by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.
1. BASED ON PRELIMINARY DATA TO NOVEMBER 30, SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES AROUND AUSTRALIA WERE THE WARMEST ON RECORD LAST YEAR, AS WERE THOSE FOR THE PAST DECADE.
The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate-extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate-extremist groups maintain.
2. THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANISATION SAYS THE YEAR TO THE END OF OCTOBER WAS THE WARMEST SINCE INSTRUMENTAL CLIMATE RECORDS STARTED IN 1850 – 0.55 C° ABOVE THE 1961-90 AVERAGE OF 14 C°.
It is easy to cherry-pick periods of less than a calendar year and say they establish a new record. The cherry-picking of the first nine months of 2010 is particularly unacceptable, since that period was dominated by a substantial El Niño Southern Oscillation, a sudden alteration in the pattern of ocean currents worldwide that leads to warmer weather for several months all round the world. The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, which tends largely to reverse the effect of its preceding El Niño and make the world cooler. Indeed, the calendar year from January to December 2010, according to the reliable RSS and UAH satellite records, was not the warmest on record. Besides, what is important is how fast the world is warming. In fact, the rate of warming from 1975-2001, at 0.16 C° per decade, was the fastest rate to be sustained for more than a decade in the 160-year record, but exactly the same rate occurred from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, when we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.
3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.
After 300 years of global warming, during nearly all of which we could not on any view have influenced the climate to a measurable degree, it is scarcely surprising that recent decades will be warmer than earlier decades. That is what one would expect. If one has been climbing up a steep hill for a long time, one should not be surprised to find oneself higher up at the end of the climb than at the beginning.
4. THE WORLD IS NOT COOLER COMPARED TO 1998.
Actually, it is cooler. There was a remarkable spike in global temperatures in 1998, caused not by manmade “global warming” but by a Great El Niño event – an alteration in the pattern of ocean currents that begins in the equatorial eastern Pacific and spreads around the globe, lasting a few months. In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.
5. THE TRENDS HAPPEN TO FOLLOW CLOSELY THE PREDICTIONS OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS OF TEMPERATURE RISES RESULTING FROM INCREASED GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
In the 40 years since 1970, global temperatures have risen at a linear rate equivalent to around 1.3 C°/century. CO2 concentration is rising in a straight line at just 2 ppmv/year at present and, even if it were to accelerate to an exponential rate of increase, the corresponding temperature increase would be expected to rise merely in a straight line. On any view, 1.3 C° of further “global warming” this century would be harmless. The IPCC is predicting 3.4 C°, but since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001 global temperature has risen (taking the average of the two satellite datasets) at a rate equivalent to just 0.6 C°/century, rather less than the warming rate of the entire 20th century. In these numbers, there is nothing whatever to worry about – except the tendency of some journalists to conceal them.
6. MOST SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT DOUBLING THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS LIKELY TO LEAD TO WARMING OF 2-3 C°.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling. The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft,
or satellites. Also, the models predict that every Celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1-3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes.
7. WARMING OF 2-3 C° RISKS SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC DAMAGE.
Actually, the IPCC’s current thinking is that up to 2° of warming compared with the present would be harmless and even beneficial. Since far greater temperatures than this have been the rule on Earth for most of the past 600 million years, there is no sound scientific basis for the assumption that “significant environmental and economic damage” would result from so small an additional warming. However, significant economic damage is already resulting from the costly but pointlessly Canute-like attempts governments to try to make “global warming” go away.
8. GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS ROSE BY 27.5% FROM 1990-2009.
Since anthropogenic effects on the climate are net-zero except for CO2, we need only consider CO2 concentration, which was 353 parts per million by volume in 1990 and is 390 ppmv now, an increase not of 27.5% but of just 10.5%.
9. ARCTIC SEA ICE SHRANK TO ITS THIRD-LOWEST AREA IN THE SATELLITE RECORDS, OFFSET ONLY SLIGHTLY BY GROWTH IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE.
In fact, the global sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, because the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice. Indeed, when the summer extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high. The record low was widely reported; the corresponding record high was almost entirely unreported.
10. GLOBAL SNOW COVER IS FALLING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, a new record high for snow cover was set in the winter of 2008/2009, and there is some chance that a further record high will be set this year.
11. GLOBAL SEA LEVELS ARE RISING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, the rate of increase in sea level has not changed since satellites first began measuring it reliably in 1993. It is a dizzying 1 ft/century – not vastly greater than the 8 inches/century that had previously been inferred from tide-gauges. A recent paper has confirmed what marine biologists had long suspected: coral atolls simply grow to meet the light as the sea rises, and some of them have even gained land mass recently according to a
just-published scientific paper. Professor Niklas Mörner, who has been studying sea level for a third of a century, says it is physically impossible for sea level to rise at much above its present rate, and he expects 4-8 inches of sea level rise this century, if anything rather below the rate of increase in the last century. In the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age, sea level has risen at an average of 4 feet/century, though it is now rising much more slowly because very nearly all of the land-based ice that is at low enough latitudes and altitudes to melt has long since gone.
12. MUNICH RE SAYS 2010 SAW THE SECOND-HIGHEST NUMBER OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES SINCE 1980, 90% OF THEM WEATHER-RELATED.
There are really only three categories of insurable natural catastrophe – meteorological, epidemiological, and seismic (volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). Except during years when major seismic disasters occur (such as the tsunami caused by an earthquake in 2000), or when major pandemics kill large numbers at an unexpected rate (and that did not happen in 2010), weather-related natural disasters always account for getting on for 90% of all such disasters. Because the climate is a mathematically-chaotic object, the incidence of weather-related disasters is highly variable from year to year, and there is no good reason to attribute the major events of 2010 to manmade “global warming”.
13. THE TEMPERATURE OF 46.4 C° IN MELBOURNE ONE SATURDAY IN 2010 WAS MORE THAN 3 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS HIGHEST FOR FEBRUARY.
February is the height of summer in Melbourne. Since the planet has been warming for 300 years, it is not surprising to find high-temperature records being broken from time to time. However, some very spectacular cold-weather records were also broken both in early 2010, when all 49 contiguous United States were covered in snow for the first time since satellite monitoring began 30 years ago, and in December, which was the coldest final month of the year in central England since records began 352 years ago. However, neither the hot-weather nor the cold-weather extremes of 2010 have much to do with manmade “global warming”; like the heatwave of 2003 in Europe that is said to have killed 35,000 people, they are known to have been caused by an unusual pattern of what meteorologists call “blocking highs” – comparatively rare areas of stable high pressure that dislodge the jet-streams from their usual path and lock weather systems in place for days or sometimes even months at a time. No link has been established between the frequency, intensity, or duration of blocking highs and manmade “global warming”.
14. IN MOSCOW, JULY 2010 WAS MORE THAN 2 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS TEMPERATURE RECORD, AND TEMPERATURE ON 29 JULY WAS 38.2 C°.
And the lowest-ever temperatures have been measured in several British and US locations in the past 12 months. Cherry-picking individual extreme-weather events that point in one direction only, when there are thousands of such events that also point in another direction, is neither sound science nor sound journalism.
15. THE HEATWAVE AND FOREST FIRES IN CENTRAL RUSSIA KILLED AT LEAST 56,000, MAKING IT THE WORST NATURAL DISASTER IN RUSSIA’S HISTORY.
More cherry-picking, and the notion that the forest fires were the worst natural disaster in Russia’s history is questionable. Intense cold – such as when General January and General February defeated Corporal Hitler at the gates of Stalingrad in 1941 – has many times killed hundreds of thousands in Russia.
16. IN PAKISTAN, 1769 WERE KILLED IN THE COUNTRY’S WORST-EVER FLOODS.
In fact, the floods were not the worst ever: merely the worst since 1980. The region has long been prone to flooding, and has flooded catastrophically at infrequent intervals when a blocking high combined with unusually strong runoff of snow from the Himalayas swells the numerous rivers of the region (Punjab, or panj-aub, means “five rivers”). The flooding was not caused by manmade “global warming” but by a blocking high.
17. THE HURRICANE SEASON IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC WAS ONE OF THE MOST SEVERE IN THE LAST CENTURY.
In fact, Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University, who maintains the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes round the world, says that the index is at its least value in the past 30 years, and close to its least value in 50 years. For 150 years the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has shown no trend at all: this is a long and reliable record, because one does not require complex instrumentation to know that one has been struck by a hurricane.
18. EVEN CAUTIOUS SCIENTISTS TEND TO SAY WE CAN BLAME MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE.
Cautious scientists say no such thing. Even the excitable and exaggeration-prone IPCC has repeatedly stated that individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to manmade “global warming”, and it would be particularly incautious of any scientist to blame the blocking highs that caused nearly all of the weather-related damage in 2010 on us when these are long-established, naturally-occurring phenomena.
19. CLIMATE CHANGE HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE 20% DECLINE IN RAINFALL IN PARTS OF SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS.
Climate change began 4,567 million years ago, on that Thursday when the Earth first formed (as Prof. Plimer puts it). The question is whether manmade climate change has contributed to the drought. Interestingly, there has been very heavy rainfall in previously drought-ridden parts of southern Australia in each of the last two years. Australia has a desert climate: it is no surprise, therefore, that periods of drought – sometimes prolonged – will occur. One of the longest records of drought and flood we have is the Nilometer, dating back 5000 years. Periods of drought far more savage than anything seen in modern times were frequent occurrences, and entire regions of Egypt became uninhabitable as a result. A 20% decline in rainfall in a single region, therefore, cannot be safely attributed to anything other than the natural variability of the climate.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
There is no such evidence. As the IPCC has repeatedly said, ascribing individual, local extreme-weather events to “global warming” is impermissible.
21. THERE HAS BEEN A SUCCESSION OF EXTRAORDINARY HEATWAVES, WITH BIG JUMPS IN RECORD TEMPERATURES, STARTING IN EUROPE IN 2003 AND CONTINUING ALL AROUND THE WORLD, CULMINATING IN RUSSIA LAST YEAR. MORE THAN 17 COUNTRIES BROKE THEIR MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE RECORDS IN 2010, AND “YOU REALLY HAVE TO STRAIN CREDIBILITY TO SAY IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE.”
The heatwave in Europe in 2003 is known to have been caused by a blocking high similar to those which gave Russia its record high temperatures in 2010 and kept the monsoon fixed over Pakistan for long enough to cause catastrophic flooding. You really have to stretch credibility to say it has anything to do with manmade “global warming”. Though that heatwave may have killed 35,000 right across Europe, a three-day cold snap in Britain the previous year had killed 21,000 just in one country. The net effect of warmer worldwide weather, therefore, is to reduce deaths, not to increase them. That is why periods such as the Holocene Climate Optimum, when temperatures were 3 C° warmer than the present for most of the time between 6000 and 8000 years ago, are called “optima”: warmer weather is better for most Earth species – including Man – than colder weather.
22. FOR 20 YEARS MORE HOT-WEATHER THAN COLD-WEATHER TEMPERATURE RECORDS HAVE BEEN SET.
This is merely another way of saying that temperatures today are generally higher than they were 20 years ago. Since there has been some warming, more hot-weather than cold-weather records have been set. Not exactly surprising, and not exactly alarming either: for the mere fact of warming tells us nothing about the cause of the warming, particularly when the rate of warming in recent decades has been no greater than what has been seen in two previous quarter-century periods over the past 160 years.
23. EVEN IF GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS WERE TO STABILIZE AT LITTLE MORE THAN TODAY’S LEVELS, 2 C° OF FURTHER WARMING WILL OCCUR – FOUR TIMES THE INCREASE OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.
This value of 2 C° – like too many others in this regrettably fictitious article – appears to have been plucked out of thin air. Let us do the math. We can ignore all Man’s influences on the climate except CO2 because, up to now, they have been self-canceling, as the table of “radiative forcings” in the IPCC’s most recent quinquennial Assessment Report shows. In 1750, before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 was 278 ppmv. Now it is 390 ppmv. Taking the multi-model mean central estimate from Box 10.2 on p.798 of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, plus or minus one standard deviation, we can derive the following simple equation for the total amount of warming to be expected in 1000 years’
time, when the climate has fully settled to equilibrium after the perturbation that our carbon emissions to date are thought to have caused:
ΔTequ = (4.7 ± 1) ln(390/278) F°
Let us generously go one standard deviation above the central estimate: thus, a high-end estimate of the total equilibrium warming the IPCC would expect as a result of our CO2 emissions since 1750 is 5.7 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration in the 260-year period: i.e. 1.9 C°. Even this total since 1750 to the present is below the 2 C° Mr. Setekee says is lurking in the pipeline.
Now, to pretend that manmade “global warming” is a problem as big as the IPCC says it is, and that there will be more warming in the pipeline even if we freeze our emissions at today’s levels, we have to pretend that all of the observed warming since 1750 – i.e. about 1.2 C° – was our fault. So we deduct that 1.2 C° from the 1.9 C° equilibrium warming. Just 0.7 C° of warmer weather is still to come, at equilibrium.
However, various climate extremists have published papers saying that equilibrium warming will not occur for 1000 years (or even, in a particularly fatuous recent paper, 3000 years). The IPCC itself only expects about 57% of equilibrium warming to occur by 2100: the rest will take so long to arrive that even our children’s children will not be around to notice, and the residual warming will happen so gradually that everyone and everything will have plenty of time to adjust.
Bottom line, then: by 2100 we can expect not 2 C° of further “global warming” as a result of our emissions so far, but 0.4 C° at most. The truth, as ever in the climate debate, is a great deal less thrilling than the lie.
24. ADAPTATION TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF “GLOBAL WARMING” WILL GET MORE DIFFICULT THE LONGER WE DELAY.
This assertion, too, has no scientific basis whatsoever. The costs of adaptation are chiefly an economic rather than a climatological question. Every serious economic analysis (I exclude the discredited propaganda exercise of Stern, with its absurd near-zero discount rate and its rate of “global warming” well in excess of the IPCC’s most extreme projections) has demonstrated that the costs of waiting and adapting to any adverse consequences that may arise from “global warming”, even if per impossibile that warming were to occur at the rapid rate imagined by the IPCC but not yet seen in the instrumental temperature record, would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective than any Canute-like attempt to prevent any further “global warming” by taxing and regulating CO2 emissions. It follows that adaptation to the consequences of “global warming” will get easier and cheaper the longer we wait: for then we will only have to adapt to the probably few and minor consequences that will eventually occur, and not until they occur, and only where and to the extent that they occur.
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A PDF version of this document is available here
Michael, you’ve got the wrong end of the argument from me, I’ve already found so much proof that this is a con that I’m no longer looking for proof that it isn’t. However, even though you think AGW and all associated is correct, Monckton’s last point should be the clincher even for you.
This is already an obscene amount of money being conned by taxes and idiotic fuel solutions which aren’t from the majority people who can’t afford it, all to make fat cats even fatter. Just as they first created the banking crisis and conned the people to pay their gambling debts by taking cuts in salaries and jobs and services, so AGW is a scam. Control by fear over something that doesn’t exist, and so vocally supported by the very people being conned.
And what don’t we have yet? We don’t have one smidgin of proof from AGWScience that CO2 can raise global temperatures. We certainly have proof that it has not done so in the last 600,000 years of really genuinely dramatic global warming and cooling.
I’ve even seen the Vostok graph printed backwards.., mustn’t draw attention to the fact that CO2 rises follow temperature 800 years later.
Which is where we are now, 800 years after the MWP.
Michael says:
“Most of the graphs of trends are quite clear as I explained above, the weight of evidence is enough to justify action.”
I prefer not to click on a mis-named alarmist blog run by a cartoonist, but I will respond to your panicky call to action.
The central argument in the entire debate is over carbon dioxide [or “carbon” to the scientifically illiterate]. The demonizing of CO2 is necessary to governments because modern society cannot exist without emitting this harmless and beneficial trace gas. And because CO2 emissions can be quantified, they can easily be taxed.
That is what the entire scare is about – as Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the UN/IPCC’s Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change has made crystal clear.
Edenhofer stated:
Edenhofer admitted that “climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth” and said “it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization.” In other words, ‘climate policy’ is the excuse for world government and the confiscation of your wealth, to be handed out to governments willing to join the push.
Edenhofer further admitted that expropriating the wealth of the G-8 countries “has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, or with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”
Any excuse to raise taxes and prices, eh? When an IPCC chieftain admits that the global warming/CO2 bunkum is a front for a big one-world government, how can you cling to their propagandistic narrative that global warming and more CO2 is bad?
What is bad is the push toward totalitarianism by the thoroughly corrupt UN. The climate scare is simply a pretext to justify the money/power grab, as Edenhofer now admits.
“Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Werner starts breaking up the decade to try to cherry pick a period like all climate denialists…”
James Hansen and others also talked about the last decade at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20101211_TemperatureAndEurope.pdf
A quote from this article is:
“Contrary to frequent assertions that global warming slowed in the past decade, as discussed in our paper in press, global warming has proceeded in the current decade just as fast as in the prior two decades.”
Please reconcile the above statement with the five green bar graphs for 5 and 10 years, including GISS at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates
Myrrh says: “The only data going against that shown in these studies is that marked in the little box, which it says wasn’t used in main map,” So your saying lets discard the recent data because the current rise is so steep over such a short space of time it can’t be shown on a map covering thousands of years? and
“Michael, you’ve got the wrong end of the argument from me, I’ve already found so much proof that this is a con that I’m no longer looking for proof that it isn’t. ” So may I assume you no longer call yourself a skeptic and are actively looking at ways to discount every proof with coloured glasses?
I do not demonize CO2, yes it is a gas, an important gas that has been shown in experiments and by explanation using simple physics to be a greenhouse gas that helps our planet regulate its temperature to make it livable for humans. To little or to much and we would be in trouble. This is fact accepted by even most [snip . . skeptics]. That being said how can anyone think that disturbing that balance by pumping billions of tons of it into the atmosphere at a rate that the planet cannot absorb and thereby increasing its % in the atmosphere could be done without consequence? This is arrogance at its most extreme. There is overwhelming proof from multiple sources (link above) and the hockey stick has been confirmed several times with other sources of data.
Instead you wish me to believe that governments (mostly democratic and therefore can be chucked out), and a majority of the worlds climate scientists and scientific organisations are colluding on a massive scam that is designed to redistribute wealth for…really why would they do that, how does it be benefit democratic governments and scientists? Do you believe we landed on the moon or was it staged?
Finally adaptation only works if you believe the changes will occur slowly enough for us to be able to adapt. I think the evidence supports the fact that it will happen quicker than we can adapt even if we start now and the sooner we do act the less painful and cheaper it will be.
“Please reconcile the above statement with the five green bar graphs for 5 and 10 years, including GISS at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates”
Easy, the trend is obviously going up, what are you looking at?
Michael says: So may I assume you no longer call yourself a skeptic and are actively looking at ways to discount every proof with coloured glasses?
Right, but through my research into this, and I spent a long time following the arguments and checking things for myself, the coloured glasses I’m looking through are sunglasses to protect against being blinded by AGWScience’s global warming claims. I can now recognise it as a con. There’s no reason to change my mind, it’s just become easier now to spot the deceptions. Real science is based on fact, on data, on observation, on rational analysis – if AGWScience was real science, its promoters wouldn’t have to lie and manipulate temperature records and cherry pick single trees to con us.
I do not demonize CO2, yes it is a gas, an important gas that has been shown in experiments and by explanation using simple physics to be a greenhouse gas that helps our planet regulate its temperatuere to make it livable for humans.
Yes it is an important gas, all carbon life forms developed because of it. You are around 20% carbon, your lungs need around 6% carbon dioxide in each breath to use oxygen and transport it to the rest of your body, without it or with reduced levels, less than 5.5% is going down into danger levels, you will struggle to breathe. It is the food source of all plant life on earth which uses photosynthesis, plants breathe it in to form sugars and so on and breathe out oxygen in doing so, it’s the building block of their bodies and through them ours; the oxygen in our atmosphere comes from plants producing it from carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is food for all carbon life in the Carbon Life Cycle, we are Carbon Life Forms. It is insignificant in any other role, insignificant to anything known as a ‘greenhouse gas’, which is primarily water in the Water Cycle. Carbon Dioxide’s primary purpose is to produce life on earth as we know it.
Too little or too much and we would be in trouble.
Exactly. At 250 ppm or less plant life everywhere would begin to struggle for survival, carbon dioxide is not “well-mixed” in the atmosphere because it is heavier than air and so sinks to where plants are able to use it, and in growing conditions in the warmth, summer and so on, the levels around plants is around 400-450 ppm. Much higher levels are introduced in greenhouses (real ones) to improve plant growth, stress levels go down and they need less water, anywhere from 550ppm to 1500ppm. If you have pot plants in the house, talk to them, you will be delivering the c 4% of CO2 in your exhaled breath and so feeding them, they will be healthier for it. When not utilising CO2 for photosynthesis plants breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide as we do, so they add this to their surroundings also, raising levels.
This is fact accepted by even most [snip ..skeptics]. that being said how can anyone think that disturbing that balance by pumping billions of tons of it into the atmosphere at a rate that the planet cannot absorb and therby increasing its % in the atmosphere coul be done without consequence? This is arrogance at its most extreme.
Not the real facts as I’ve just presented. What balance? The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the healthier the plants around the globe will grow and so better food production for us and for all the animal life dependant on them. The only arrogance here is from AGWScience which promotes and teaches children that carbon dioxide is a poison. This is either in ignorance or deliberate, whichever, the effect is downright evil.
There is overwhelming proof from multiple sources (link above) and the hockey stick has been confirmed several times with other sources of data.
Instead you wish me to believe that governments (mostly democratic and therefore can be chucked out), and a majority of the worlds climate scientists and scientific organisations are colluding on a massive scam that is designed to redistribute weath for .. really why would they do that, how does it benefit democratic governments and scientists?
Shrug, if you only read AGWScience excuses for their deliberate manipulation of data that’s what you’ll end up thinking. If the Hockey Stick was truly representative of our temperature changes since coming our of the Little Ice Age, there would have been no need for them to spend so much time and effort distorting the temperature records.
Do yourself a favour re governments, read the history of the New Zealand alterations by Salinger from CRU going there and fiddling the figures, there’s been a long fight about this and finally the NZgovernment has conceded that these CRU artificial warming data was designed to show rises in NZ temperatures where no such warming existed, they, the actual records, were corrupted. What Salinger couldn’t do there was what has been done at CRU on home territory, to ‘lose’ the original data.
This has been a scam for a long time, the long con. The ‘idea’ of this being to redistribute wealth is also part of the scam, it’s a distraction, the people of the third world are being stopped from developing their resources to better their lives. The con is to take financial control of people and resources globally by the same people that print your banknotes. If you don’t know how money is created out of debt and crashes manipulated for the greater wealth grab of only some, then you’d do well to explore it. If you’re American then read up on how the government gave printing banknotes to private banking companies, the Federal Reserve, in 1913 – that’s the scam. The FR charges interest to the government for this service and taxes are collected via the IRS, a private company, to pay these interests. Etc. If you want to know who is behind such a long con, follow to those who had the money to organise it. Lots of bit players have come on board, they are useful fuel to keep the machine turning.
Do you believe we landed on the moon or was it staged?
One tactic, well understood psychology of manipulation, is to treat others as if they’re insane or stupid by saying things such as the above and so implying that whatever they say can be discounted; and another good example is to label those questioning the AGWScience ‘conspiracy theorists’, as if this is some kind of slight and insulting and again, that because these kind of people therefore ‘believe all kinds of stupid things’, though unproven, implying they’re not really intelligent as those who don’t.
What I’ve found is that people are generally intelligent, different talents, but this is subject to information they’re getting in. If a child taught now in school that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, a toxic, a poison, that putting more of into the atmosphere will create a climate catastrophe and it will all be his fault if he does this, then that is brainwashing. It doesn’t matter how intelligent they are, people being people generally take things on trust. That’s what makes us human, our capacity for co-operation often to extreme unselfish ends (in defending others for example). The only way to get through to the truth here is to examine it for yourself. That means exploring both sides of the argument. When I was doing this I found the weight of evidence showing that AGW was deliberate manipulation, for all kinds of reasons, and so a manufactured scam, grew to the point where my doubts had to be put aside – it became obvious then in all sorts of areas. Bearing in mind that much of it is regurgitated without thinking, because people generally have no reason to distrust the continual pushing of this being ‘scientific consensus’ and so on and taken as real, is only part of the picture. Most people don’t think about it because of that and because they’re involved in living their own lives. These are the ones who won’t understand what is happening, why they are being taxed ’til they squeak and having fuel rises several times a year… We’re all in this together aren’t we? Yes, we should tighten our belts and take pay cuts ‘to get our economy back on track’.. And we’re so easily distracted from the implications of the poor being forced to become poorer by outrage genenerated for a while about bankers’ bonuses or something equally insignificant in the financial scheme of this.
Sadly, the deeper one explores the more extraordinary the scam is found to be. It’s very clever to manipulate ‘science’ to give credibility, because science has a reputation for being realistic, rational and based on facts. But as any totalitarian in history of politics and religion shows, sell the story and people will follow, as long as there’s something in it for them they’ll even go to the extremes of waging war on others and counting the carnage an expression of ‘bravery’. I have a dream… that there will come a time when humanity doesn’t forget its history, and reflecting properly on it will find another way to exist together. It’s the Nelson Mandela’s of this world who I consider to be heroes.
“Michael says:
January 11, 2011 at 9:19 pm
“Please reconcile the above statement with the five green bar graphs for 5 and 10 years, including GISS at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates”
Easy, the trend is obviously going up, what are you looking at?”
I am looking at the green bar graphs below the first set of graphs. And specifically, the 5 year and 10 year ones. Note that the most recent 5 years ones are smaller than the 10 years ones in every case. So in other words, it was cooler from 2006 to 2010 on the average than from 2001 to 2005.
Now in order for Hansen to make the claim that “global warming has proceeded in the current decade just as fast as in the prior two decades”, he would have had to “break up the decade” like I did, right?
But in my opinion, those bar graphs prove Hansen wrong. Remember we are not talking about high temperatures during the decade. They were high. What we are talking about is the rate of change of those temperatures, and if we neglect El Ninos and La Ninas, there has basically been no change for the last dozen years, and possibly a slight cooling, but certainly no warming rate as was the case between 1975 and 1998.
Have you posted the response by Steketee anywhere?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
I really can’t comprehend why you still post the fact-free paranoid ramblings of Monckton.
REPLY: Has the Australian printed Monckton’s response anywhere? If you can convince the Australian to give equal time to Mr. Monckton for his rebuttal, I’ll happily make Steketee’s response front page here. Certainly seems fair. BTW what do you do for the Museum Victoria? Do you manage the AGW scare exhibits? – Anthony
“I am looking at the green bar graphs below the first set of graphs. And specifically, the 5 year and 10 year ones. Note that the most recent 5 years ones are smaller than the 10 years ones in every case. ”
Your cherry picking again and ignoring all the graphs where the trend up is fairly clear. You also cannot ignore El Ninos and La Ninas as they are part of the climate system and becoming more intense due to the ocean warming. They become part of all the averages being looked at. There are also other seasonal, annual and decadal cycles to take into account and so looking at a single short period is deceptive. Generally climate wise you are supposed to look at at least 30 years. The trends are clear and the warnings in the climate trends itself are becoming stronger every day. The increasing extreme weather events the science predicts are being seen.
Myrrrh their is not much more I can say, your mind is made up. I am quite happy to accept how useful and beneficial co2 is for us and our plants in our everyday lives but that does not detract from the well accepted fact that it is a greenhouse gas and tiny concentrations mean very little in science. Their are many examples where a tiny amount of some chemical can catalyse a large reaction at slightly larger amounts than an even tinier amount. Since I believe that, and after all the reading I have done and science I have seen, it is not hard to see that pumping billions of tons of the co2 that was trapped over millions of years, to give us the favorable conditions we currently enjoy, can and will probably be disastrous for us. Don’t forget the feedbacks that are increasing the water vapour in the atmosphere you mentioned, currently 4%.
Also while governments do manipulate and individual leaders have focussed on their own personal interests I cannot see how that can translate into a situation where most if not all governments, most scientists and scientific organisations are colluding in some massive scam. Also with everything I have read and seen and with the evidence and personal observations of conditions on the planet it seems logical that we are warming and that co2, a well known greenhouse gas that is increasing at the same time is the cause. The planets may love it but will we? How habitable will our planet be with the increasing levels of disasters and records broken? How can changing the composition of the atmosphere which regulates our temperature and determines the movement or air (weather) not cause things to change.
What you say I cannot reconcile with basic logic, actions have consequences, those consequences affect governments and scientists and have them worried about our future. Sometimes they are over zealous as they try to convince us to change our ways for our own good but they are human. We should let them do their job and they need our support, and with it, they can develop newer and better technologies and methods for the next revolution of sustainable and renewable advancement to take the human race into their next golden age. Keep putting up road blocks and we may very easily be retrofitting caves while the planet rebalances itself.
“Michael says:
January 12, 2011 at 7:04 pm
Generally climate wise you are supposed to look at at least 30 years.”
True, and I can do much better than the last ten years. See page 21 of http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
Here we see a pattern over 130 years. A sine wave repeats itself every 60 years and what has happened over the last ten years is very consistent with what has been happening over the last 130 years. The IPCC predictions are way off from the actual temperatures. So there is no reason at this time to be alarmed.
[There] is not even agreement on the exact signature or even if the same signature may apply to several different types of forcings and [there] is also disagreement on whether it is a signature at all. Some measurements in the short term do confirm predictions and long term don’t. This area of climate science is [too] murky and the measurements to questionable to confirm anything, it also assumes that if one line of evidence is wrong then it must all be wrong. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/9/2148/pdf
Climate change depends on many lines of evidence from sea level change and warming, surface temp from stations and satellites, increased coral bleaching, atmospheric energy imbalance, retreating glaciers and ice sheets etc, changing and increasing weather events. To throw the baby out with the bathwater on one line of evidence that nobody on both sides is sure about is illogical.
Michael – my mind is made up because I have never seen any rational data supporting the idea that CO2 has the power to raise global temperatures and because all the data produced by AGWScience shows consistent massaging to fit its claim that it does.
I, for one, do not see any reason to doubt my own analysis of the argument.
Show me actual proof that CO2 is even capable of doing this. There is none, I’ve asked and asked and asked, but AGWScience which claims this is robust and settled can’t give actual data for proof.
Instead, it keeps coming up with revised excuses to explain the non-existence of any actual cause and effect. Where is the proof that it accumulates in the atmosphere defying gravity and known science re molecular weight? Where is the proof that it has been shown historically to be the cause of global warming?
This is religion, not science, AGW insists we put our faith in these people who have consistently shown themselves corrupt because they are not real scientists and this now has a political agenda going at great pace to produce more of this corruption. Real scientists extrapolate from data, AGW tweaks data to fit. This is a scam of such vast proportions because it has taken decades to grow to that, with more and more disparate interests coming on board for the ride having been educated in the non-science fact of AGW. Most operate out of ignorance, governing bodies and lay people both; told to trust the science, they do. It’s only those who actually make the effort to explore the claims who can see how the facts of AGW are claimed but never proved, but, this is for all practical purposes hidden in the noise of the overblown faith position. Thanks but no thanks.
A well known fact, the more CO2 we pump in the more plant life will eat it, the stronger it will grow the more benefit there will be for our food production. Plants need warmth to grow.
There isn’t a problem in the first place.
“Michael says:
January 12, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Some measurements in the short term do confirm predictions and long term don’t.”
Since things are not too conclusive, perhaps we need more study before making huge expensive changes? When I debated things about a year ago, I said to others that if two of the next four years beat the 1998 mark, I would seriously reconsider my position. (By the way, I trust the satellite data and Hadcrut3, but not GISS.) Now 2010 came close, however 1998 was not beaten. And with this La Nina, it does not look like 2011 will beat 1998. So I would like to wait and see if 2012 and 2013 beat 1998. If not, I would not consider global warming a crisis.
Myrrh you did not explain what sort of proof you require? Even your own cycles explanation predicts we should be cooling, so even no warming should give you pause. Instead NASA has just released that 2010 was tied hottest year on record with 2005 and that the previous decade was the hottest on record, how do you explain that? Their is evidence all around us, temperatures, mass coral bleachings, oceans warming, ocean acidification, increasing extreme weather events and more all at a time when our sun is in a stable or cool period and your own cycle theory predicts we should be cooling.
It is irrelevant if a few plants are happy if all the fish are dead and our environment is so inhospitable we can’t find anywhere safe to live. The proof is all around you, the climate is not the kind of thing you can put in a test tube and measure ph balance. It is determined by a large range of effects at the same time as there has been a measurable increase of co2 in the atmosphere. A + B = C. There is no other precipitating event that you can point to that can cause the range of effects we are experiencing. Simple physics tells us co2 is a greenhouse gas, co2 rises, effects are observed, you spend all your time looking for ways to discount the facts and then say proof isn’t their. Yes it is.
“Since things are not too conclusive, perhaps we need more study before making huge expensive changes? ”
We should always continue studying as the more information coming in the better models and the better decisions we can make, but we should not wait. The consequences for waiting if mainstream science is right far exceed the cost of doing something now. Ocean warming and acidification is bleaching our coral, affecting our algae and phytoplankton, deforestation and urbanisation are all reducing our ability to absorb CO2, while at the same time we are increasing by billions of tonnes a year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it does not make sense that this can be done without consequence. This is irrational and illogical and is more like a religious belief. We influence nature every day and we influence the atmosphere as can be seen in the increased CO2.
http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/warmest-equal-year-ends-warmest-decade-record/5/78431
So Werner you only trust data from Hadcrut3, and just released it shows that 2010 ties with 1998 and that the 2001 to 2010 decade was the hottest on record and that the previous decade was the 2nd highest, will you reconsider your position now? Surely you can see that basing your position on a single year is illogical.
Michael – I’m asking for actual proof that CO2 has the power to effect these nightmare cataclysmic scenarios which AGWs keep spouting in ever greater degrees of shrillness and rising threats of violence against those who don’t belong to the Church of Climatology.
Even your own cycles explanation predicts we should be cooling, so even no warming should give you pause.
What makes you assume it hasn’t already?
Instead NASA has just released that 2010 was tied hottest year on record with 2005 and that the previous decade was the hottest on record, how do you explain that?
Perhaps I haven’t explained myself well enough, but I thought my references to corrupt data would not have raised such a question. Again, please read the saga of New Zealand re this deliberate corruption organised from CRU. Add to that all the other ‘adjustments’ and I now don’t give any temp data credibility that begins with the same scare tactic to bolster the con. If you look for it, and WUWT is a very good resource here, you’ll find plenty of detail of this corruption of data; and the book on the front page here, The Hockey Stick Illusion, is recommended. I haven’t read it yet, but I spent a considerable amount of time on this aspect researching it for myself while I was trying to understand the arguments.
Their is evidence all around us, temperatures, mass coral bleachings, oceans warming, ocean acidification, increasing extreme weather events and more all at a time when our sun is in a stable or cool period and your own cycle theory predicts we should be cooling.
Evidence of what? That climate changes. What exactly does that prove? I’m asking for specific proof, specific data, there should be reams of it, proving that CO2 has the capability of doing what AGWScience says it can do. I’ve yet to find it. And have never been given it whenever I’ve asked for it. What I get instead is the variation on a theme as you give it here – “simple physics, CO2 rises, effects are observed” etc.
But no such simple physics exists, just absurd claims about the properties of CO2 using a mangling of real science; no such effects are ever observed, just the continual repetition that it is proved without ever giving proof. Really, I’ve looked. And you’re doing it here too. Avoiding it.
An example. Bandied about by AGWs as ‘settled science’ is the: ‘CO2 levels have remained constant for x hundred thousand years and only since man has been burning fossil fuels the amount is rising and and the world is warming and it’s all mankind’s fault because it shows that CO2 is causing the warming.’
? I don’t mean to be rude here, because my head was spinning from all these kinds of statements when I first heard them, but does that really make any sense?
When I began to explore the subject to understand this I learned a lot more about ice ages than I had known before, fascinating subject and I get really easily distracted, but think about it. What this is saying is that for these hundreds of thousands of years carbon dioxide had nothing at all to do with the dramatic and really cataclysmic events of global warming and cooling as we went in and out of interglacials. Nada, zilch. It all happens regardless of the CO2 level, is what this is actually saying. Therefore, it is saying, CO2 is irrelevant to the huge changes of temperature in the cataclysmic global warming events with real hundreds of feet sea level rises, as shown in Vostok. Interglacials come and go.
So why should this particular warming event in our cycles be any different? If CO2 was irrelevant to the changes all this time, it can’t be relevant now.
Then you might realise, actually this cycle is being downplayed by AGW and time time lag of c800 years brushed aside. Vostok is only referenced to ‘prove’ that CO2 levels haven’t changed in this time, and the pretence is immediately pushed to the fore that temperatures have ‘remained constant until CO2 was introduced with industry’. Now that’s a disjunct. One can only see it’s a sleight of a magicians hand by not forgetting that our global temperatures as Vostok shows are not at this mythical ‘hardly changed until man’s industrial output’.
That’s why AGW denies that the MWP and LIA were global, for example, and an immense amount of effort went into producing the Hockey Stick to further this deception, and by continually bringing attention around to the ‘last hundred years’ as a distraction from the fact that in the statement that CO2 levels haven’t changed for hundreds of thousand of years, actual, real, cataclysmic global warming and cooling were going on.
So, what I’m asking for is something you can’t provide, because AGWScience doesn’t provide it and you can’t prove it. Because it’s obvious from well-established knowledge of ice ages and data such as Vostok that we can all see for ourselves, CO2 was irrelvant. That’s simple logic. AGW works very hard to distract us from this simple observation which immediately falsifies its claims about CO2.
You don’t provide me with proof that CO2 causes global warming because there is none. Instead you come back with the same catalogue of scare stories attributing these to CO2 levels when you haven’t yet proved that CO2 drives global warming. And no, I’m not getting distracted this time, I’ve looked into all those also.
Examples such as these and others of their ilk contain the same sleight of hand relying on suspension of logical connection by stirring up the emotions as a distraction in lieu of proving cause and effect.
Prove that CO2 drives global warming.
Myrrh so many issues…
For starters science does not work how you understand it. Most of science is based on theories, predictions are made and if the predictions hold then the theory is strengthened, otherwise it is adjusted or dumped for a new theory. Some well known and well accepted theories have stood for hundreds of years but cannot be proved in your simplistic sense. Your CRT tele and GPS uses calculations from the theory of relativity to work but you cannot prove it.
The proof I give in actual data you don’t accept because you have fallen for skeptic propaganda. Science is a huge field with the wide range of people and all their failings as in any other discipline, because one has let you down(in your eyes) or conspiracies have been manufactured to discredit others does not deter from all the real science and data this theory rests on. I have no way to counter that, I accept well known and renowned organisations and their data over ramblings of the few disgruntled.
You rely on history to much, all data before several 100 years is guesswork and even then nobody says that co2 is the only driver of the planet. Their are many other greenhouse gases, volcanos, planetary wanderings, temp changes of the sun over its lifetime, heat from our centre plus much more. Most episodes in the past we have good workable theories for but their are no proofs there. Similar conditions to our distant past will be unlikely to occur again as the sun and the planet has past that point in its development.
Regardless this point in our history is the only time man has been significant enough to influence the planet to this degree, co2 levels are rising (do you dispute those as well), the isotopes tell us the majority of the excess is from burning fossil fuels and that our planet cannot cope with the excess or they would not be rising.
Temperatures are rising, ocean acidification and warming is rising, extreme weather events are rising, plus more and there is no other cause found. Like I said A+B=C, if you refuse to accept mainstream science data and organisations I have no more to add, you are unwilling to accept the proof that is at 90% confidence according to predictions, which make it a fairly strong theory in Science terms. Waiting until the planet is inhospitable so you can have the type of proof you require is unacceptable.
For the record, Monckton is shown to be absolutely and without a doubt wrong on the following post.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/monckton-skewers-truth/
Not even close actually. It is regarding Sea Ice. Isn’t there some quality control we can keep here with some of the posts that are allowed through?
Robert:
Is “quality control” the new alarmist euphemism for the routine censorship that tamino practices daily?
Lord Monckton has probably forgotten more about the climate than Grant Foster ever learned. That being the case, I propose a debate between Viscount Monckton and Mr Foster. Of course, “tamino” doesn’t have the stones for it. But it would be very interesting.
Alarmists don’t even realize it, but they suffer from Monckton Derangement Syndrome, just like the Left are victims of Palin Derangement Syndrome and Bush Derangement Syndrome. The common thread is derangement.
@Myrrh, try this link for starters: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm
“Michael says:
January 13, 2011 at 11:48 pm
So Werner you only trust data from Hadcrut3, and just released it shows that 2010 ties with 1998”
Thank you for that. I must confess to some confusion regarding the 0.52 values for both 1998 and 2010. The following site that I go by has 1998 at 0.548 and 2010 at 0.493 up to November of 2010.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
But even so, 2010 was a strong El Nino year. And even though the El Nino ended around the middle of the year, its effect on temperature lasted much longer. UAH had the warmest September on its record, and GISS had the warmest November on its record. Had 2010 been tied without the help of an El Nino, that would have been much more impressive.
With regards to other comments, I do believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas and I fully accept that the concentration went from 280 ppm in 1750 to 390 ppm today. However of the 0.8 C that the temperatures went up since 1880, I would only give man-made CO2 credit for 0.2 C. So at this point, I do not believe any catastrophe awaits us due to man-made CO2. We have far more urgent things to worry about. For starters, the Mexican president should be far more alarmed about the drug killings in Mexico than the tiny effect our CO2 is having on Mexico.
Michael – AGWScience doesn’t work the way I understand science to work. Most of science is bases on fact, theories stay theories unless facts are obtained to prove them. The general theory of relativity is still a theory, not a science fact. Most theories are created by first examing the facts found in the natural world, and trying to make sense of them. Like the man who first proposed that continents moved. If you don’t know that history do read up on it.
What science isn’t is imagining a theory and then claiming it is proved when every part of the theory is already falsified. That’s called scientific fraud. Which is why we see this constant pattern from AGW of having to re-adjust past temperature data and now this sad about face from years of proclaiming CO2 will cause steep rising global temperatures that will end up in us living in a baked and flooded world to ‘warming means cooling’, because it can’t account for the weather.. And, even sillier, that ‘our models are improving all the time’, having failed to show any relation to real conditions in any of the models past or present. GIGO, AGWScience continues to put in parameters which it makes up, as in the example Emile gives, my post below.
You can make up anything you want as a hypothesis, but until you can prove it has legs it can’t walk even as theory, which might have some use in the real world. To demand from an already falsified and full of illogical constructs that people change their lives and be forced to pay loads of money in green taxes to support the Greenshirt elites, is criminal. That is obviously a con in any other adventure of the unprincipled. The old folk that get targetted by the oh so concerned ‘builder’ who sees dreadful problems with their roofs and can fix it for a small sum which cost grows with the availability of funds. So AGW ‘scientists’, claiming they are real scientists doesn’t pass the discernment test, by their fruits we know them, they can’t think and they act as any petty con artist. The bigger the scale the more successful they are in convincing that this scale gives them credibility, but organised crime is what they’re successful at; by creating a ‘pyramid scheme’ of oiks below them, wittingly or unwittingly bolstering the crime, they can continue to brainwash that they’re the experts and there really is something dreadfully wrong with your roof, you can trust them.
The proof I give in actual data you don’t accept because you have fallen for skeptic propaganda.
You haven’t given me any proof. That facts here that you keep giving me data from the people who are in control of faking it does not constitute proof. I am asking you for specific proof re your claims for CO2. Prove it has the capacity to drive temperature, prove it. All data shows it is irrelevant to global temperature changes. In other words, the vast amount of data we already have already falsifies this claim for CO2. That’s why you, and generic you, never come back with anything rational. You have not proved that there is any connection at all between CO2 and global climate changes. You have not proved by experimentation that CO2 has any of the abilities claimed for it in AGW. You have not shown any connection between A and B, actual real science in between is missing. It may well seem entirely reasonable to you that ‘CO2 is rising and cataclysmic global climate changes are happening therefore CO2 is the cause’, but there’s a gap there, a logical disjunct. It goes against actual data which show that CO2 is irrelevant to these changes.
Those who forget history … The ‘last hundred years’ mantra is full of junk ideas, claiming junk ideas are science is no substitute for producing real science. You have yet to do so.
……………………………………………….
Emile – from your link above: CO2 amplifies warming
Prove that CO2 can even do this.
Nothing in CO2 following temperature rises, which this link admits was not caused by CO2, by around 800 years would suggest any link anyway, rationally. What your site proposes is that 800 years of rising temperature is being influence by rises of CO2, but, what the data actually show is that there is no rise of CO2 until 800 years after temperature rises. What’s so difficult about 800 years after? It means that CO2 doesn’t begin rising until 800 years have passed. Showing that CO2 is not playing any part in driving temperature and has nothing to do with the rising temperature levels for all those 800 years. For example, we’re at c 800 years after the MWP, we’d expect to see rising CO2 levels, now.
Again, this is data showing that CO2 is not playing any part in driving temperature and irrelevant to the AGW concept that CO2 is ‘amplifying’ it, therefore driving is global warming is disproved.
Another example of the magicians sleight of hand by disjunct and distraction, whether by unthinking repetition of the trick or as primary creator of the disjunct, he presents flawed logic as rational science. Why would anyone want to put their faith into ideas propounded by people who can’t even think straight?
Myrrh Says “…The old folk that get targetted by the oh so concerned ‘builder’ who sees dreadful problems with their roofs and can fix it for a small sum which cost grows with the availability of funds. So AGW ‘scientists’, claiming they are real scientists doesn’t pass the discernment test, by their fruits we know them, they can’t think and they act as any petty con artist. The bigger the scale the more successful they are in convincing that this scale gives them credibility, but organised crime is what they’re successful at; by creating a ‘pyramid scheme’ of oiks below them, wittingly or unwittingly bolstering the crime, they can continue to brainwash that they’re the experts and there really is something dreadfully wrong with your roof, you can trust them…”
What would you accept as proof?
Michael – I’d accept real science, but, I’ve really looked into this and I haven’t found any. I ask that question because that’s what I asked for in the beginning of my journey into this argument and not getting any proof I investigated for myself why I wasn’t given any. What I was given was as examples above, claims that kept having this disjunct between A and B. It happens in every aspect of the statements AGWScience makes so it is very difficult to get to grips with it, I had the time and the interest, most people take it on trust because they’ve got better things to do with their lives as I once did.. (grin).
Just looking at the things you’ve said, there’s an awfully big area of knowledge required to find out about CO2 and its properties and the history in science and the history of it in this argument; temperature likewise, ocean acidification, rising sea levels.. I began by questioning two things I was told, temp and CO2.
When I said, ‘hold on a minute, of course the temperature has gone up since the Little Ice Age as it had gone down to that from a previous higher one so any measurement taken from the depths of the LIA is going to show upward trend’, I was given Mann’s Hockey Stick to prove that temperatures ‘had remained flattish and unchanged for the last 1000 years’ – which is contrary to everything we already know because we do actually have an enormous body of knowledge through the history of the last 2000 years. What I saw in the AGWScience claim was that this beginning point of taking the LIA and claiming it represented ‘a constant and benign climate which we’re now changing’ couldn’t make sense, ‘couldn’t’ being the operative word. Then finding that this claim was being deliberately maintained by all kinds of methods, from creating the Hockey Stick in the first place to hide that great changes in climate had happened in the last two thousand years, to eliminate the MWP and LIA, which entailed cherry picking data, one tree Biffa, and designing a number cruncher which gave the hockey stick regardless of the numbers given it to crunch, to the deliberate tampering of historical temperature records, such as in New Zealand, where the original data could still be accessed and so this claim of rising temperatures eventually disproved, and in England, where the FOI request came back with the excuse that the originally records had been lost. Both these last organised by CRU, Salinger went to NZ in the early ’70’s to cook the books, so exploring that history takes one into the politics of the day. And so on.
And that’s together with having to learn about ice ages and interglacials and CO2 measurements – which is necessary to explore to see the point I’ve made here, that there’s a disjunct in the logic between A and B, A:CO2 levels haven’t changed for hundreds of thousands of years and B:rising CO2 levels from our production are driving warming. If CO2 had nothing to do with the vast and dramatic changes we went through in glacials and interglacials then it is irrelevant now, etc., but how will you see that if you don’t have any knowledge of ice ages? And more importantly, if you don’t link this knowledge once you have it, to the actual AGW claim relevant.
The etc. being all the nuances that come in this AGWScience package, such as you’ve given, that CO2 levels have gone up. There are two ways of approaching this, to look at the measurements in the ice cores and the science behind that, are these methods good enough to establish what the levels were over all these hundreds of thousands of years, and to look at the recent history of measurements in science, Beck v Mauna Loa. I explored Mauna Loa, there is no way they can say they are measuring ‘background’ CO2 and that their measurements come from a ‘pristine site uncontaminated by local imput’ – they’re sitting on the world’s largest active volcano for a start.. And the history shows that Keeling began by cherry picking a low number for CO2 levels from all the previous work that had been done looking at levels, and he did this because he had an agenda. And that agenda takes us into the maintaining the fiction through his son in Scripps and now, with other interests in the wider political background exploiting it in seriousness since the 70’s.
And that’s before exploring the claims for the molecule carbon dioxide. I’ve grown very attached to this molecule, it is much maligned in AGW. And my CO2 molecule is feeling just a tad envious that it can’t do all the things the AGWCO2 molecule can do; it can’t defy gravity and air pressure and rise of its own volition to mix thoroughly in the atmosphere, it can’t stay up in the atmosphere accumulating for hundreds and thousands of years defying its weight through the lighter air molecules around it. I reassure him, supermen models, hero and antihero, are for comic books, to entertain because they defy real science. That’s why we enjoy them, because we understand the disjunct in the tale they’re telling, supermen can fly through the air, we can’t.
So, I’m asking for proof of any real science that backs up any of the claims made. I haven’t found any in the areas I’ve explored, and as you read the imput from posters here you’ll find the same in the areas they’ve explored. What we do keep finding is these logical disjuncts in the claims.
A really good discussion to read through is the one currently on the go about Trenberth http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/12/trenberths-upcoming-ams-meeting-talk-climategate-thoughts/ which looks at the logic content of his statements.
When one gets to grips with this, it becomes astonishingly obvious that what is happening is that science in AGW has been sidelined completely, they’ve changed the definition and claim their definition is science; facts no longer matter and any fact that contradicts, falsifies any of their claims, shouldn’t even be heard.
Sorry, that should be AGW taking a temperature base for their graphs from the end of the LIA, not from the middle. They do say there was a drop in temp before but they’ve flattened this out to make it appear insignificant.