UPDATE: Below is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. Comments are open. – Anthony
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Various You-Tube videos by a former “science writer” who uses a speleological pseudonym “potholer54” sneeringly deliver a series of petty smears about artfully-distorted and often inconsequential aspects of my talks on climate change. Here, briefly, I shall answer some of his silly allegations. I noted them down rather hastily, since I am disinclined to waste much time on him, so the sentences in quote-marks may not be word for word what he said, but I hope that they fairly convey his meaning.
For fuller answers to these allegations, many of which he has ineptly and confusedly recycled from a serially mendacious video by some no-account non-climatologist at a fourth-rank bible college in Nowheresville, Minnesota, please see my comprehensive written reply to that video at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. The guy couldn’t even get his elementary arithmetic right – not that the caveman mentions that fact, of course.
The allegations, with my answers, are as follows:
“Monckton says he advised Margaret Thatcher on climate change. He didn’t.” I did.
“Monckton says he wrote a peer-reviewed paper. He didn’t.” The editors of Physics and Society asked me to write a paper on climate sensitivity in 2008. The review editor reviewed it in the usual way and it was published in the July 2008 edition, which, like most previous editions, carried a headnote to the effect that Physics and Society published “reviewed articles”. Peer-review takes various forms. From the fact that the paper was invited, written, reviewed and then published, one supposes the journal had followed its own customary procedures. If it hadn’t, don’t blame me. Subsequent editions changed the wording of the headnote to say the journal published “non-peer-reviewed” articles, and the editors got the push. No mention of any of this by the caveman, of course.
“Monckton says the Earth is cooling. It isn’t.” At the time when I said the Earth was cooling, it had indeed been cooling since late 2001. The strong El Niño of 2010 canceled the cooling, and my recent talks and graphs have of course reflected that fact by stating instead that there has been no statistically-significant warming this millennium. The caveman made his video after the cooling had ended, but – without saying so – showed a slide from a presentation given by me while the cooling was still in effect. Was that honest of him?
“Monckton says Greenland is not melting. It is.” Well, it is now, but for 12 years from 1992-2003 inclusive, according to Johannessen et al. (2005), the mean spatially-averaged thickness of Greenland’s ice sheet increased by 5 cm (2 inches) per year, or 2 feet in total over the period. The high-altitude ice mass in central northern Greenland thickened fastest, more than matching a decline in ice thickness along the coastline. Since 2005, according to Johannessen et al. (2009), an ice mass that I calculate is equivalent to some six inches of the 2 feet of increase in Greenland’s ice thickness over the previous decade or so has gone back into the ocean, raising global sea levels by a not very terrifying 0.7 millimeters. According to the Aviso Envisat satellite, in the past eight years sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 2 inches per century. Not per decade: per century. If so, where has all the additional ice that the usual suspects seem to imagine has melted from Greenland gone? Two possibilities: not as much ice has melted as we are being told, or its melting has had far less impact on sea level than we are being invited to believe.
“Monckton says there’s no systematic loss of sea-ice in the Arctic. There is.” No, I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009. The caveman, if he were capable of checking these or any data, would find this to be so. In fact, he knew this to be so, because the slide I was showing at that point in his video, taken from the University of Illinois’ Cryosphere monitoring program, shows it. Of course, the slide was only in the background of his video and was shown only for a few seconds. Since that particular talk of mine the Arctic sea ice has declined again and came close to its 2007 low in 2011. But it is arguable from the descriptions of melting Arctic ice in 1922 that there may have been less sea ice in the Arctic then than now.
“Monckton says there has been no correlation between temperature and CO2 for the past 500 million years. There has.” Well, there has in the past few thousand years, but the correlation since the Cambrian era has been spectacularly poor, as the slide (from a peer-reviewed paper) that the caveman fleetingly shows me using at that point demonstrates very clearly. For most of that long period, global temperatures were about 7 Celsius degrees warmer than the present: yet CO2 concentration has inexorably declined throughout the period.
“Monckton says a pre-Cambrian ice-planet shows CO2 has no effect on climate. It doesn’t.” No, I cited Professor Ian Plimer, a leading geologist, as having said that the formation of dolomitic rock 750 million years ago could not have taken place unless there had been 300,000 ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere: yet glaciers a mile high had come and gone twice at sea-level and at the Equator at that time. Professor Plimer had concluded that, even allowing for the fainter Sun and higher ice-albedo in those days, the equatorial glaciers could not have formed twice if the warming effect of CO2 were as great as the IPCC wants us to believe. At no point have I ever said CO2 has no effect on climate, for its effect was demonstrated by a simple but robust experiment as long ago as 1859. However, I have said, over and over again, that CO2 probably has a much smaller warming effect than the IPCC’s range of estimates. The caveman must have known that, because he says he has watched “hours and hours” of my videos. So why did he misrepresent me?
“Monckton said there had been no change in the Himalayan glaciers for 200 years. There has.” No, I cited Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey, who had told me on several occasions that the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change”: indeed, it is the opposite, for advance and retreat are both changes. Why did the caveman misrepresent me?
“Monckton says only one Himalayan glacier has been retreating. Many have.” No, I mentioned the Gangotri and Ronggbuk glaciers as being notable examples of glacial retreat in the Himalayas caused by geological instability in the region. To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating. Why did the caveman misrepresent me? It is this kind of intellectual dishonesty that permeates the caveman’s cheesy videos. He has not the slightest intention of being accurate or fair. If he had, he would surely have mentioned that the IPCC tried for months to pretend that all of the glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone by 2035. The IPCC’s own “peer-reviewers” had said the figure should be “2350”, not “2035”, but the lead author of the chapter in question had left in the wrong figure, knowing it to be unverified, because, as he later publicly admitted, he wanted to influence governments.
The caveman says I misquoted the lead author who had left in the erroneous date for the extinction of the Himalayan glaciers, but here is what that author actually said in an interview with the Daily Mail: “We thought that if we can highlight it [the erroneous date], it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” For good measure, he said I had misquoted Sir John Houghton, the IPCC’s first science chairman, who had said that unless we announced disasters no one would listen.
Sir John, too, tried to maintain that I had misquoted him, and even menaced me with a libel suit, until I told him I had a copy of the cutting from the London Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995, in which he had said, “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster”, and that I also had a copy of an article in the Manchester Guardian of July 28, 2003, in which Sir John had luridly ascribed numerous specific natural disasters to “global warming”, which he described as “a weapon of mass destruction” that was “at least as dangerous as nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism”. Perhaps the caveman didn’t know any of this, but here’s the thing: I do not recall that he has ever bothered to check any of his “facts” with me (though, if he had, I wouldn’t have known because he lurks behind a pseudonym and, even though I am told he has revealed his identity I have no time to keep track of the pseudonyms of people who lack the courage and decency to publish under their own names).
“Monckton says Dr. Pinker found that a loss of cloud cover had caused recent warming. She disagreed.” No, I drew the conclusion from Dr. Pinker’s paper, and from several others, that cloud cover does not remain constant, but waxes and wanes broadly in step with the cooling and warming phases respectively of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I did not misrepresent Dr. Pinker’s paper in any way: I merely used it as a source for my own calculations, which I presented at the annual seminar on planetary emergencies of the World Federation of Scientists in 2010, where they were well received. Less cloud cover, particularly in the tropics, naturally warms the Earth: the point is surely uncontroversial. If one removes the influence of this natural warming phase from the record since 1976, it is reasonable to deduce that climate sensitivity based on that period is much lower than the IPCC thinks. Strictly speaking, one should study temperature trends in multiples of 60 years, so as to ensure that the warming and cooling phases of the PDO cancel one another out.
Frankly, that’s quite enough of these dull allegations. There are others, but they are all as half-baked and dishonest as these and it would be tedious to deal with each one. You get the drift: the caveman is a zealot and we need not ask who paid him to watch “hours and hours” of my YouTube videos to realize from these examples that his videos are unreliable. More importantly, it would interfere with my research: I hope shortly to be in a position to demonstrate formally that climate sensitivity is unarguably little more than one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate. My objective is to reach the truth, not to distort it or misrepresent it as the caveman has done.
He concludes by challenging his small band of followers to check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible”. Of course the Earth has been warming since 1750: I have at no point denied it, though that is the implication of the caveman’s statement.
And of course there are scientists who say CO2 is “largely responsible” for the warming: that is the principal conclusion of the IPCC’s 2007 report, reached on the basis of a fraudulent statistical abuse: comparison of the slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines on the global-temperature dataset falsely to suggest that “global warming” is accelerating and that it is our fault. Not that one has ever heard the caveman utter a word of condemnation of the IPCC’s too-often fictional “science”. But it is also reasonable to mention the growing band of scientists who say CO2 may not be “largely responsible” but only partly responsible for the warming since 1950. Would it not have been fairer if the caveman had pointed that out?
Climate skeptics have come under intensive attack from various quarters, and the attacks have too often been as unpleasantly dishonest as those of the caveman. Also, there is evidence that someone has been spending a lot of money on trying malevolently to discredit those who dare to ask any questions at all about the party line on climate.
For instance, after a speech by me in in the US in October 2009 went viral and received a million YouTube hits in a week (possibly the fastest YouTube platinum ever for a speech), a Texan professor who monitors the seamier side of the internet got in touch to tell me that someone had paid the operators of various search engines a sum that he estimated at not less than $250,000 to enhance the page rankings of some two dozen specially-created web-pages containing meaningless jumbles of symbols among which the word “Monckton video” appeared.
These nonsense pages would not normally have attracted any hits at all, and the search engines would normally have ranked them well below the video that had gone platinum. The intention of this elaborate and expensive artifice, as the professor explained, was to ensure that anyone looking for the real video would instead find page after page of junk and simply give up. The viral chain was duly broken, but so many websites carried the video that more than 5 million people ended up seeing it, so the dishonestly-spent $250,000 was wasted.
At one level, of course, all of this attention is an unintended compliment. But no amount of sneering or smearing will alter two salient facts: the Earth has not been warming at anything like the predicted rate and is not now at all likely to do so; and, in any event, even if the climate-extremists’ predictions were right, it would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective to wait and adapt in a focused way to any adverse consequences of manmade “global warming” than it would be to tax, trade, regulate, reduce, or replace CO2 today.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
==========================================================
Note: for anyone who wishes to see what this is about, you can see “potholer54” aka Peter Hadfield on Monckton at YouTube here – Anthony
UPDATE: Here is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. – Anthony
Response from Peter Hadfield:
In January, Christopher Monckton criticized me on WUWT after I made a series of videos exposing errors in most of his claims. I have asked Anthony Watts for the opportunity to respond in kind, so that we can put Mr. Monckton’s verbatim assertions up against the documentary evidence he cites.
At first I was puzzled as to what Mr. Monckton was responding to in his WUWT guest-post, because he failed to address any of the rebuttals or the evidence I showed in my five videos. Then I realized he must have watched only the last video in the series, including a light-hearted 30-second ‘mistake count’. So in this response I am going to deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, as shown and rebutted in my videos, rather than what he thinks I think he said, and what he thinks I rebutted.
Mr. Monckton doesn’t claim to be an expert, and neither do I. All I can do is to check and verify his claims. So the question is whether Mr. Monckton has reported the sources he cites accurately in order to reach his conclusions. I have made it very easy for you to check by playing clips of Mr. Monckton making these assertions in my videos, then showing images of the documentary evidence he cites. Since this response is text I will write out Mr. Monckton’s assertions verbatim and quote the documentary sources verbatim (with references in the body of the text.) References to the relevant video (linked at the bottom) and the time on the video where they are shown, will be shown in square brackets.
ON THE COOLING EARTH:
Since Mr. Monckton failed to address the evidence, but implies I was duplicitous in my timing, let’s see what my video actually showed. In a speech given in Melbourne in February 2009, Mr. Monckton said: “We’ve had nine years of a global cooling trend since the first of January 2001” [Ref 1 – 4:06] — and St. Paul in October 2009: “There has been global cooling for the last eight or nine years” [ibid.].
So in my video, the period Mr. Monckton was talking about was clearly identified in his own words, as well as in the graphs he showed, and I showed the dates the speeches were made, and the studies I cited covered the same period.
[“Waiting for Global Cooling” – R. Fawcett and D. Jones, National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, April 2008]
[“Statisticians reject global cooling” — Associated Press 10/26/2009 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33482750/ns/us_news-environment/]
ON THE MELTING OF GREENLAND:
Again, let’s deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, which is what I rebutted. In a speech in St. Paul in 2009, Mr. Monckton cited a paper by Ola Johannessen, and told the audience: “What he found was that between 1992 and 2003, the average thickness of the vast Greenland ice sheet increased by two inches a year.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM 11:40)
No, he found no such thing. Johannessen said he only measured the interior of Greenland above 1,500 metres [1 – 11:59] In fact, he specifically warns that the very conclusion Mr Monckton reaches cannot be made: “We cannot make an integrated assessment of elevation changes… for the whole Greenland Ice Sheet, including its outlet glaciers, from these observations alone, because the marginal areas are not measured completely…. ” [“Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland” Ola M. Johannessen et al, Science November 2005]
ON THE LOSS OF ARCTIC ICE:
Mr. Monckton claimed there is no long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic, and I rebutted this with studies showing a decline in Arctic summer sea-ice extent since satellite measurements began in 1979. [1 – 8:20 onwards]
Mr. Monckton’s response: “I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009.”
So, as I said, he did not tell his audience there had been a 30-year decline. Quite the opposite – he said there was no long-term decline. Mr. Monckton showed his audience a slide covering just three years, referring to the 2007 low as a “temporary loss of sea ice” which had recovered by 2009. Then he told them: “So we’re not looking at a sort of long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic.” [1 – 8:27]
ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN CO2 AND GLOBAL TEMPERATURES SINCE THE CAMBRIAN:
Mr. Monckton’s conclusion about a lack of correlation rests entirely on a graph showing CO2 concentration and temperature over the last 500 million years [3 – 0:04]. The graph uses temperature data from Scotese and CO2 data from Berner. Neither researcher supports Mr. Monckton’s ‘no correlation’ conclusion. On the contrary, Berner writes: “Over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the greenhouse effect.” [“Geocarb III: A revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time” — R. Berner and Z. Kothavala, American Journal of Science, Feb 2001]
How so? Because paleoclimatologists have to factor in solar output, which has been getting stronger over time [3 – 4:45]. If the rising curve of solar output is compared to global temperatures over the phanerozoic (500 million years) there is a similar lack of correlation. But it would be absurd to draw the conclusion that the sun therefore has no effect on climate.
So when gradually rising solar output is taken into account there is a very clear correlation between CO2 and global temperatures, and the source of Mr. Monckton’s data points that out. So does another senior researcher in the field [“CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” — D. Royer et al, GSA Today, March 2004].
ON THE PRE-CAMBRIAN ICE PLANET:
Again, let’s look at what I showed in my video, which was a clip of Mr. Monckton himself, speaking in a debate:
“750 million years ago, a mile of ice at the equator, ice planet all round, therefore at the surface 300,000 ppm of CO2. Will you tell me how that much CO2 could have been in the atmosphere and yet allowed that amount of ice at the equator?” [3 – 5:17]
Since Mr. Monckton thinks this is a puzzle for climatologists, let’s go through the well-understood explanation step by step.
Mr. Monckton agrees with the experts that the frozen planet was due to very weak solar output (about 8% less than today.) And he agrees that the high albedo (reflectivity) of this white surface would have reflected most of what little solar warmth the Earth did receive.
But he doesn’t seem to accept that volcanoes would have continued releasing CO2 into the atmosphere of this frozen planet over millions of years, and that this eventually warmed the planet enough to unfreeze it [“CO2 levels required for deglaciation of a ‘near-snowball’ Earth” T. Crowley et al, Geophysical Research Letters, 2001]. He cites no peer-reviewed research showing why paleoclimatologists are wrong. (No, the opinion of “a leading geologist” is not the same thing.)
ON HIMALAYAN GLACIERS:
Mr. Monckton writes in his WUWT response: “the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change””
Then let’s look at what Mr. Monckton actually said to his audience in St. Paul:
“The glaciers are showing no particular change in 200 years. The only glacier that’s declined a little is Gangoltri.” [3 – 10:20]
So is it a pattern of advance and retreat? Or no particular change? Or only one glacier retreating? Which?
In his WUWT resp onse, Mr. Monckton went on to say: “To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating.”
But you DID say it, Mr. Monckton. Here it is again: “Only one of them [Himalayan glaciers] is retreating a little and that’s Gangoltri.”
ON MISQUOTING MURARI LAL:
Speaking about Murari Lal, the man behind the IPCC’s 2035 disappearing glaciers fiasco, Mr. Monckton told his audience there was: “….an admission that he [Lal] knew that figure was wrong but had left it in anyway because he knew that the IPCC wanted to influence governments and politicians.”[4 – 3:50]
This is not even borne out by Monckton’s own source, cited in his response, which is a quote from Lal in the Daily Mail about the 2035 date: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” Nowhere does Lal say he knew the figure was erroneous.
MISQUOTING SIR JOHN HOUGHTON:
Mr. Monckton claims Houghton wrote this in the Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” [4 – 5:50]
And I maintain Houghton wrote: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster. It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.”
Who is right? Well, both Mr. Monckton and I have exactly the same source [Sunday Telegraph, September 10, 1995], but I actually show an image of it in my video [4 – 7:24]. Take a look. Even though it turns out my quote is correct and Mr. Monckton’s is clearly a gross misquote, he still insists in his WUWT response that he got the quote right.
ON HIS CLAIMS ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE SUN…
Mr. Monckton showed and quoted an extract from a paper by Sami Solanki: “The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episodoes on to come.” [5 – 1:21 onwards]
That could suggest the sun is a likely culprit for recent warming. But why didn’t Mr. Monckton tell or show his audience what Solanki wrote in the very next line?
“Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades.” [“Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the last 11,000 years” — S.K. Solanki et al, Nature Sep 2004]
ON THE ROLE OF THE SUN IN RECENT WARMING:
Mr. Monckton said: “The solar physicists – you might take Scafetta and West, say, in 2008, they attribute 69% of all the recent global warming to the sun.” [5 – 3:48]
No, they don’t. In my video [5 – 4:32] I showed the actual document Mr. Monckton refers to (an opinion piece) where Scafetta and West wrote: “We estimate that the sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in the Earth’s average temperature.” [“Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” Nicola Scafetta and Bruce J. West, Physics Today March 2008]
I hope we all understand the difference between “69%” and “as much as 69%.” But what about all those other “solar physicists” who purportedly support Monckton’s position? Well, they don’t. Solanki’s figure is up to just 30%, Erlykin less than 14%, Bernstad 7%, Lean ‘negligable’and Lockwood –1.3% [5 — 4:40]
[4:41 “Can solar variability explain global warming since 1970?”– S. K. Solanki and N. A. Krivova, Journal of Geophysical Research, May 2003]
[“Solar Activity and the Mean Global Temperature”
A.D. Erlykin et al, Physics Geo 2009]
[“Solar trends and global warming” — R. Benestad and G. Schmidt, Journal of Geophysical Research” July 2009]
[“How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006” J. Lean and D. Rind, Geophysical Research Letters, Sep 2008]
[“Recent changes in solar outputs and the global mean surface temperature. III. Analysis of contributions to global mean air surface temperature rise” — M. Lockwood, June 2008]
Mr. Monckton then asserts that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) agrees with this conclusion (that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming.) After he had been confronted during a TV interview with the plain fact that it didn’t [5 – 5:49 “Meet the Climate Sceptics” BBC TV Feb 2011], Monckton gave a reason for the error in his WUWT response:
“I cited a paper given by Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov at the 2004 symposium of the IAU in St. Petersburg, Fla, but put “IAU” at the foot of the slide rather than Dr. Abdussamatov’s name.”
Maybe so. But that doesn’t explain why Mr. Monckton continued to make exactly the same claim elsewhere. At St. Paul he said:
“Most solar physicists agree [that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming]. The International Astronomical Union in 2004 had a symposium on it, they concluded that that was the case.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:27]
And in his film ‘Apocalypse No!’ a slide headed ‘International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004’ was shown to an audience, along with its main conclusions. Third on the list, Monckton read: “The sun caused today’s global warming.”
Monckton told the audience: “This is not my conclusion, this is the conclusion of the International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004. This is what they said, this is not me talking here.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:34]
Mr. Monckton has to accept that this claim is completely spurious. This is why he dislikes detailed examinations of his sources. While he takes every opportunity to debate on stage, where his speaking skills are essential and his assertions can’t be checked, an online debate is far tougher, because every paper and fact CAN be checked. So come on, Mr. Monckton, let’s debate this on WUWT to see which of us has correctly read your sources.
The rebuttals I made are not “inconsequential aspects of my talks” as Mr. Monckton claims; they include almost every major topic he covers, from the melting of Arctic and glacial ice, to the role of the sun and the correlation between CO2 and temperature. His only recourse in his WUWT response was therefore to call me names, attack my character and my competence, and question my financing and my motivation… anything but answer the documentary evidence I presented. And then he adds one more error — a ridiculous claim that I asked my “small band of followers” to “check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible.”
Since I can’t establish that myself, I certainly wouldn’t advise other amateurs to have a go. So I ask Mr. Monckton to cite the source for this claim, sure in the knowledge that once again we will see a yawning gap between what the source actually says (in this case, me) and what Mr. Monckton claims it says.
References: (Hadfield’s own videos)
1 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM
2 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTY3FnsFZ7Q
3 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpF48b6Lsbo
4 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3giRaGNTMA
5 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRCyctTvuCo
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“science writer” – his silly allegations – I am disinclined to waste much time on him – he has ineptly and confusedly recycled from a serially mendacious video by some no-account non-climatologist at a fourth-rank bible college in Nowheresville, Minnesota, – the caveman – the caveman – The caveman – The caveman, if he were capable of checking these or any data – the caveman – The caveman – The caveman – the caveman – I am told he has revealed his identity I have no time to keep track of the pseudonyms of people who lack the courage and decency to publish under their own names – the caveman is a zealot and we need not ask who paid him to watch “hours and hours” of my YouTube videos – My objective is to reach the truth, not to distort it or misrepresent it as the caveman has done – the caveman’s – the caveman – the caveman – the caveman.
now lets have a look at how hadfield addressed monkton.
Christopher Monckton – Mr. Monckton
it’s clear in his response to hadfield that monkton hasn’t watched even a small part of any of the videos, instead relying on other people telling him what someone said in a video. in other words. he didn’t fact check, he didn’t go to the source, he relied on other people to tell him what the source said, and blindly believed them.
10 minutes on youtube would have given him hadfields name, something he knew he could have done, but chose not to, choosing instead to rely on petty insults in an attempt to belittle and berate any opposing view into submission. not the way anyone who claims to have advised anyone else on matters of science should go about conducting himself. it seems his diploma in journalism has gone to waste.
Here is take 2 on the Monckton comment of a moment ago. I found that one lacking in various ways.
If we assume most people who study something well can come to OK conclusions. If we assume most people mostly are not out to hoodwink others. Then it is reasonable to believe that (a) most climate scientists would, as a group, be in the best position to speak for the science of the climate and any potential predictions and that also (b) we would find that most people just would not be confident of the claims made by climate or generally by any other type of scientist or specialist. Add that the IPCC went too far 10 years back. Add that this topic has become politicized even beyond what is traditional for certain environment issues. It makes sense that Monckton (a) would largely believe his position and (b) be in good company. Most of us just have to be skeptic.. if we dig down inside. Monckton does a decent job conveying a point. Yes, it is possible he could be a bit dishonest — we can’t rule that out. Mostly, he presents a position that resonates with a lot of people. Climate scientists themselves believe to differing degrees the points the IPCC has presented over the years. In the end, a war will be waged and science and nature will be backing those who win. Nature is the ultimate arbiter (I completely agree.. and we are a part of it), but I do hope that we recognize any serious threats that could be looming while there is time to avoid a very costly situation for future generations.
should also add that 20 seconds on google would have given him hadfields name.
While Ben and Jose_X are playing: “Look! A kitten!”, I’m still waiting for them to attempt to falsify my hypothesis per the scientific method:
At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
Plants take in CO2, strip out the carbon to make sugars and cellulose, and emit the oxygen for animals to breathe. The added CO2 is measurably greening the planet. But climate alarmists want a less green planet. That’s why they demonize carbon. Obviously, they want to harm the biosphere by starving it of life-giving, harmless CO2.
Conclusion: warmists hate Gaia! And Mother Earth is getting even.
After reading post after post it should be obvious that Smokey is just a good old fashioned Troll and should be ignored.
@Smokey
>> I’m still waiting for [Ben and Jose_X] to attempt to falsify my hypothesis per the scientific method:
>> At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
Let me take this opportunity to read Ben’s mind. A little bit more mind-reading on this thread will not much alter the CO2 balance.
OK. I have contacted Ben’s force from a distance. Ben was indeed thinking the same thing I was. With 100% confidence, let me share Ben’s and my thoughts. ..Ben, with your permission…
[I just got his permission.. and he says that he might not offer up an alternative response. … Oh, wait, it seems Ben may have already submitted a comment. Moderators, can you please hold Ben’s comment if it arrives before mine?]
One spouse goes to the other spouse,
“I understand you are considering possibly upgrading the portion of the budget that we spend on security for this household. I object to another penny further — and object to current budget — until you can falsify my hypothesis per the scientific method:
“At current and projected crime rates in our neighborhood, current and projected risks for loss of jobs, etc, etc, etc, human engagements are harmless and are actually beneficial to our family.”
No, that conversation has not (not) taken place.
Smokey, you aren’t going to get very far with your line of reasoning, pressing everyone else to prove something, the opposite of which you expect we will all simply assume to be correct no matter the results of research and study. People aren’t going to buy it in large numbers. Society doesn’t work that way. You even stand the risk of finding someone that will engage you in a wasteful back-and-forth exchange, them saying, “no, you prove your hypothesis true, first”, against your, “no, you prove my hypothesis false, first”.
Policy decisions, whether related to the climate or not, are subjective decisions. Those making them will consider the advice of the economists, scientists, and other people in respective fields who have studied the pertinent issues the most and present their reams of evidence suggesting we should take out one or another type of insurance policy. No reasonable person in a position of power is going to fail to consider the evidence and instead insist that a scientist first prove their hypothesis “Popperfully”. We have a single complex planet that naturally resists attempts to be turned into a Poppernian laboratory or to be cloned multiple times a la Poppe(accent accute).
I have not claimed to be able to prove “AGW”, and, to show you how much I want to help you find your inner garden of peace, if you give me a list of the serious scientists who have published papers claiming to have proved AGW, I will give serious thought to contacting them asking for some serious enlightenment (which I would share with you diligently) or demand they cease and desits and then apologize to the world for their unPopperly conduct.
Smokey, I am ready for the name of the first 3 heathens.
>> Obviously, they want to harm the biosphere by starving it of life-giving, harmless CO2.
OK. Enough is enough. I demand the @-dot-com emails of 5 scientists who want to harm the biosphere by starving it of life-giving, harmless CO2!
@LeMorteDeArthur, Smokey is a darn good gardener. His points on the value of CO2 to plants are well received by almost every reader.
[REPLY: Jose, WordPress remembers the order stuff came in. If I hold Ben’s comment, when it is released it will still appear above yours. But so far, he’s not here. And a word of advice: Smokey’s bite is FAR worse than his bark. -REP]
@LeMorteDeArthur
On the other hand, you were correct in thinking that since trolls favor flesh and the hunt 3 to 1 over consuming sessile lifeforms that the Bayesian probability Smokey was indeed a troll out-weighted the odds that he (or it) was a mild-mannered forest ranger.
@LeMorteDeArthur
(continuing with my unusually diversionary projection)
You are almost as well aware as I am that you no longer trust your ability to scientifically disprove the 3rd Smokey supposition: Smokey is a mild-mannered forest ranger.
For that reason and for some others which have not yet fully hardened in your mind, you are going to conditionally put aside the question of Smokey’s true nature to question if the count dracula of Monckton could have actually evolved from cavemen during a period of time of no less than 30 years during a WMP 87% of scientists believe one could not tell wet wood from the trees.
[@Moderator from my next to last comment before this one: So are you saying you suspect Smokey may in fact not be a mild-mannered forest ranger. But do you have hard evidence?]
[REPLY: Smokey has good reason to adopt a pseudonym on this blog, but he is in fact known to Anthony and myself. He is not a forest ranger, has a scientific background that has in fact saved many lives, and is not to be trifled with. He CAN be wrong, I think, but have your ducks really lined up. -REP]
[@MyModerator (I know your shift is almost up, so I’ll be quick). We both know the answer to that question… and it’s a resounding NO!]
In fact, Smokey *is* a mild-mannered forest ranger. (and as late as it currently is, one could almost say, a sleeping bear — am I right or am I right? I think we’ll just let WordPress’s un-CUT time stamps (not Greenwich) and his absence from this feast answer that one).
Thank you moderator #1. [No, *you* are the BEST.]
In one of the comments above, it was stated that Monckton attributed not 33C but something like 18C to the ghg effect.
Assuming this comment was made, I want to clarify that the 33 C value comes from calculating Stefan Boltzmann and geometrical considerations of the sun/earth system on top of an albedo of .3. That is, the calculation uses the current .3 albedo value that is a consequence of our current atmosphere and land.
Some people (perhaps like Monckton?) have taken exception to this apparently and decided to calculate the reference temperature as if there were no atmosphere but only hard rock, water, ice, etc, albedo (no atmosphere contribution).
Each approach provides a correct answer to the respective question.
For the question of what is the ghg effect, then that would be 33 C (accepting Stefan Boltzmann, the Solar System conjecture, etc, etc), because the ghg effect we want to measure happens only after the sun’s radiation has interacted with the atmosphere and been reduced by 0.3X.
Hose_B says:
“Smokey, you aren’t going to get very far with your line of reasoning, pressing everyone else to prove something, the opposite of which you expect we will all simply assume to be correct no matter the results of research and study. People aren’t going to buy it in large numbers. Society doesn’t work that way. You even stand the risk of finding someone that will engage you in a wasteful back-and-forth exchange, them saying, “no, you prove your hypothesis true, first”, against your, “no, you prove my hypothesis false, first”.”
There is so much pseudo science and anti-science in that one paragraph I feel liike a kid in a candy store.
First, nobody is forcing you to try and falsify my hypothesis. We all know you woulld if you could. And I’m not asking you to prove anything. Rather, I am challenging you to disprove it. But your series of rambling posts all carefully evade the attempt. [BTW, thanks for doing more than your part to increase WUWT’s traffic numbers!]
Next, there is no credible “research and study” that shows CO2 is harming the planet. And it doesn’t matter how “society works”; this is science, not sociology.
The central conjecture in this whole debate is the increasingly preposterous claim that rising CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate disruption. Anyone with any intelligence can see that is not happening. Not even a little. If you understood the null hypothesis you would see that there is no problem. To demonstrate that observation I proposed a testable, falsifiable hypothesis. But so far, no one has been able to falsify it. Instead, whenever I post it you folks get together and yell, “Look over there! A kitten!” And ignore that uncomfortable hypothesis.
As I’ve pointed out, that simple hypothesis is both falsifiable and testable. But so far, no one has been able to show global harm from CO2, and I’ve provided plenty of testable evidence showing that CO2 is beneficial to the biosphere. Satellite measurements show that the extra CO2 is greening the planet – something the alarmists hate, because it shows that fossil fuel-using scientific skeptics are the true Greens.
. . .
LeMorteDeArthur says:
“After reading post after post it should be obvious that Smokey is just a good old fashioned Troll and should be ignored.”
By all means, ignore me if you can. But obviously you cannot, as your post shows.
I’ve been commenting here for five years, and been called quite a few names, although “troll” is rare. Why is that, you ask? Glad you asked! The reason is because I try to provide thoughtful, logical comments. For example, in my post directly above yours where you called me a troll and told others to ignore me, I commented:
“I’m still waiting for [Ben & Jose] to attempt to falsify my hypothesis per the scientific method:
At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
“Plants take in CO2, strip out the carbon to make sugars and cellulose, and emit the oxygen for animals to breathe. The added CO2 is measurably greening the planet. But climate alarmists want a less green planet. That’s why they demonize carbon. Obviously, they want to harm the biosphere by starving it of life-giving, harmless CO2.”
.
Rather than attempt a reasonable response, or admit that you are unable to falsify my hypothesis, you called me a troll. As I’ve often commented, if it were not for psychological projection, the alarmist crowd wouldn’t have much to say.☺
James Sexton>> absurd things like “heat defies physical laws and hides at the bottom of the ocean”
This does sound absurd, but I think whoever said that may have been referring to a movement of heat into or out of the measurement space at the bottom of the ocean.
This next article and my response to it in the comments section may help explain more carefully.
[I don’t have first hand experience with how/where/when/etc these ocean measurements are taken, so I am taking an educated guess.]
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/ocean-heat-content-transfer-of-heat-through-the-top-700-metres-gavin-schmidt-vs-roger-pielke-sr/#comment-15963
Smokey says:
February 16, 2012 at 12:19 pm
It is clear from your name smokey that you are relying on research down on crops in a controlled environment like your garage, but real scientific experiments show that “Across all multifactor manipulations, elevated carbon dioxide suppressed root allocation, decreasing the positive effects of increased temperature, precipitation and nitrogen deposition on productivity.” http://www.sciencemag.org/content/298/5600/1987.abstract. Christopher Field who has done countless studies in this field says elevated CO2 does not always increased plant growth and when it is combined with other environmental factors, it can actually decrease planet growth.
University of illinois is doing studies on increased CO2 and found that it produced more bugs attacking the crops and even increased the life expectance of the bugs so that they could eat and reproduce more. Even a forest study in Europe found that during a heat way the forest CO2 up take reduced by 50%. As temperatures increase, bugs like pine beetles are surviving longer and being more destructive. This is a huge problem in Canada with enormous areas of forest already dead. Then there is the fact glaciers are disappearing and are the main source of irrigation for crop lands, this is a serious problem that is expected to drastically reduce the amount of water available.
Your frivolous idea that you have somehow actually done a scientific experiment to deduce if your null is right or wrong is laughable. Actual experiments that show the potential impacts of increased CO2 in nature have yielded many different findings. But the argument still comes down to your lack of acceptance of science. You know CO2 is a greenhouse gas that will warm the planet but you make your conclusions based on the most outrageous skeptical papers, and completely disregard the fact that there are hundreds of papers on climate sensitivity. These papers you claim are the only ones to get it right (because they are all low) are miniscule compared to the sea of papers that get a much higher value, they have even all been found wrong. Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi’s 0.0°C has been shown wrong http://tinyurl.com/7evhvtr Dr Spencer under 0.5°C has been found wrong http://tinyurl.com/28e5a7l Prof Richard Lindzen’s little over 1°C also found wrong http://tinyurl.com/28e5a7l
The IPCC look at all the climate sensitivity findings and determine the best value. You cannot expect normal people to believe only a couple of skeptical scientists when there are hundreds of other papers to also consider. The IPCC look at all of them and when put together on a graph its is extremely easy to see why they come to the conclusion of 3 Degrees Celsius warming http://tinypic.com/r/vd0nki/5 This is why your absurd idea that we should accept that CO2 will cause ≈1°C warming per doubling, ± ≈0.5°C is a joke.
>> As I’ve pointed out, that simple hypothesis is both falsifiable and testable. But so far, no one has been able to show global harm from CO2
So suggest a test for us that you think if passed would prove “global harm from CO2”.
We are playing a game of evidence weighing no matter the test, and Smokey has his own standard just like everyone else has their own unique standard.
Whenever a person says, “prove it”, they are really saying, “prove it to my standard”. Science doesn’t advance because of consensus !!! As concerns policies, enough individuals will probably tolerate/accept sufficiently whatever gets enacted… or else there will be a bloody revolution and gnashing of teeth.
We can probably agree to a very high degree (and use computers as objective third parties) that something has been proven when we are merely dealing with logic and symbols. The minute we carry out science — model real life — we lose the very high degree of confidence that can come with depending solely on a fixed set of abstract rules.
minor9985,
You are all over the map in your desperate attempt to try and show that internationally respected climatologists like Prof Richard Lindzen and others are wrong. But Lindzen has forgotten more than you could ever possibly learn about the subject, and your links to Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science ignore the embarassing fact that PSPS is the only blog listed on the WUWT sidebar as being “Unreliable”. Linking to unreliable sources doesn’t do anything for your credibility.
Since your questionable “authority” is not reliable, it must be ignored. It is only propaganda by a censoring cartoonist. If that is the best you can do, you fail.
If the planet’s sensitivity to 2xCO2 was any higher than Prof Lindzen posits, then any rise in beneficial, harmless CO2 would cause a rise in temperature. But there is no evidence of that occurring. Rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature, on all time scales.
You live in a bubble of ignorance, actually believing that CO2 will cause runaway global warming when the planet itself is falsifying your nonsense. So who should we believe? Planet Earth? Or you? I think most reasonable folks would prefer to believe what the planet is telling us, over a know-nothing water carrier for the alarmist cult.
Hose_B,
As usual you are just rambling. Psychologists call it free association, and it is meaningless. Your comment: “So suggest a test…” shows that you still don’t understand. All you need to do is provide verifiable evidence showing that the added CO2 has caused global damage or harm, per the scientific method. It is not my job to hold your hand and lead you to non-existent evidence.
If you cannot produce proof that directly links the rise in CO2 to global harm, then the obvious conclusion is that CO2 does not cause any harm. And I have provided ample evidence that the rise in CO2 is beneficial. But of course it is, as numerous experiments have proven beyond any doubt.
It is, in fact, you who will not accept the reality that more CO2 is harmless and beneficial. And as usual, you hide behind you endless meaningless quibbles rather than accept my straightforward challenge. An honest person would either try their best to falsify my hypothesis, or admit that there is no evidence showing that CO2 is not harmless and beneficial. But that person is not you.
>> Rather, I am challenging you to disprove it.
I am challenging you to falsify that 8X CO2 will result in greater cumulative harm than 1X CO2.
We all know that more CO2 in the atmosphere means higher temps than we would otherwise have, and this creates greater need for fresh water and energy.
Fresh water is already a threatened resource.
We also know that fossil fuels are getting more scarce by the minute (the rate of fossil fuel creation is many times lower than the rate of their exploitation). This promotes higher costs and rationing over time. This lowers the quality of living and promotes war, violence, and death. The effects of this can already be seen in modern times, inspiring classics such as “The Road Warrior”, starting Mel Gibson, where a gasoline rich desert community must defend themselves against violent criminals.
We know rising seas promotes displacement of people and loss of valuable infrastructure. It promotes reduced living spaces and hence also promotes conflict and violence. Inspired classics include Waterworld, starting Kevin Costner.
We know that nuclear fuels present a number of difficult compromises. [I won’t go into details unless you ask, but rest assured classics like C.H.U.D. would likely not be here but for these nuclear dilemmas.]
Honestly, life is about compromises and opportunity costs. You don’t get a free ride on the null hypothesis.
>> And it doesn’t matter how “society works”; this is science, not sociology.
Popper did not have vague words like “harmful” in mind. “Harmful” is a social-sciency word which leads to policy decisions. It is not a word used in hypothesis of hard sciences.
>> If you cannot produce proof that directly links the rise in CO2 to global harm, then the obvious conclusion is that CO2 does not cause any harm.
CO2’s rise is already well correlated with a strain on natural resources.
If you can’t prove that further rises will actually defy our expectations and unexpectedly be more beneficial, “then the obvious conclusion is that CO2 rises do cause further harm.”
[“Yeh, I know, I put the paraphrases in quote marks. I’ll respond when the video comes out.”]
>> As usual you are just rambling.
As usual your mind reading pierced my rambling in time to push this thread to loftier heights.
>> All you need to do is provide verifiable evidence showing that the added CO2 has caused global damage or harm, per the scientific method. It is not my job to hold your hand and lead you to non-existent evidence.
“All you need to do is provide verifiable evidence showing that the added CO2 has *not* caused global damage or harm, per the scientific method. It is not my job to hold your hand and lead you to non-existent evidence.”
And further:
“It is, in fact, you who will not accept the reality that more CO2 is *not necessarily* harmless and beneficial. And as usual, you hide behind you [sic] endless meaningless quibbles rather than accept my straightforward challenge. An honest person would either try their best to falsify my hypothesis, or admit that there is no evidence showing that CO2 is *necessarily* harmless and beneficial. But that person is not you.”
Smokey says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:46 am
Science is more than WUWT!! I come to WUWT so I can see both sides of the debate, but because you lack the ability to think for yourself you did not notice that I liked you a summary of a peer reviewed paper that rebutted Lindzens work http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2009GL042314.shtml
Using 1°C for a doubling of CO2 “0.27°C/(W/m2)” would have had to contribute 0.5°C to global warming up until now. As CO2 has increase so has temperatures and as pointed out Lindzen was wrong http://tinyurl.com/858hos2 .
Over the last 500 million years CO2 has reached over 5000 ppm compared to 390ppm now, yet temperatures did not have to go through the roof to reach 5000ppm. To think that CO2 can only increase/decrease due to temperatures is wrong. To claim that the recent rise in CO2 is due to increased temperatures is also wrong, CO2 has a fingerprint and the build up of it in the atmosphere at present is linked to burning of fossil fuels. Also as I pointed out before, the ocean is increasing its concentration of CO2, not decreasing it.
How would you know what the earth is telling you, you have no idea how the climate system works. You think CO2 is rising naturally, you don’t understand ENSO or solar forcing, you see a drop in temperatures and think it somehow proves CO2 is not contributing to global warming, but we all know that when there is volcanic eruptions or a La Nina events there is a cooling. [SNIP: A little less of the insult, please. -REP]
Hose_B and minor9985,
Both of you have the Scientific Method exactly backward and upside-down: the onus is entirely upon those claiming that CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate disruption to defend your repeatedly falsified conjecture. You have both obviously failed: the climate is well within its historical parameters. Nothing unusual is occurring. Therefore, the null hypothesis remains un-falsified, which absolutely debunks your falsified alternate CO2=CAGW conjecture. [I don’t expect either of you to understand this, since you cannot even explain the null hypothesis. And as usual, you don’t understand the rigors of the Scientific Method.]
When/if it dawns on either of you what is required by the Scientific Method and the null hypothesis, wake me. Until then ignorance is bliss, so both of you kids should be very happy.
Yep; it’s called The Trenberth Twist, and should be labelled as such wherever it occurs. It comes in all sorts of guises, but needs to be nailed every time.
Smokey says:
February 17, 2012 at 8:46 pm
As more research has been done on climate sensitivity the idea of a runaway global warming has reduced. But so you and others can understand it better, it relates to CO2 driving up temperatures and forcing the oceans to release more CO2, causing more warming. Another one stems from the Siberian Tundra and the fact more Methane is being be released as the earth warms up. But because you have very little understanding of what you are talking about, you go on to say that “Nothing unusual is occurring” which you have continued to state from the very beginning. Yet I show you that temperatures have followed solar forcing for the last 11000 years up until the late 70s when manmade CO2 (a greenhouse gas) force temperatures up even though solar forcing went down. You accept this by stating that CO2 has a forcing value of ≈1°C warming per doubling, ± ≈0.5°C. I link a temperature graph that clearly shows the earth should be cooling but is warming in line with CO2 http://tinyurl.com/858hos2 and I show you that countless climate sensitivity studies when averaged out come to a value of 3°C http://oi43.tinypic.com/vd0nki.jpg .
But I think you just need to learn what is expected to happen with one degree warming, I will let National Geographic explain it for you:
1 Degree Warming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_ZQRIsn2pA
2 Degrees Warming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-0_gDXqYeQ
3 Degrees Warming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rdLu7wiZOE
4 Degrees Warming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skFrR3g4BRQ
5 Degrees Warming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nRf2RTqANg
6 Degrees Warming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8qmaAMK4cM (Mass Extinction)
The scientific studies are numerous and all point to man increasing CO2 and that it will warm the planet. Do you think there is one null that can make it all disappear??
Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, with 80% of atmospheric CO2 rising occurring after 1940 (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview_2006.html). About 40% of human CO2 emissions are being absorbed, mostly by vegetation and the oceans. The rest remains in the atmosphere. As a consequence, atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years from 270ppm post-industrial to 389ppm today (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5958/1394.abstract).
A natural change of 100ppm normally takes 5,000 to 20.000 years. The recent increase of 100ppm has taken little over 50 years. We know for a fact the recent rise in CO2 is manmade because when we measure the type of carbon accumulating in the atmosphere, we observe more of the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/icdc7/proceedings/abstracts/keeling.rFF328Oral.pdf).
If all this CO2 is increasing the greenhouse effect we should be able to see it, so with the use of satellites we can measure less heat escaping out to space, at the particular wavelengths that CO2 absorbs heat, thus finding direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html).
If less heat is escaping to space, it has to radiate back down to the Earth’s surface. Surface measurements confirm this, observing more downward infrared radiation (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml). Even when they look at the downward radiation, they find more heat returning at CO2 wavelengths (http://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100737.htm).
Science then looks at how CO2 participates in the climate system. Will the same null disprove all this science or will you need another null??
With over half a billion years worth of climate data, comprehensive conclusions have shown over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and temperature, as manifested by the atmospheric greenhouse effect.” p.201. (http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~ajs/2001/Feb/qn020100182.pdf). This was the same conclusion for all the other studies:
CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate — D. Royer et al, GSA Today, March 2004 (http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/GSA_Today.pdf)
CO2 forced climate thresholds during the phanerozoic, Dana L. Royer 2005 (http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf)
Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature, Andrew A. Lacis, Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind and Reto A. Ruedy, 2010 (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.abstract)
Science has studied the Greenhouse Effect for many years, and knows very well that CO2 contributes 26% to the warming of the planet:
“Absorption of Solar Radiation by Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” T.G. Kyle et al, Jurnal of the Optica; Society of America. Vol. 55.
“Direct Absorption of Solar Radiation by Atmospheric Water Vapor, Carbon Dioxide and Molecular Oxygen” Giich Yamamoto, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences Dec 1961, pp. 182-188.
“Solar Radiation Absorption by CO2, Overlap With H2O, and a Parametenzation for General Circulation Models” S. M. Freidenreich, V. Ramaswamy, Geophysical Research, Dec 1992.
“Parameterization for the absorption of solar radiation by O2 and CO2 with application to climate studies” Ming-Dad Chou, Journal of Climate, 1990 Vol 3 pp. 209-217
I’ll restate my previous point: If some of you “skeptics” don’t believe in or trust the peer-review process governing mainstream science, then by what standard do you substantiate credible science from junk science? What makes Richard Lindzen’s work, for instance, legitimate in your eyes, when it has been largely panned by the scientific community simply on the merit of its flaws?
Do you feel that scientific consensus should extend to simply being left open to the interpretation/opinion of any arm-chair expert with an internet connection? Why should these views be taken seriously by anyone in charge of anything?
For instance…should NASA, the U.S military or Nuclear Energy Institute etc. listen to people like Smokey and James Sexton in the event that they should hypothetically express “skepticism” towards the science that goes into building spacecraft, weaponry or nuclear reactors?
Before you go crying apples and oranges about the differences in the fields and how you feel that one deserves to be taken more seriously than the other, consider the central purpose of the analogy, which is the matter of deciding who is most likely to be in the better position of knowing what they’re talking about, by virtue of sheer time spent devoted to studying the topic.
Brian H,
minor9985 doesn’t understand that rises in CO2 always follow rises in temperature, on all time scales from months to hundreds of millennia. Typically the rise is ≈800 years, ±200 years. At least part of the current rise is due to the global and very warm MWP, which ended around 1200 A.D. The rest is probably due to human emissions. But as usual, 9985 fails to falsify the hypothesis that states:
At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
CO2 causes no global harm. Therefore it is ipso facto “harmless”. And it is causing a measurable greening of the planet. Therefore it is beneficial. It turns out that the CO2=CAGW scare is exactly contrary to reality.
But when a belief takes hold, some folks become hooked on it, and they spend countless hours in their mom’s basement furiously trying to convince anyone who will listen that Down is Up, Ignorance is Strength, and CO2=CAGW. Sucks to be them, doesn’t it? They are clearly losing the argument, because what they sincerely believe just isn’t so… as the planet is clearly demonstrating.