impression he was one. The Laboratory for Climatology and Paleoclimatology was operating at the University of Ottawa and he certainly did not participate.
Robert says:
September 20, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Having been a student at that University while Dr. Rancourt was there. I think it was perhaps necessary that WUWT mentions that he was a former professor because he was fired what has been termed by some as academic misconduct. He was not a climate researcher and perhaps people on here have the impression he was one. The Laboratory for Climatology and Paleoclimatology was operating at the University of Ottawa and he certainly did not participate.
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Your subject-changing and trying to focus “against the man” don’t need any further attention.
Good thing he can speak for himself on these interviews, and he does not need your commentary.
Res ipsa loquiter.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Northbound says:
September 20, 2010 at 4:52 pm
His cost for speaking up!
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Thank you for that. I watched the whole thing.
He is a brilliant, sharp individual who is punching his way out of the box.
May we have more!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
David, UK
thanks for the laugh about politicians!!
bbttxu says:
September 20, 2010 at 4:28 pm
You made one statement which doesn’t clarify which of my statements you feel needs proving.
That would be all of them.
RW
You, Ferdinand and the AGW all make the same mistake, ignoring the outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans since the end of the LIA! Ferdinand claims he knows how much is human induced because burning fossil fuels will increase the CO2-12 percentage. But he fails to see or to mentioned that the CO2 generated by ocean biomass and the CO2 outgassed by warming oceans will be almost entirely CO2-12, totally negating his analysis and conclusion. Mankind has only been producing measurable CO2 emissions for the past 60 years yet CO2 concentrations have been linearly increasing since the end of the LIA. But AGW proponents ignore data and facts that conflict with their theory and agenda!
AGW is a scam, only a fool or someone with a ulterior motive promote it!
Bill Yarber
Owen says:
September 20, 2010 at 3:49 pm
“The rise in atmospheric CO2 has closely tracked human combustion of fossil fuels, and it will continue to do so! Anyone want to challenge that notion?”
Uh, yeah. Firstly, the two don’t track very well in the lower frequency domain, beyond the qualitative observation that they are both increasing. A low order polynomial fit looks similar, but then, all low order polynomial fits of increasing series look similar, so this is one of those “who’da thunk it?” kind of observations.
At higher frequencies, there is virtually no overlap at all of the dominant harmonics. None at all. Try it sometime. None. At. All.
George E. Smith says: Sep 20, 2010, 3:31pm
– Perhaps you could elaborate on just exactly what YOU mean by :- ” CO2 has a residence time in the atmosphere of ~100 years.” {lots of valid calculations} … So that means the decay time constant … about 2 1/2 years. So I think the 100 year residence time is pure bunkum. … In any case; it is quite academic; because one CO2 molecule is about as good as another; and the same goes for H2O molecules … so the whole concept of “Residence time” is simply a red herring.
Hi George. I like your method for estimating residence time of an individual CO2 molecule. It is a sensible skeptical approach, yields the correct order of magnitude (see Segalstad/Essenhigh) and reveals some sloppiness in my post.
I should have used the term “effective residence time” in reference to “100 years”, meaning the estimated time it would take to permanently scrub the increase of one accumulated CO2 molecule from the atmosphere (rather than that of a specific CO2 molecule – the figure you have calculated.) That is, if the atmosphere contained X molecules of CO2 and one was added, how long would it take before the atmosphere was back to X molecules (not necessarily the same ones it started with). Please note that the “100 year” figure is unlikely to be very precise. (Effective residence time may act as a gauge as to how long we may be stuck with a problem should CO2 have the impact predicted by many climate scientists.)
As you also correctly point out, one molecule is as good as another. If each H2O molecule lost is reliably replaced by another it is irrelevant what the residence time is and in this sense it is indeed a “red herring” – in a steady state situation.
The thought experiment in response to edmh’s comment was to consider what would happen should all non-water-vapour GHGs be scrubbed from the atmosphere never to return. The key question is “would a lost H2O molecule reliably be replaced in such a situation?” If so there would be little change (as is edmh’s implicit assumption from my reading). If not, there would be an inexorable decline potentially leading to snowball earth – my expectation. (In such a case H2O residence time would influence the rate of decline but not the end result.)
Muddy enough?
Dr Dave said;
Man has a long history of inflating his importance and significance and ultimately, his influence on the planet.
This is what Hubert Lamb said in practically his last piece of writing before his death.
“The idea of climate change has at last taken on with the public after generations which assumed that climate could be taken as constant. But it is easy to notice the common assumption that mans science and modern industry and technology are now so powerful that any change of climate or the environnment must be due to us. It is good for us to be more alert and responsible in our treatment of the environment, but not to have a distorted view of our own importance. Above all, we need more knowledge, education and understanding in these matters.”
Hubert Lamb December 1994
I echo those sentiments-we need to take care of our planets environment but not to believe we can fundamentally and radically alter its climate.
tonyb
Bill Yarber says:
September 20, 2010 at 10:31 pm
RW
You, Ferdinand and the AGW all make the same mistake, ignoring the outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans since the end of the LIA!
It took an ice age and a 5-6 deg swing in temperatures to cause a 100 ppm change in CO2 levels. All the long term records, e.g. Armagh, CET, Uppsala, all show an increase in temperature since ~1800 of around 1 degree C. Since ~1850 CO2 concentration has increased by more than 100 ppm and shows no sign of slowing up.
Some truth at last! Dr Richard Lindzen said ‘I feel sure that humans have some effect on climate but I have been researching this for 40 years and as yet have found no proof that they do’ Dr. Lindzin is professor of paleoclimatology at MIT.