The stupid, it burns. OTOH, he’s with Gore and Hansen and there’s press with him, so maybe he’s just being sociable . Get a load of this from Richard Branson’s blog, CO2 can apparently contradict solar forcing due to the Earth’s precession wobble and orbit:
Here’s the money quote:
The good news is we now know how to heat up the world. We just release an excess of carbon into it. So any time we’re heading to an ice age again that is what we can do to stop it.
Yeah, sure, that’ll go over well with the people that think Branson, Gore, and Hansen are heroes. And walking from Scotland to North Africa? Really?
But I agree with Sir Richard on one point; warmth is far preferable to an ice sheet. You can’t dodge ice sheets but you can take steps to stay cool.
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If wishes were airplanes, CAGW would fly.
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Maybe Virgin Air should stop leaving all that co2 in the atmosphere. He should ground all of his jets if he believes that crap.
How *does* he get on with Burt Rutan??
I don’t think Sir Richard is right, regarding this part of his blog comment:
“If you look at the history of the world we are normally in an ice age. Only 10,000 years ago you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice. When it melted sea levels rose by hundreds of feet.”
Aside from the fact that 10,000 years ago we were already out of the last ice age, let that one go, was the Mediterranean ever covered with ice, or at least the narrow passage from Gibraltar to Morocco? Perhaps I’m wrong, wouldn’t be the first time, but can someone tell us whether it is true that ice went to North Africa in the last ice age?
Well, you’ve got to admit, he and we will be long dead before he is found to be wrong, so there is little downside for him.
The graph above indicates “eccentricity” is trending down. Given Branson, Hansen and Gore’s beliefs, shouldn’t that be going up sharply? 😉
I cannot find anything showing that the ice sheets extended to North Africa. How does someone that inept become so wealthy?
Or we could get Branson, Gore, and Hansen to release a lot of hot air, that might warm the climate up.
cui bono says:
How *does* he get on with Burt Rutan??
That is a good question.
Got a map of extent of ice caps at different times in the last ice age. Bottom line: even at the height of the last ice age, not even southern England was covered with ice, and certainly the Mediterranean was not. See:
http://donsmaps.com/icemaps.html
Thus Sir Richard, in saying that you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice 10,000 years ago (when the ice age was already over) or indeed at any time in the last ice age, is a very uninformed statement (see my comment of 9:40 AM for what Sir Richard said)..
So Branson is a believer in Geoengineering:
“If we move quickly and get on top of this issue we could regulate the earth’s temperature so that we need never go back into another ice age. And have the best of all worlds.”
So he’s trying to resurrect Carbon Capture and Storage, but with a twist:
Kind of like “catch and release”, I suppose.
Is he serious? (and we thought biofuels for airplanes was silly idea).
Kurt in Switzerland
My area of southern England is literred with gravel pits – and as Richard Branson was almost certainly told when he was at school in southern England, these are basically massive terminal moraines dropped close to the southern extent of glaciers in recent ice ages.
North Africa? Total bollux!
John,
Actually it appears that due to the drop in sea level the Straits of Gibraltar was dry during part of the ice age. So no ice to walk over but probably dry land.
I see he purposely said carbon instead of carbon dioxide.
How in the future will this carbon be released when ancient carbon fuel sources become scarce in the future, by burning down all the forests ?
Twat Branson. He is another one with houses everywhere and aircraft to fly him there for weekends.
“Only 10,000 years ago you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice. “
I’m no ice-age-ologist, but I believe the European ice sheets didn’t extend much south of the latitude of London during the last ice age, save for an isolated ice sheet over the Alps. In other words, you certainly could not walk on ice all of the way to North Africa.
Branson doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to be smarter than average.
Being a greenie is profitable, it’s happy-face PR, and it makes him feel good in side. Why would he want to look any closer than that. And once you are committed, you are committed. No going back. No saying “oops”. Just fight to prove that whatever you said last year is still true.
if idiots could fly, we would never see the sun again. It will cloudy the whole day long…
Russ in Houston says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:43 am
. . . . inept become so wealthy?”
He started by selling music. Excellent training as a climate scientist! As they say, the rest is history.
People like Branson, Gore, etc. should learn to keep their mouths shut – the stench is overwhelming.
Let us judge ahr-Richard not by what he is saying, but by what he is doing: He has an airline, a Formula 1 team, and planes that fly into outer space. Now we know why: He wants to prevent the next ice age.
Would Trenberth say Sir Richard should leave climate risk assessment to the experts?
I am reminded of the H.P. Lovecraft tale, “At the Mountains of Madness”.
From Branson’s 1st Antarctica blog:
http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/antarctica-log-1–first-24-hours-at-sea
“So at our next OceanElders meeting we will debate how the climate can be policed better and how krill can be protected.”
“OceanElders” include Branson, Jackson Browne, Neil Young and Ted Turner…
These are to be the world’s new climate “police”?
Branson’s 2nd posting included this:
http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/antarctica-log-2–no-lie-can-live-forever
“As Jim Hansen the scientist said on this ship: ‘We cannot continue to burn all the coal, oil from the tar sands without pushing the planet out of control. It’s time to stop subsidising fossil fuels. The quickest way of solving the problem is to tax all fossil fuels and distribute the taxes back to every man and woman in the country. Within 10 years we’d have a 30% reduction in fuel use and begin to get on top of this most worrying of problems.’ ”
There you have it from “Hansen the scientist” – socialistic taxes can solve climate change….end of problem….
I’m so glad he sold Virgin Music in 1992. So I can buy their records without regrets.