So much for the theory that AGW increases water vapor and positive feedback

(((Note to moderator, please discard my first comment and replace it with this one in which I have corrected a typo)).
I don’t get the title of this piece. As the atmosphere gets warmer, it holds more water. But the amount of water in (evaporation) still will equal the amount of water out (condensation. Thus, in very general terms, on the surface of the Earth dry places will tend to get drier and wet places will tend to get wetter (or collect more snow). Therefore, evidence of drier places does not justify the title of this piece – while it might fool the public that does not generally understand what I have said here.

Another example of the challenges of climatology as a generalist discipline. I wrote about these issues with general circulation and specifically the Hadley Cell and the failures of the IPCC and other models as representations of reality years ago and again recently in two articles.
http://drtimball.com/2012/static-climate-models-in-a-virtually-unknown-dynamic-atmosphere/
http://drtimball.com/2012/errors-and-omissions-in-major-tropical-climate-mechanism-invalidate-ipcc-computer-models/
The real travesty is CSIRO and all government run weather and climate agencies are just catching up with what we knew thirty years ago. They are victims of the hijacking of real climatology by the pseudo- climate science of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) sanctioned IPCC.
Get the government and the politics out of climatology and stop pretending that a specialist in one small part of a vastly complex interconnected system is a climate scientist and we might have a chance at better understanding. Something about not seeing the forest for the trees.

Like Eric I don’t see the connection between this article’s title and decreased humidity in the atmosphere (a negative feedback). I also don’t yet see a positive feedback. What is demonstrated is a change in regional rain fall pattern as a result of changing atmospheric circulation patterns, not atmospheric warming, chaning humidity levels, or increased storm activity. This probably means I need to find and read the original paper. I would also say that if the only thing that changes as a result of heating from increased CO2 is an expansion of the dry zones then we have a problem. That alone is bad enough to be a concern. I hate to invoke the old joke, but this analysis probably needs more grant money to discover the whole truth. The grain belts in both hemispheres are facing significant change if this is an accurate portrayal of the effects of CO2 warming. No feedbacks needed, apparently, as this appears to be a direct affect of CO2 warming warming alone.

So much for the title of posts on WUWT having anything whatsoever to do with the study that is discussed in the body of the post!
The article discussed didn’t have anything whatsoever to do with the water vapor feedback. It had to do with region variations in rainfall patterns that are observed and also predicted by climate models.
And, the water vapor feedback is already well-verified by observations as discussed in these two articles, for example:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841.abstract

REPLY: So much for you being able to look at the bigger picture of research. This is where I was coming from:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/hall0001.pdf
Abstract. Using two versions of the GFDL coupled ocean-atmosphere model, one where
water vapor anomalies are allowed to affect the longwave radiation calculation and one
where they are not, we examine the role of water vapor feedback in internal precipitation
variability and greenhouse-gas-forced intensification of the hydrologic cycle. Without
external forcing, the experiment with water vapor feedback produces 44% more annualmean,
global-mean precipitation variability than the one without. We diagnose the reason
for this difference: In both experiments, global-mean surface temperature anomalies are
associated with water vapor anomalies. However, when water vapor interacts with
longwave radiation, the temperature anomalies are associated with larger anomalies in
surface downward longwave radiation. This increases the temperature anomaly damping
through latent heat flux, creating an evaporation anomaly. The evaporation anomaly, in
turn, leads to an anomaly of nearly the same magnitude in precipitation. In the
experiment without water vapor feedback, this mechanism is absent. While the interaction
between longwave and water vapor has a large impact on the global hydrologic cycle
internal variations, its effect decreases as spatial scales decrease, so water vapor feedback
has only a very small impact on grid-scale hydrologic variability. Water vapor feedback
also affects the hydrologic cycle intensification when greenhouse gas concentrations
increase. By the 5th century of global warming experiments where CO2 is increased and
then fixed at its doubled value, the global-mean precipitation increase is nearly an order of
magnitude larger when water vapor feedback is present. The cause of this difference is
similar to the cause of the difference in internal precipitation variability: When water
vapor feedback is present, the increase in water vapor associated with a warmer climate
enhances downward longwave radiation. To maintain surface heat balance, evaporation
increases, leading to a similar increase in precipitation. This effect is absent in the
experiment without water vapor feedback. The large impact of water vapor feedback on
hydrologic cycle intensification does not weaken as spatial scales decrease, unlike the
internal variability case. Accurate representations of water vapor feedback are therefore
necessary to simulate global-scale hydrologic variability and intensification of the
hydrologic cycle in global warming.
So if positive water vapor feedback were occurring, based on this idea, we’d see an “intensification of the
hydrologic cycle”, i.e. more rainfall, runoff, and evaporation. That would apply to the souther hemisphere continents too.

For those who do not see the connection, Eric, dp, the difference is WHERE the moisture is located relative to insolation, the energy input from the sun. If the greenhouse gases are not in the region where most of the energy is coming in, then they cannot trap it, it reflects and re-radiates.

In August 2012, global water vapour levels were 0.13 mms/m2 or 0.6% above normal – ie. nothing.
Australia’s individual levels are very highly dependent on the ENSO pattern (in La Nina’s, there is more rain and more water vapour and there are lower values during El Ninos) versus some Hadley cell explanation. There is no long-term trend in the ENSO so one would expect no long-term trend in Australia rainfall either.

When the hydrological cycle intensifies it doesn’t produce more humidity globally if the cycle is faster.
A faster hydro cycle can be larger without increasing humidity because the water is in vapour form for a shorter time.
Nor need it be accompanied by a higher temperature globally as opposed to locally because a faster or larger hydro cycle ejects energy to space faster as a negative feedback.
My position is that solar cycles, ocean cycles AND GHGs all produce a negative system response via a change in the hydro cycle which manifests itself as a change in the global air circulation including the position, sizes and intensities of the subtropical high pressure cells.
However, the contribution from human CO2 emissions would be imperceptible compared to that from sun and ocean variability.

The other point is, without extra water to multiply the warming of CO2, CO2 alone doesn’t come close to cause enough heating to match measurements. As the paper said, approximately the correct amount of water is falling Australia, but further to the south (this did not apply to Africa or Chile, but that is possibly a measurement issue ie maybe the rain is falling into the ocean). So at least in Australia there’s no indication of the excess water required to create CO2 warming.

They could’ve saved time and money and just asked any Melbournian. We could’ve told them we observed this change. During the 80’s Melbourne’s weather would track in a pretty much Easterly direction from the Great Australian Bight, then in the 90’s our weather would track South-East across Australia bringing hotter drier weather. Then during the 00’s the weather tracks moved further South so now our weather tracks North-East from the direction of Antarctica (reversal occurred about 2008).
You can physically notice the difference as we USED to know we’d have the same weather as Perth 3 days later (Adelaide got it 2 days later). Then we had to start looking at the Western Australia Central Coast in the 90’s. Now we look at what comes out of the Southern Ocean. These last 3-4 years have been cold and wet as a result.

Eastern Australia has just experienced 3 of the wettest years in more than a decade including 2012 which was the wettest since the 1974 flood year.
CSIRO abandoned science years ago and now produce propaganda for sale.

Oh – and included in that devastating 1997-2009 millenium drought were the 2001 floods of northern NSW and South East Queensland – road transport severly disrupted due to flooding.
Eastern Australia has seen way above average rainfall since the drought broke in Spring 2009 – especially northern NSW and SE Queensland.
Wivenhoe dam in SE Queensland went from <15 % in Spring 2009 to over 65 % after the 09/10 wet season (Summer here) to 199% in January 2011 where it nearly created an even worse flood disaster because politicians listened to climate scientists claiming it would never rain again and refused to lower what is essentially a flood control dam – then tried to blame the engineers for the politicians stupidity in believing the lie that it would never rain again.
January to June 2012 was the wettest six months since 1974 – despite no major flood event like 2011.
Every major wet season in my life has coincided with LaNina conditions in Eastern Australia.
After 2 major wet years I am hoping that the ENSO meter stays in neutral territory and we have a more normal summer – but I wouldn't bet on it though.

Dale @ 1:01 pm:
Yes, in Melbourne a few years ago you could always rely on getting a dose of Perth’s weather 3 days later. Not so more recently.

“So if positive water vapor feedback were occurring, based on this idea, we’d see an “intensification of the hydrologic cycle”, i.e. more rainfall, runoff, and evaporation. That would apply to the southern hemisphere continents too.”
The only “positive water vapor feedback” or “intensification of the hydrologic cycle” only happen in the “Gore Effect”.

Once again the task shall fall to CSIRO to show to Australia and the world the proven damages wrought by Anthropogenic Climate Change. The models are in agreement, now backed by real world confirmed evidence. There is only one solution to save Australia from the horrendous ravaging drought to come.
Build more desalinization plants.
Hopefully CSIRO will be able to bring about this certain cure for ACC before the Great Barrier Reef is irrevocably destroyed beyond any hope of recovery, again.

Rosco, Nelson, and others have got that right. CSIRO “science”: By the government, for the government. The propaganda that CSIRO churns out, at the public’s expense, is no more reliable than its models. They don’t even have the right balance of energy.
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/17674/Climate-scientist-Dr-Murry-Salby-explains-why-manmade-CO2-does-not-control-climate
Who cares how one of their internal cogs affects another? Yet, those models are the excuse for building expensive but pointless desalination plants, which have inflated water costs, and our big new tax burden, through which power bills have jumped dramatically.
This must be the payoff of “Trickle Down Government”.

Oxygen isotopes in tree rings are a good proxy for Amazon precipitation and El Niño-Southern Oscillation variability
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/27/1205977109

REPLY: The story is that none of you supposed climate experts have any real clue of how it all works, nor does anybody for that matter, and this is just another example of the uncertainties of a science in its infancy. Reminds me of “knobs”. A few years ago they were predicting “permanent drought” for Australia, now its floods. Sure whatever. See the update above. See also Dr. Tim Ball’s comment. – Anthony

Ok – this I can understand. There are a lot of people that are big on decrying the well-understood CO2 heating (as a result of doubling blah blah blah) but can’t begin to get past the 1.2ºC limit of that doubling. Meaning they ignore that a lot of knock-on forcings absolutely have to happen for global warming to be a bother and nobody knows if these forcings are net positive or net negative.
But – according to Planet Earth, that big ball under our feet, and the output created by defective but never the less the very best climate models available, the forcings are not positive else there would not be a growing divergence between projected and observed temperatures.
You will find not shortage of experts who will decry the direct warming of CO2 (which is unimportant and would have happened even without human intervention given the natural growth of CO2) but who cannot close the deal by showing the process by which forcings finish the job CO2 starts (Mosher, for example).

To Dp,
I have had a go around before with the person named richardscourtney who scolded you above for seriously considering my comment. FYI, in that go around, I learned that he has no demonstratable background in science, in general, and certainly no record of contribution to climate science. In addition, when drawn into a discussion of the simplest aspect of climate science, I found that he cried foul and ran for cover, asking the moderator to ban me instead of him from participation in WUWT. Yet he is encourage to pontificate very regularly at WUWT for reason I do not know. It must have something to do with the clever British put downs that litter his comments. While that are they carry no content and come from nowhere scientific.
On the other hand, I have a very long record of accomplishment in the field of atmospheric science that was been domonstated and can be inspected at ericgrimsrud.com. Therefore, there is a distinct possiblity that you might just happen to be in better company when you also noted that the problem I immediately had with the title of this post.
Cheers to you and, of course, his excellency, Sir Richardcourney, whoever you are.

As a resident of Perth, Western Australia, it has seemed to me that these days we get rain from warm tropical moist air more frequently than we used to, and rain from southern cold fronts less frequently.
So I’d agree that the weather patterns seem to be moving south, away from the equator.

There can be no GHG-AGW because GHG thermal emission from the atmosphere annihilates that band emission from the Earth’s surface.
The physics is very simple: the net UP IR in any wavelength interval at the surface is the vector sum of the Poynting vectors arriving at that point. This is required by Poynting’s Theorem, the most basic axiom derived from Maxwell’s Equations.
Engineers like me calculate this from the difference of the S-B emission from the bodies in radiative equilibrium. So every GHG atmospheric thermal emission band reduces the equivalent emission from the surface. The Aarhenius GHG blanket is not possible and anyone who believes in it betrays their lack of basic physics’ knowledge.
The addition of ‘back radiation’ to net UP IR in the Trenberth ‘Energy Budget’ recreates the UP Poynting vector, most of which can do no thermodynamic work.
The real GHE is mostly the result of the rise in temperature needed to overcome reduced surface emissivity. Check this argument with any physics’ professional and they will confirm I am right.

Another nail in the GHG theory. Keep them coming.
Increased water vapour in the atmosphere will adsorb more SIR and emit more LIR to cause more evapouration etc.

“External forcings such as green house gases”. What sort of statement is that! External to what? The world, are these CO2 molecules attenuated out in space and emitting evil forcings at the Earth. My understanding of a forcing is the gaining of entry through a door by breaking it down.
Using real speak it could be interpreted as “external forces such as the sun”
That however may lead to a lesser career path and pay cheque. These people really need to just do the science and stop the BS.

Here is the current water vapour levels back to 1948 and the IPCC water vapour forecast which will be in AR5 going out to the year 2100.
http://s19.postimage.org/pk8wtzxqr/WV_IPCC_AR5_Forecast_2100.png
And then more of a close-up going out to just 2020 where we can also see that the ENSO is the dominant control mechanism of global water vapour levels (which lag behind it by 3 months – this is one of the most important climate drivers there is, global water vapour levels – this relationship is taken advantage of by the climate science community since any paper dealing with water vapour levels deliberately starts their analysis in a La Nina and ends in an El Nino so they can show an increase in water vapour levels – they should instead be trying to understand why the ENSO is so dominant here and what the implications of that are.)
We can also see that the “hindcast” of IPCC AR5 which should be using actual observational data up to about 2010 is already way off of the actual values. IPCC AR5 has water vapour levels up by 5.4% already and have it increasing by 23.5% by 2100 (similar to the theory that water vapour should increase by about 7.0% per 1.0C increase in temperatures – so they have just built this theory directly into the models – it is needed to get to 3.0C per doubling – perhaps that is why the ENSO relationship is so downplayed – because it would throw a wrench into 3.0C per doubling if the ENSO continues its historic pattern of no trend over the long-term.)
The theory is missing something very important here.
http://s19.postimage.org/rnjc1nxjn/WV_IPCC_AR5_Forecast_ENSO_Sept2012.png

ericgrimsrud,
Considering that most everything you believe has been falsified, your ad-hom insistence that anyone with a scientific point of view must be a member of the AGW priesthood is ridiculous.
Mr Courtney is a peer reviewed climate author, and also a peer reviewer. Your false statement is that “he has no demonstratable background in science, in general, and certainly no record of contribution to climate science” is provably wrong.
Obviously you are wrong. It took only a minute to find that reference to Mr Courtney’s peer reviewed publication. There may be more, but one example falsifies your derogatory statement.
It is not my ox being gored, so I am not concerned about your ignorance. But you do owe Mr Courtney an apology for your baseless ad hominem attack. A stand-up guy would admit it when he is shown to be wrong. We will now see if you possess any character, or if you instead continue to argue the man instead of the science.

ericgrimsrud, no wonder you keep changing the topic to CFCs. Yet even in your area of expertise you are prone to spouting nonsense like “CFC’s were completely destroying ALL stratospheric ozone over the continent of Antarctica every Springtime.” see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/28/the-president-decides-to-stick-with-climatism/#comment-1094768
There are at least two problems with your thinking and approach. First you are prone to stating exaggerations. You later correct and said “near zero”. But you never acknowledged the fact that natural processes could also bring stratospheric ozone down to near zero and CFCs simply made that natural occurrence worse. Your inexactitude is distressing for someone who supposedly taught science to students who probably don’t know any better and end up poorly trained.
Second, you seem to be equating your knowledge of CFCs with an understanding of greenhouse gas warming. But above you demonstrate ignorance of weather when you state (at the beginning of this thread): “But the amount of water in (evaporation) still will equal the amount of water out (condensation. Thus, in very general terms, on the surface of the Earth dry places will tend to get drier and wet places will tend to get wetter”
It is possible that wet places will get wetter due to increased water cycle. It is even possible but less likely that drier places will get drier due to weather pattern changes. But the latter is *not* because of the balance of evaporation and condensation as you claim. The latter can only happen due to (speculated) changes in circulation such as enlargement of the Hadley cells.
In short your expertise in some atmospheric science field does not apply to the discussion in this thread and most threads on this site. It’s mildly amusing and a little sad that you think it does and keep posting your nonsense.

D Boehm,
There you have one answer straight from a pseudo scientistist’s mouth. Sir RC said, “I don’t need to justify my posts because people can judge my contributions for themselves”.
I hope this statement also applies to me with the additional understanding that I am alway willing and pleased to explore any details of the science that I have related with any interested party. In my first comment at the very top of this thread I did just that and no more – until Sir Richardscourtney showed up, starting with a personal insult to me. That man will not stick to scinence. When losing on the science front, he switches to personal insults. When treated in kind by the person he insults, he then claims violations of political correctness. Yes to me, he does seem to be both a charlatan and a wimp who does a great disservice to public discussions of AGW. But as the man himself says, “people can judge my contributions for themselves”. My own goal at ericgrimsrud.com is to help the public learn the basic science to that they can do just that.

to D Boehm,
Evidently you did not read Sir RC’s comments on this post, as I suggested you should – such as the one he posted at 1:07. With respect to acceptable decorum, you seem to have one set of standards for your friends and another for the “climate alarmist crowd”, as you can American scientists.
Instead, you return here to nitpick on the point that I had not noticed that SirRC had actually managed to get his name on one scientific paper in the past – and I did admit that I missed that detail – while am still waiting for his full resume to be made available to the public – as I and all other scientists have.
I don’t know who you are either of course, Mr. Boehm (resume please!), but from our breif interactions here, I am inclined to think that it is you who is “despicable”. And for good measure, let me add that I’ll bet my Dad is stronger than your Dad. So there!! And if you call me despicable again, I’ll look into the rumors concerning the footware favored by your grandmother !!
(Note to others: toying with the self-righteous is so much fun!!)

More ignorance from the Grimsrud book: ” In addition, during the first half of the twentieth century, a gradual increase in the solar intensity of about 0.1 percent was observed. While the change might have contributed to a small increase in temperature over that fifty-year period, it would have had no effect after 1950.”
Wrong in several ways. Solar intensity rose through 1950, but then stayed historically high fully into the 1980’s and only recently decreased drastically. More importantly solar radiation heats the ocean more than the atmosphere and (along with the warming from increased CO2) is lagged in reaching the atmosphere. So the atmospheric warming would clearly not stop in 1950 as you state. My conclusion is the same as Richard Courtney’s, you cribbed this information from SkepSci or a related site but you do not understand it. At the very least you should have read through the commentary below the “myth” articles presented there because often people will point out the flaws.

[Snip. Do not refer to scientific skeptics as “deniers” here. You have been warned several times. This is strike two. — mod.]

The most obvious feature that this model captures qualitatively is the subtropical dry zones. Air parcels in these driest areas have either been carried down and warmed due to compression by the mean subtropical subsidence after losing most of their water in upward motion near the equator — or they have traveled down the midlatitude isentropic surfaces after having condensed most of their water during an earlier poleward and upward excursion. (The point of this paper was to think about how to quantify the relative importance of these two classes of trajectories.) Differences with the comprehensive models on the left are due in part to the absence of realistic boundary layer mixing spreading the evaporated water upwards, the absence of a seasonal cycle and monsoons that move subtropical dry zones and wash out the minima in the annual mean figure shown on the left, and the distortion of the vertical structure of the outflow from the tropical rising motion. (In the dry model, this outflow is spread over a broad layer of the troposphere, whereas in more realistic models with moist convection this outflow is confined more sharply to a layer near 200mb, causing the dry zone to be displaced upwards compared to the passive water model.) The bottom line is just that the atmospheric flow is what prevents this model atmosphere from becoming saturated everywhere – by wringing water out of parcels of rising/cooling air and then bringing these parcels back down so their relative humidity drops as they warm.

eric1skeptic,
You comments concerning the measured intensity of the Sun at the Earth’s location will be easy to check out. Such measurement have been made since about 1850, as I recall. My statement was made by looking at those measurements and I have a graph in from of me that suggest what I said in my book. When I get back (need to run at the moment) I will retrieve another graph from source on the internet. Why don’t you do the same and refer me to your information souce. Then we will see if you are just nitpicking or talking about something important.
By the way, have you learned yet for yourself that the CFC molecules are not quicky restroyed. If not get a sample from your backyard and bring it into your neighborhood analysis store. They will tell you that your samle contains about 550 pptril CF2Cl2 – essentially the same as your backyard had twenty years ago just before the use of the compound was discontinued.

SE Australia, are they including the red center and Great Victorian Desert, hmmm, DESERT!
Perth has been short of water, but had floods not so long ago, in Australia it is drier following flooding! Since when has it been different, you tell me, certainly it is normal for Australia, as most people live within 50 miles of the coast as from their on, depending on altitude precipitation decreases, like in America. The whole point of water in Australia is much more crucial as the cities have failed sometimes to store enough water and have to put on water restrictions or build an expensive salt water conversion plant. Out in the rural areas the same, but also they sometimes depend on only dams, river water or reticulated water for animals. Rainwater tanks for domestic use.

Please Mr. RichardsCourtney,
Do you not know !!!!! that it takes a long time (several decades) for a CF2Cl2 molecule that happens to find itself tranported into the lower stratosphere to then diffuse high enough into the upper stratosphere where one of its C-Cl bonds will be ruptures by UV light.
That is why the total effective half life of CF2Cl2 is about 100 years – nothing happens to it in the troposphere and it takes so long for any molecule emitted at the surface to find itself in the upper stratosphere.
That is also why: YES, the CFC’s are being destroyed when they get to the upper stratosphere while that loss due to that process occurs so slowly that the background level to today is only slightly less than it was 20 years ago. So that is the simple and well known reason behind “Grimsrud’s explanation of this magical ability of CFCs to be destroyed but continue to exist.”

To the moderator: RichardsCourtney says “I await Grimsrud’s explanation of this magical ability of CFCs to be destroyed but continue to exist”. So if you will allow this one to go through (my previous one did not make it), I will provide that explanation. Warning: the answer might still prove to be quite embarrassing to RC because it profound simplicity. In any case, here is it:
A given chemical reactant can “continue to exit” for a very long time if the rate of that reaction is sufficently process as to cause the concentration of that reagent to decrease very slowly.
That is the case for stratospheric ozone depletion caused by the CFC’s. The rate is very slow in this case because it takes a several decades for any molecule to diffuse from the lower to the upper stratosphere – where UV intensity is large enough to break the C-Cl bonds of the CFCs. Thus, the CFC’s destroy ozone in the upper startosphere while the % loss of that CFC throughout the total atmosphere is very small over a given time period. Thus about half of CF2Cl2, for example, will disappear from our background atmosphere in about 100 years.
I hope this lesson provided to Mr. RC is sufficient to answer Mr. RC’s question and does not prove to be too embarrassing WUWT, its moderator or to its frequent climate expert as to block its submission.

No matter how many times ericgrimsrud is proven to be wrong, he keeps posting his nonsense.
grimsrud is to science as astrology is to astronomy.

Ericgrimsod,
Look at Tim Ball’s comment *4 Oct 8.45 am* he puts references, and if you have more informed knowledge, that I doubt you do, as these gentlemen are specialists in their field and published on the subject of climate AGW change. Understand that anyone can make a comment without references to scholarly papers of course, but when you criticize published scholars you must make your point more than just saying they don’t know what they are talking about! And you do? That is ignorant opinionated bullshhhh in my book and you have to take a minus – 10 for the arguments you raise. Oh – by argument I refer to the tertiary scholarly terminology, means also hypothesis or thesis is an ‘argument’ not a set two of just name calling. Better men/women have tried to down grade intelligent and informed scholars on this site, that they fear contradicts their hypothesis if one can call it, or their green political agenda. You know most of us here have a green mentality and push for sustainability and against pollution, that occurs when you have too many people living in a small area and without sufficient resources to clean up after themselves, they pollute. But it doesn’t change the global climate. So when you graduate from high school and go to college or university, you will thank me for giving you that advice. Cheers from Oz. I don’t mind being labelled ‘pushbunny’. It’s funny isn’t it folks?

PS – Eric wot’s your name, you could have pulled me up on my comment 5 Oct – South East Australia Perth is SW Australia. My mistake, but we still have flooding in North NSW, as I live there. Sure the El Nina seems to have finished for a while, but usually our continent has a habit of drying up and then getting a surplus of rain. It is does not have a predictable precipitation pattern. And Eric the watt, there is really nothing d…n all we can do to effect it to our liking. Climate is what we ‘expect’ but weather is what we get, and weather and natural calaminities, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons is what is recorded as killing us in large numbers.

From ericgrimsrud on October 5, 2012 at 9:13 pm:
Concerning D Böehm who shared with us at 7:09 pm,

So let me respond in kind to Mr. Boehm with “my dad is stronger than your dad” So there!

Who’s your daddy?
;-)——-===8

Sorry I was out, I would have responded sooner. But we can see from the discussion above that ericgrimsrud doesn’t wish to enlighten lay people with facts. Instead his book states that the life of CFC is very long but fails to point out “YES, the CFC’s are being destroyed when they get to the upper stratosphere” He admits it here, but not in his book. His book is mostly propaganda for readers who don’t know any better.
Regarding solar energy, you pointed out the graph at colli239.fts.educ.msu.edu/2003/12/31/solar-activity-2003/ which shows a clear rise up to 1950 and then it stays high. You ask “As to your suggestion that the additional increase of about 1 watt/m2 observed before 1950 has caused recent temperature increases, I’ll leave you to explain and provide support for that one.”
The solar energy is mainly deposited in the ocean. Some immediately warms the atmosphere, some increases the water cycle (no net effect) and some is stored in the ocean. Net storage is mostly during La Nina, and subsequent release during El Nino (Bob Tisdale writes a lot on that in this blog). A lot of heat was stored in the 80’s, some released in the early 80’s El Nino, and a lot was released the 1997/8 El Nino. The satellite temperature record shows a nice step up at that El Nino and a good amount of that warming was stored solar. Of course there was also CO2 warming during that interval but obviously slow and steady. The recent dip in solar energy has yet to manifest as much cooling, there is still plenty of leftover heat in the ocean. Of course there is ongoing CO2 warming, but slow, steady and very modest.

Bushbunny, according to his book the other Eric lives in Montana. No, he didn’t says lives. He said “during the author’s recent existence in rural Montana” whatever that means. It is typical of the whole book, full of pontifications but woefully inadequate on specifics, much of it misleading.

The lifetime of CFC’s is well known in my view and the mechanisms are well described. Prof Li in Waterloo has a really good description of CFC’s over Antarctica in his papers on the effect of GCR on ozone which is where ‘all the damage’ is supposed to have been. Turns out to be alarmism I see. Quelle surprise.
If the trolls haven’t heard of Tim Ball and RC they have not surveyed ‘skeptical’ sites. Simple as that. It is not sites that are skeptical, it is scientists, real ones, who won’t swallow what they are offered without first checking it for pathogens.

To RC,
Some more detail here concerning the conc of CFC’s in the atmosphere. First pull up the data for the most abundant of these, CF2Cl2, at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Ozone_cfc_trends.png
This graph shows that its conc 20 years ago was about the same as today. Looking more closely one sees that it reached a slightly higher value, about 540 ppm, its all time max, about 10 years ago which just happens to be when also all industrial production around the world is thought to have been finally stopped. Even after 2000, however, there were undoubedly some residual emissions occurring due to folks who had saved some and then used it after that date. Also there are still rogue nations that don’t pay any attention to world wide environmental issues.
Understanding these additional details enables one to see why the turnaround from slight increase to slight decay in the F12 conc shown in this figure occurred. The real situation was not one in which the emission of CF2Cl2 was immediately stopped at one specific point in time. Thus the Conc of F12 happens to be about the same today as it was 20 years ago and one of the primary reasons for this is that it has a very long livetime in the atmosphere. Go forward from the present date we might expect to see a decay rate that is in near perfect agreement with its expected half life. This, because eventually we will run out of our “leftover” CF2Cl2.
AS I stated before: what is still clear in all of this is that while F12 is destroyed itself in the process of destroying ozone in the upper stratosphere, it still persist in our background atmosphere for a very long time. Hopefully, what I just said if no longer a “mystery”.

Concerning eric1skeptic’s comments onOctober 5, 2012 at 10:44 pm
Read some more of the book. Lots of Montana this and Montana that. So I supposed the author actually does live in Montana. It is somewhat surprising that he wishing for colder weather, but to each his own I guess. What is most noteworthy about this book is how thin the author’s knowledge is and how he repeats every cliche that the catastrophic alarmists have published on the internet especially the one about how AGW = CAGW.
He claims in his book to have studied “skeptical” websites. I find no evidence of that. In fact he mostly seems to have cribbed SkepSci which we all know is not the least bit skeptical about CAGW. Any mention of skeptical arguments is “myths” very similar the list at SkepSci or a straw man or red herring.
Yes, I do love Montana and have lived here for some 37 years in total. I am also indebted to the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washingtion and Alberta, Canada where I spent at least 4 years in each working at their major Universities and loved every minute of it. All seemed have an abundance level headed and appropriately progessive people.
If you did read my book you apparently missed one of its major chapters, chapter 3 in which I searched for a major flaw in the notion of AGW. I went through about 20 of the most ofter seen in the sceptic’s “literature”. You say I pick only a “straw men” to shoot down. I am sure, however, if I have picked 100 of them, you would undoubedly dismissed them all in the same way. Your “review” of my book was quite shallow. Why not try the free short course offered on my website, ericgrimsrud.com. It goes further into the science involved and deals with subjects described everywhere in the official scientific but not so famiar to many of the sceptics who frequent this web site.

To bushbunny,
My apologies for referring to you as “pushbunny”. It was not intentional. As everyone has undoubtedly noted, I misspell often while posting (I wonder how many errors I have in this short comment). Or perhaps I just thought that a “b” becomes a “p” downunder where you live. In any case, no disrespect was intended and I deserved any retort you might have provided.
Sincerely, EricGrimsod

ericgrimsrud says:
October 6, 2012 at 9:22 am
“I do tend to pay far more attention to the peer-reviewed literature than I do the information provided on websites.
That possibly explains why I feel like a black man and a KKK rally while participating on this web site. Nevertheless, I thank WUWT for at least letting me in the door. The only complaint I would have is that when some of the WUWT regulars heap personal insults on me, I am not always allowed to respond in kind.”
eric, you in fact just did respond “in kind”, at least according to your own feeling of being black at a good ol’ Democrat KKK rally instead of actually being at WUWT.
The problem with the particular “peer review” world which you seem to inhabit is that its CO2 = CAGW hypotheses have not produced even one relevant correct prediction yet, a point that this main blog post supports by referring to a “peer reviewed” study from the publishers of Nature!

From ericgrimsrud on October 6, 2012 at 8:26 am:

(…)We can not say for sure that an ozone hole never existed prior to 1950 because we then did not have the means of measuring one. All we can say is that an ozone hole did develop between the years 1950 and the present. (…)
…
So if the hole is caused by CFC’s it seems unlikely that a hole occurred prior to 1950, but there are other possibitlies that might interest you (but not me). For example, perhaps the Romans or even the Neanderthals produced CFC’s so that we had an ozone hole then. Or perhaps Mother Nature put our CFC’s at any other futhere time – possibly from volcanoes, now extinct. Or better still perhaps the suggestion that the ozone holes are produced by the CFC’s is all a big hoax. So Tonyp, take you pick and carry on with that line of thought if you wish.

If that is indicitive of your scientific understanding of the ozone “hole”, then I am impressed, at your lack of knowledge.
See this collection of images of the region of ozone deficit known as the “hole” from 1995 to 2007, note how it is always surrounded by a region of ozone surplus.
Read this piece from January 2011, New rate of stratospheric photolysis questions ozone hole. As quoted from the linked Nature article:

Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

The evidence is clearly pointing to the “ozone hole” being a natural effect caused by the Polar Vortex. This was recently thoroughly discussed in the comments of an August 2012 WUWT post, this link to it goes right to a highly informative comment by WUWT regular “Just The Facts”.
Since the ozone “hole” that forms within a ring of ozone surplus is a natural effect arising from the Polar Vortex, you would have to argue the CFC’s caused the vortex to say CFC’s caused the ozone hole.
Hopefully this knowledge will further your scientific education, thus allowing you to not have to resort to such extreme sarcasm when confronted on your obvious lack of scientific knowledge.

to Stephen Wilde, You say:
“we have seen similar climate variations before such as Roman Warm Period, Dark Ages, Mediaeval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and the Current Warm Period all long before CFC emissions and all those changes correlate well with solar variations.
What is your position in light of all those facts ?”
I say this:
First are they indeed “facts” concerning the entire globe? There is a great difference, you know between global average climate and local and regional weather. But let’s for the moment assume that the periods you mention reflect a global average.
CFC,s of course had nothing to do with anything until the last few decades. Then they mainless affected ozone levels in the stratopshere and since ozone is a GHG, have probably had an affect on climate and the overall dynamics of the atmosphere.
Concerning the more ancient events you mentioned: let’s start by remembering one important point The average surfice T of the Earth is determined by just 3 factors (see my shot course on my web site for elaboration). These are the intensity of the Sun, the albedo (reflectivity to incoming sunlight) and the greenhouse effect. The last two of these can be affected by events occurring on the Earth – for example, the eruption of a very large volcano can send particles into the stratosphere that will stay their for 2 to 4 years during which time they will increase the aldebo of the Earth and cause some cooling.
So the significant global changes that undoubedly occurred in the near and very distance past had to be caused changes in any one or more of these three variables, the intensity of the Sun, the albedo, or the greenhouse effect, a change in the average T and climate of the Earth would have occurs.
So let’s consider : what if we find in the ancient literature that a warming trend occurred in the 5 th century BC. What caused it? We would not know because we do not have sufficient records concerning the 3 factors involved. We can be sure, however, that if a change occurred it was due to changes in one or more of those 3 factors. The same is true for all other events prior to the modern age of science when people finally were able to make and save such records.
IN the last century or two, we have become much more aware of all factor affecting those three varibles. So if you are saying that the predictions that we can now make based on modern measurements are no good because we cannot explain all of the past, I think you have to give that notion some more thought. It makes no sense. Of course we can not explain what is called the Roman Warm Period. We do not have suffient information concerning what was happing all over the globe. We don’t even know if was a regional or global phenomenon. Concerning the Little Ice Age, do we know, just to pick one possibility, were their a series of very large volanic eruptions prior to that which might have set off a cooling period via the injection particle into the air. Note also that a human being might not have noted that change in atmospheric conditions – for example, after Pintatubo went off in 1991 and significantly cooled the Earth for about 2 years, did you note a change in appearance of the atmosphere whose stratosphere then contained more particles? I did not , but modern instrumentation did.
In short, we can explain our current climate conditions far far better than historic ones – for very good and obvious reasons. To discount the former because we are not so good at the latter is foolish as well as suicidal.

to the Mods, concerning your comment,
“You (your replies) have NOT been cut, killed, trimmed, or eliminated. The Mods.”
Please lets no even go there. You know as well as I that I have a lot of evidence to the contrary concerning my submissions to WUWT in recent months. But please so know that I also do not want to go there. It is off the scientific points and, furthermore, I recognize that WUWT is yours to run and manage as you prefer. Also note that I am not complaining. I only want to beat down a false statement before it morphs into a fact and then used irresponsibly by some of the folks at WUWT who are continuously trying to undermine my reputation and input to WUWT.

To Stephen Wilde,
NOT!! It takes a few decades, not centuries to overcome the thermal inertia of the oceans. In addition, remember that inertia works both ways – what takes a long time to warm up takes a long time to cool off.

To Stephen Wilde, You just said,
” I accept that more GHGs would have a similar effect on the atmospheric circulation but the evidence is that any such effect from human emissions is miniscule compared to the natural variations.”
My own understanding is that the emissions of CO2 for example by plants and those from the oceans are each about 100 Gitatons (of carbon) per year while that due to fossil fuel combustion is about 7 to 8 Gitatons per year. Note also that the fossil fuel carbon is added to the tolal biological carbon every year, year after years, thus increasing the total carbon in the air, ocean, and plants by that much each year. Thus, we have about 800 Gigaton of C in the atmosphere today while we had only about 550 Gigatons C in the atmsphere prior to the industrial age.
And you call the human emissions miniscule comparted the the natural ?? !!! Why not trying to think it through again. If you like, we can try to see which of us is full of it right here. It is an extremely important point that we can not afford to have misunderstood by the public. So in responding please do not change the subject
Your turn

Stephen, Again you say things are transparently silly, though very commonly encountered in the contrarian “literature”, when you said,
“Unless one understands historical changes one cannot understand current changes.” Uffda !!!
The reason why we have a chance of understanding our present environment and climate is because of the scientific advancements we have made in recent decades in measuring all of the myriad factors: those that affect both the albedo and greenhouse effects and also the instruments which after about 1975 could be mounted on satalites – making accurate measurements of solar intensity possible without interferances from the atmosphere.
Studies of the past are important but the far greater difficulties presented in them should not restrict our much better understanding of the present. Your suggestion is one that would prevent action against AGW forever – which just might possibly be the only reason you made it.

From ericgrimsrud on October 6, 2012 at 1:00 pm:

to the Mods, concerning your comment,
“You (your replies) have NOT been cut, killed, trimmed, or eliminated. The Mods.”
Please lets no even go there. You know as well as I that I have a lot of evidence to the contrary concerning my submissions to WUWT in recent months. But please so know that I also do not want to go there. It is off the scientific points and, furthermore, I recognize that WUWT is yours to run and manage as you prefer. (…)

So you are saying: PLEASE don’t even try to DENY it as I have PROOF you have been CENSORING and DISTORTING my words for months, it is obviously TRUE, but it is YOUR SITE so you can CENSOR and DISTORT my words AS YOU CHOOSE and YOU HAVE OBVIOUSLY DONE SO.
Put up or shut up.

Also note that I am not complaining.

Hurling accusations without providing proof, throwing out ‘you know what you did’ as justification, basically stating WUWT is as bad as sites like ReallyRealClimate and SkepSci in their moderation, with those sites just as justified in doing so for the same reason, that you have done.
Stating in classic passive-aggressive fashion ‘Now I’m not complaining’… What, you think you’re on a Seinfeld episode? Actually, maybe you do, as you also tossed out “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”…

To the Mods, As you know I objected the your recent comment to me because it was not true and because I thought if I corrected it right away the bottom feeders might not rise to bait. Wrong!!! as is beautifully illustrated by kadaka (KD Knoebel) above. Note how long and spirited it is. While not being able to contribute to the science around which this threat is based, he finally found his niche. The force of Hate over reason should never be underestimated and some are blessed with so much of it. Thus, web sites like this one do a great public service in letting our scientifically illiterate wackos vent.
REPLY: The “force of hate”? Scientific illiterate wackos? Why not tell us what you really think? I find your comment emotionally ironic.
I think you need to step back a bit and get some quiet time for yourself. If you don’t like the comment policies here, which have worked quite well now for over 900,000 comments, approaching a million, you are welcome to defer from commenting further. You can take your knocks and continue, or be upset and stay away, your choice. But, know that your comment above is out of line, but I’ll tolerate your emotions to help get the point across this one time. – Anthony Watts

ericgrimsrud,
Where did you get your “200” total? Was it your own WAG? Or did you find it at RealClimate, or SkS?

I posted the link. Click on it. The IPCC is the ‘authority’.

ericgrimsrud,
Really, this is like hand holding:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/eia_co2_contributions_table3.png
Now, since you have avoided answering my post showing that CO2 has no measurable effect, the following is a step by step explanation showing that rising CO2 has no measurable effect on global temperature, and thus why the “carbon” scare is a false alarm:
To avoid complaints about ‘cherry-picking’, we will begin with a very long time period; more than three centuries. Let’s look at the natural global warming trend:
http://i35.tinypic.com/2db1d89.jpg
As we see, the long term trend is the same, whether CO2 is low or high. That is confirmed in this Wood For Trees chart. The naturally rising global temperature trend since the LIA has remained within its long term parameters. There is no acceleration of global warming. It is on the very same long term trend line that it was on before the start of the industrial revolution, thus falsifying the CO2=CAGW conjecture.
The fact that CO2 has no measurable effect on global temperature is confirmed here. Notice that the two recent warming episodes — again, one when CO2 was low, and the other when CO2 was high — show conclusively that any effect from CO2 is so minuscule that it is not even measurable, because the rising temperature trends are exactly the same.
Empirical measurements also show conclusively that CO2 follows temperature on all time scales, from decades to hundreds of millennia.
That proves that the alarmist crowd has cause and effect reversed. Temperature changes cause CO2 changes; not vice-versa. There is no empirical, testable scientific evidence showing that rising CO2 causes rising temperatures (if you disagree, post a chart for us showing that changes in CO2 precede temperature changes). The false belief that CO2 leads temperature is based on an entirely coincidental short-term correlation, which is now breaking down. There has been no global warming in more than 15 years, while CO2 has risen steadily. (I should point out that CO2 may cause an insignificant temperature rise; that is not ruled out by the logic of this argument. But since the effect is too minuscule to measure, it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes).
Finally, the planet is starved of harmless, beneficial CO2. More is better. With added CO2 the biosphere will thrive, and there will be no global harm or damage. The “carbon” scare is a false alarm.
Using verifiable scientific facts based on empirical evidence, it is demonstrated here that CO2 has no measurable effect on temperature. None. The rising temperature trend since the LIA remains the same, whether CO2 was low or high. There are no testable measurements showing otherwise. Therefore, CO2 does not have the claimed effect.
The reason that the alarmist crowd cannot get anything right is because they are fixated on the false and disproven presumption that measurable temperature change is driven by CO2 — when, in fact, exactly the opposite is true.
Now, explain why CO2 has had no measurable effect on temperature since the LIA.

EricGrimsrud, your chapter 3 mostly reflects your poor understanding of weather. Let’s look item by item: #1. “We can’t predict the weather” – obvious red herring. #2. “Warming is simple: solar, albedo and GHG” – no it is not simple. Global average temperature can change naturally in one week the same amount as a decade of AGW. Natural variations exceed AGW on every time scale. #3. “CO2 is not a powerful GHG” – red herring by the use of the word “powerful”. #4. “CO2 is secondary to water vapor” – you say it’s not true, but reality says otherwise (see #2). The distribution of water vapor controls the forcing from water vapor and natural factors control the weather patterns which control the distribution. # 5. “CO2 lags temperature” – there are a handful of posters here who dwell on that, but the red herring part of your statement is that skeptics believe the CO2 rise is natural. No serious skeptic believes that the rise is anything other than manmade.
#6. “Other GHG’s could become more important than CO2” – I have never heard that from a skeptic ever. That’s probably your projecting from your speciality of CFCs an similar gases. #7. “clouds”. Your cloud explanation is comically oversimplified. You claim with your usual handwavy lack of quantification that clouds will be neutral. Skeptic sites talk about tropical convection based thermostats. If you had read any skeptic site you would have known that. #8. “Global dimming offsets CO2 warming”. In this are you are just repeating some crap about aerosols which is contradicted by real world measurements (particularly the claim that aerosols are causing the current lull in warming). If you thought that garbage came from a skeptic site then you obviously don’t know the difference between alarmist and skeptic.
#9 “natural factors”. Your explanation is once again comically oversimplified. You do not seem to comprehend that the increased solar energy in the mid 20th century could be stored in the ocean yet you talk about CO2 heat storage in the thread above. #10 earth is massive. I’ve nver seen that on a skeptic site. #11 “Oceans will absorb CO2”. Your explanation is just wrong, I’ve addressed it here before. #12 “CO2 is saturated.” Not a red herring and your explanation is decent, congratulations you got one right. #13, “a need for real world observations”. You point to glacial transition data to support a claim that doubling CO2 leads to 11F temperature. Wildly misleading. Albedo changes will not be replicated today, there are no continental ice sheets. Dust changes will not be replicated. Weather pattern changes will not be replicated. You do not understand the inapplicability of glacial period data to today’s climate.
#14 “climate models are flawed”. It’s true that is a skeptical argument. Your answer is that they are “entirely adequate”. Obviously your knowledge of those models is entirely inadequate. Start by looking at the spatial and temporal resolution, then go outside on a day with cold air aloft and think about how models miss cooling (diurnal clouds, increase water cycle, etc). #15 “a temperature change of 1.6F won’t do any harm.” Red herring. Part of that change is natural as any skeptic will tell you. #16 “global cooling in the last year”. nope, the real skeptic argument is that global cooling to offset a decade of CO2 global warming occurred in one week. #17 “the sun” Already addressed on another thread. Your claim that solar based warming had to stop in 1950 is wrong. #18 “we have time” Yes a good skeptic argument, but your answer is awful. You claim the last time CO2 was 500ppm the seas were 70 meters higher. You inadvertently support the skeptic argument that we have time since at 1 inch per decade we have 27,000 years to go. #19 “scientists cannot be trusted” Your answer is I’m a great scientist, other scientists are great, blah blah blah. Have you heard of climategate?
#20. “looking for additional arguments” You claim in this section that you have scoured the web for anti-AGW arguments. As I detail above, you have not. You looked at a couple sites that you thought were skeptic, one was likely skepticalscience.com which contains almost zero skepticism of CAGW arguments. Then you mention Svensmark and dismiss it with your trademark combination of hand wave and red herring. Specifically you say it is not well supported and not well understood. Then you claim that skeptics want to delay action on AGW because of Svensmark. That’s mostly a red herring since Svensmark is not a major player in alternative explanations of warming, nor in suggesting that sensitivity is low, or any other major skeptical arguments.
So in summary, your 20-odd points in chapter 3 are only partly irrelevant and where they are relevant you provide thin counterarguments that are frequently incorrect and designed to appeal to people who don’t know any better. That is basically the purpose of your book, to propagandize using various well known pro-CAGW talking points and a few of your own. Where you occasionally provide a good explanation for a skeptic myth it stands out because it so rare.

To D Boehm,
Concerning your last long post on a different subject, would you please first finish the business we were on – before changing the subject. That is, where is a reference in support of your claim that natural emissions are about 750,000 gtons and not closer to 200 gtons as I thought.
Eric

To D Boehm, So the following was how you posted the link to your source:
“D Böehm says:
October 6, 2012 at 5:26 pm
I posted the link. Click on it. The IPCC is the ‘authority’.”
Would someone on WUWT tell me what I am supposed to “click on” here. Please look back at teh actual post placed at 5:26 pm. Sorry I can’t figure out how to get to the reference that Mr Boehm promised to provide as related in our recent discussions above. Some help please from anyone ?
On the other hand, someone knows D Boehm better than I could clue me in on how this gentleman typically does business at WUWT. If, for example, he tends to run away from his commitments and previous statements, that would explain things. I don’t know the man or how he operates. I might be learning, however, and that knowledge will be useful in dealing with him (or not) in the future.

To all, I just read D Böehm’s latest and see that he has no intention of providing that source concerning his claim that natural emissions of CO2 are about 750,000 gtons / year. If he had one, of course, he would be glad to show it and thereby prove me wrong, wrong, wrong as he claimed above. So why do you support he is longer willing to reveil his source?
” October 6, 2012 at 7:36 pm
ericgrimsrud says:
“Concerning your last long post on a different subject, would you please first finish the business we were on…”
No. I did what you wanted. I posted the link you asked for. Twice.”
OK and again can someone show me how to find that post? He then chances things with:
“But you have never responded to essentially the same post a few days ago that I just posted again. Now it’s your turn to answer a question: why has CO2 had no empirically measurable, testable effect on temperature since the LIA? If you believe it has, then post a verifiable chart showing unequivocally that ΔCO2 causes ΔT — like the chart I posted showing the true cause and effect: that CO2 lags T on all time scales.”
Since I have never made such claims here at WUWT, Mr. Boehm must be confusing me with someone else. I have no response, of course, because I never made any statement of this sort.
Then he adds,
“Also, still waiting for you to admit you were wrong when you wrote:
“I learned that (Richard Courtney) has no demonstratable background in science, in general, and certainly no record of contribution to climate science.” What you ‘learned’ was that you were wrong. I posted peer reviewed proof. Man up and admit it. Then I will be happy to respond. ”
OK I’ll admit that my search for Mr. Courtney’s research accomplishments failed to review the paper Mr. Boehm referred to, While I therefore appologise that omission, I had also repeatedly ask Mr. Courtney to help me find his resume and record of accomplishments in science and climate change. He refuse to so I was left to myself to dig thing out. Apparently I did not try quite hard enough and for that I applogize. By the way if anyone is interested in finding the resumes of other scientists, one can usually get to the compete resumes with a simple Google search . I don’t know why it was so much more difficult in the case of Mr. Courtney.
There I have “Manned up” so now Mr. Boehm will be “happy to respond” (provides he does not add additional conditions before he “Mans up”)
So I am looking forward to that response and this time please provide a real link on which I will be able to “click”.
(Reply: The link has been posted several times. Your duplicitous responses are noted. — mod.)

Hallelujah,
Mr. Boehm just sent me a link that worked. So what does it say?
It says that in the 90’s the natural emission of CO2 were 770,000 million tons. That is 770 billion tons or 770 gtons. Changing this from weight of CO2 to weight of carbon (x 12/46) we get about 200 gtons of carbon.
You will recall that I had claimed that natural emission of carbon were about 200 gtons and Mr. Boehm had claimed that is was 750,000 gtons. What say you Mr. Boehm? Perhaps there is yet another information source you were thinking of – this one says the same as all of mine.

grimsmud,
OK, troll, answer my question. And man up, and admit that you were WRONG about Richard Courtney.

richardscourtney says:
October 4, 2012 at 10:02 am
dp:
re your post at October 4, 2012 at 9:10 am.
Be not afraid. The “study” “demonstrated” nothing.

Just between you me and the fence post I think you’re a bats**t crazy left wing nutter. But in your defense that is what I get from your posts, not from you personally. For all I know you are not bats**t crazy off line. By your own admission you are a left wing nutter, though.

From ericgrimsrud on October 6, 2012 at 9:09 pm:

(…) Changing this from weight of CO2 to weight of carbon (x 12/46) we get about 200 gtons of carbon. (…)

Consult a good Periodic Table. Use 12 for Carbon, 16 for Oxygen.
Carbon Di-oxide
12 + 2(16)
= 12 + 32
=44
Use 12/44 (or 3/11) for the ratio, not 12/46. Yields 210 Giga-Tonnes (GT) Carbon from 770 GT CO₂, not 200 GT C.

ericgrimsrud says:
October 6, 2012 at 10:20 pm
“And again I now admit that I was wrong in saying that I did not think RC had any evidence of a scientific background. Turns out he does have his name on a paper dealing with climate change and I apologized for my omission of this detail. I simply did not know about that paper. ”
You followed the AGW’ers ordinary tactics and attacked the man, instead of discussing science. And got caught. And admits it. Very good.
Will you please change your ordinary AGW tactics from now on? Please don’t embasass us Norwegians any further.

One has to read French climatologist Marcel Leroux to undertand that there is simply no “Hadley Cell” or “Polar Cell”, but only a global circulation system involving polar Mobile Highs originating from the poles and traveling towards the equator. Failing to understand that leads to non-sense studies.

Thierry
I quoted the great Leroux in one of my recent articlres;
“Global’ records are much less reliable than local ones due to the manner in which they are assembled, and the reality of a meaningful single global temperature is the subject of much debate, as observed by French climatologist Marcel Leroux. (who said) ‘Yet, they know very well that there is not one “global” climate, but a large variety of climates, depending on latitude, geographic conditions, and atmospheric dynamics.’ (18)
Brown and Jones commented on the many instances of local cooling trends, seemingly recording different- and cooling- climates to that observed in the global – and warming- record (19)
tonyb

grimsrud says:
“You will recall that I had claimed that natural emission of carbon were about 200 gtons…”
No, you specifically referred to CO2, not “carbon”:
“…as far as I a can tell the total natural emissions of CO2 appear to be about 200 gton per year.”
You just got caught trying to move the pea under a different thimble.

to wikeroy,
Yes, the Norwegians of the world now know that RC has his name on one research publication and perhaps some day they will be able forgive me for taking so long to discuss that he actually had one. You, however, could make us Norwegians really proud if you could produce the full scientific resume of RC. Since he holds forth so much on the subject of climate change at WUWT, knowing his background and level of professional expertice would be useful. Most Norwegians, I believe, would agree.

wikeroy, you say
“Do’t think you should put too much into the measurements back then…..”
Why not ? Because one person made a public comment somewhere? Those stratosphere measurements have continued every since 1985, you know, by numerous countries and research groups. YOu should look and see that those measurements suggest – a much better source of info.

Eric
* We know that one third of global stations are cooling, not warming (BEST)
* Of the renainder some are static, some are undoubtedly affected by UHI, some have moved location, some are warming.
*We know that CET appears a reasonable proxy for global temperature (if there is such a thing)
* We know that CET has dropped over the last decade and is now on a par with the 1730’s
*We know that global temperatures have been rising for some 350 years-long before Co2 could have had an impact (if it did have an impact back then man can’t live on this planet at present population levels)
* We know the MWP was probably warmer than today and the Roman and Minoan period were certainly warmer. It is likely therfore that 280ppm marks some sort of limit as to the likely sensitivity to co2.
* We know that in the case of the UK our co2 emissions are trivial and tryng to reduce them even further will cost around £30Billion a year we haven’t got
* Trying to move to a green economy is making us uncompetitive (petrol is $10 a gallon) and energy costs are impacting severely on the UK population with many in fuel poverty
* In an attempt to go green it is likely we will have to ration our energy or impose power cuts within 3 years (Indeprendent report this weekend) .
In all these circumstances what compelling reason is there to make the huge effort required to radically change our ways? Imperfect and controversial physics that cant take into account clouds nor natural variability?
Climate is infinitely and naturally variable and I dont know the future, I assume the long term trend will continue but it is worrying we are back to the 1730’s and reasonable to suggest we need a plan ‘B’ for cooling as well as the numerous plan A”s we have for warming.
tonyb

eric1skeptic,
Thanks for pointing out ericgrimsrud’s numerous errors of fact. It is important that alarmist pseudo-science like that is refuted, lest a new reader might accept grimsrud’s fallacies as something other than the anti-science that it is.
I also note that grimsrud has again avoided attempting to refute my October 6 @6:06 pm post, in which I logically, step-by-step challenge the belief that CO2 has any measurable effect on temperature. If it does, where are the empirical measurements? Where is a chart showing that temperature is a function of CO2?
Now, CO2 may have a minusule effect. But if so, it is too small to measure. Therefore, CO2=AGW stops at the conjecture level of the scientific method. It may be true (or not). But without testable measurements, it is only a conjecture; an opinion. A belief. Those treating it as an established fact need to post their charts. The fact that they don’t greatly undermines their argument.

To all,
Yesterday D Boehm posted this, including quote of my earlier statement.
D Böehm said:
October 6, 2012 at 2:32 pm
ericgrimsrud says:
“My own understanding is that the emissions of CO2 for example by plants and those from the oceans are each about 100 Gitatons (of carbon) per year while that due to fossil fuel combustion is about 7 to 8 Gitatons per year.”
Today he writes
D Böehm says:
October 7, 2012 at 8:26 am
grimsrud says:“You will recall that I had claimed that natural emission of carbon were about 200 gtons…” No, you specifically referred to CO2, not “carbon”
I would prefer not to have to respond to the continuous stream of misinformation (natural emissions of CO2 are 750 gtons /year?), untruths (illustrated above)and personal insults (read all his comment concerning me on this thread). But, of course, if one doesn’t the viewers of this website would be misled with respect to the science involved..

Eric, I read the Hansen paper and it looks like I need to divide the solar energy change by 4 to account for TSI/4 hitting the sphere of the earth. Also multiply by 0.7 since 0.3 gets reflected away (albedo is 0.3). That means the energy increase from the link you found which is about 1.7 W/m2 from 1900 to 1950 turns into about 0.3 W/m2 on the earth’s surface. Using Hansen’s 3/4 K/(W/m2) that means 0.2 degrees from increased solar upon reaching short term equilibrium.
We should assume the planet spent most of the rest of the 20th century trying to reach that equilibrium with solar while tracking the coincident rise in that equilibrium due to CO2 increases.
Based on that I would make a very rough estimate that about 1/3 of the rise in the 80’s and 90’s was from solar, the rest from CO2. I can also make a crude prediction that the solar minimum will cause a 0.3C drop in worldwide temperatures over the next 4 decades offset by the 0.4 rise from CO2. IOW, *if* the sun stays quiet and nothing else changes, temps will go nowhere through mid century.

To Anthony, Thanks for your response shown below.
REPLY: You can choose to respond or not, not our call nor our duty beyond determining if the comment violates policy. I do think you just don’t know how to handle online criticism well – Anthony
You might be right about my deficiencies in handling criticism. Almost all of it caused my inclination to treat people like they treat me. I have to work on that because on sites like this one, I regularly get treated very poorly. Many show little respect for the scientists who they often refer to as “alarmists” (a term used here routinely while the term, denier, is appearently not allowed). Learning to survive on a playing field that is not level provides a worthwhile experience and I’ll try to get better at it.
REPLY: “Alarmists” has no purposeful negative connotation related to holocaust denial, such as illustrated by Iran’s current president, so it is a more acceptable term than “deniers”. Witness some of the claims by Hansen, Serreze, and others, and you’ll see how “alarmist” fits, but doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone. Pro AGW advocates and climate skeptics would be better terms all around though. If you want to complain about being treated poorly online, I suggest you walk a mile in my shoes first. As for this thread, I think you overestimate the importance of your sensitivity. – Anthony

ericgrimsrud says:
October 7, 2012 at 11:27 am
Mr. Grimsrud, I would like to point out that you have engaged in a very ugly and contentious subject. I suggest you read what has been written about my father Dr. Tim Ball. A Phd in climatology. Just type his name in google and see what comes up. Note specifically Desmogblog and then note the smear that they engage in. He is far and away better schooled in climate than you are and has received egregious attacks for DECADES. You need to accept the yoke that you yourself have taken on in all it’s glory and suffering.
Just to let you know, the censuring and smears that skeptics receive at the hands of AGW proponents are FAR worse than the jabs that you are getting here. Suck it up, buttercup.

To Anthony, With respect to your additional comment shown below”
“REPLY: “Alarmists” has no purposeful negative connotation related to holocaust denial, such as illustrated by Iran’s current president, so it is a more acceptable term than “deniers”. Witness some of the claims by Hansen, Serreze, and others, and you’ll see how “alarmist” fits, but doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone. Pro AGW advocates and climate skeptics would be better terms all around though. If you want to complain about being treated poorly online, I suggest you walk a mile in my shoes first. As for this thread, I think you overestimate the important of your sensitivity. – Anthony”
OK, I did not know that reason for not allowing use of the term, Denier, that is, your envisioned connection to the holocaust. To me it simply meant what the dictionary says in meant. The term “skeptics” does not cut it for me. All thinking people are skeptics and should be skeptical of many if not all things. One of the first books every written in the field of chemistry was “the Skeptical Chemist” by one of the very best chemists early scientist, Robert Boyle.
In my view we don’t have another word yet to replace “denier”. A Denier of anything is someone who knows the answer and knows he will not change and does not even indulge in meaningful discussions on the issue with anyone excess fellow choir members. Too bad the holocaust stoled that word from us.
Finally, let me correct you of one impression you have of me – just for the record. I am not a complainer but I do point things out that do not seem fair or proper to me. There is a difference you know between that and complaining – the former is an effort simply to keep the record straight while the latter is an argument for change. I just like everyone involved to understand what the rules will be. Most say I have pretty thick skin in going forward from there.
Note how so many of your faithful followers “pile on” and come to the defense of your bonifide crybabies when the insult they lob are returned in kind (RC would be the best examples of this I have ever seen). One of these days I might find one such supporter at WUWT but very like not do not need it. I hope it is obvious to all that I run under my own steam when it somes to discussions of science and the rest is all meaningless noise.
REPLY: In another comment you said “I love skeptics, they drive science.” and above you say. “The term “skeptics” does not cut it for me. “, and “In my view we don’t have another word yet to replace “denier”.”. Those contradictory statements show your true colors, which are of contempt, IMHO.
Be as upset as you wish then, but please do stop whining, as we all have better things to do that argue about your emotive views of how you are interacted with here. – Anthony

To David Ball,
Let them pile it on all they like – and especially if their remarks pertain to science.
And rest assured that I can “take it”. If you saw how cute my 5 grandchildren are, you might better understand why I can and will.
And I am pleased to learn about your father who has gone through similar experience. Give him my regards when you see him. I will, indeed, learn more about him myself via the usual information sources. He probably even has a resume that he has made available to the public – imagine that! A standup guy, it appears, who could possibly serve as a model to others also who hold forth regularly at WUWT.
Best Regards, EPG

Kadada, I believe you will find the error is due to Mr. Boehms reading of his own table. That is your check Note 1 in also inaccurate. As I said in one of my posts that table reads 750,000 million tons which is 750 billion tons = 750 gtons. When expressed in weigh carbon (x 12/44 ) becomes approximately 200 gtons, the number I claimed. Boehms had claimed a natural emision of about 1,000 clearly because he misread his chart. This is make additional clear by his repeated claim that my number was far too low (with accompanying insults, of course). One does not get a difference of x 1,000 via imprecise communications. One gets it from not reading the source correctly.
Note 1: linked table is CO₂, “three quarters of a million gtons” of CO₂ verified. (NOT).

[Snip. You were given a 12-hour time out. No commenting until tomorrow morning. — mod.]

[Snip.]

Silence is golden? I still feel he is a professional troll, but congrats to you all holding up the banner for disarming of the alarmist rationale. I was labelled a denier when I crossed swords over a history debacle, and was labeled a climate change, Holocaust, and JFK Assassination denier publically. Holocaust and JFK Assassination was not correct. Luckily one person in the audience questioned this, and the spokesman had to back down.

I don’t know whether or not EricGrimsrud is coming back. But I do know that if he doesn’t change his ways he will not last here. Mostly he needs to stop personalizing every argument. Also if he thinks he’s going to correct everyone he thinks is wrong, he needs to think again.

Eric G, I also downloaded file #1, and saw the slides. The file was huge compared to the number of slides. Also I don’t have powerpoint. My mac displayed the slides with the preview app, but I didn’t get any sound / narrative. I can’t evaluate the course on the basis of the slides alone, I have to hear the narrative.

From ericgrimsrud on October 10, 2012 at 8:46 am:

Now concerning the previous claim by D Boehm referred to above, note that the post by D Boehm being referred to is no longer shown – at least I can’t find it.

Looks like that’s what you referenced as: Concerning your assignment to me, “where did I get my value of about 200 gton for natural emissions”…
First it’s not a real quote as D Böehm wouldn’t ask “where did I get” the value you were touting.
The first reference of “200 gtons” is D Böehm’s here: “grimsrud, I pointed out that your claimed total natural CO2 emissions 200 gtons…” It is still there, and arises from simple addition from your earlier statement with the confusing wording of 100 and 100 gtons natural emissions from different sources.
Thus your claim of comment editing has no proof, once again, this time claiming a D Böehm comment has been removed.

Then in a “time-line study” of our debate by Kadaka did not note D Boehm’s claim – a factor of 1000 higher than mine, either. Mine turned out to be correct.

I did not note what you are trying to say was D Böehm’s claim as it didn’t exist when I searched the comments, but I did note the “claimed total natural CO2 emissions” comment that I just linked to again.
However, my timeline comment was originally started very late at night and finished the next day. When it was written, it seem like the linked table, the one whose link was posted three times before you noticed it, did support the ‘three quarters of a million gtons’ of CO₂, but later I noticed it was only showing about 3/4 of a million million tons, or 3/4 of a million megatons, 3/4 of a thousand gtons. So you do pick up that correction.

Nevertheless some “Manning up” seems to be required here.

Gee, according to your accusations WUWT has altered comments, deleted inconvenient stuff, concealed the truth. How much more “Mann-ing up” do you want?

kadaka,
ericgrimsrud is fixated on D Böehm, and he is impotently trying to nitpick a minor point in order to avoid responding to my October 6 @6:06 pm post.
Note to grimsrud: if you wish to make certain that someone will not respond, simply state that you are ‘assigning’ homework. And when you accuse me of dishonesty, see how far that gets you.
Truly, you are the biggest complainer around, always whining. All your ‘poor me’ sniveling concerns ericgrimsrud, and your crazy world view. You can’t find mysterious comments? You can’t find the IPCC’s table that was posted in plain view three times? I am not surprised. You seem unable to hold a coherent view, preferring to play the crybaby role instead of answering my October 6, 6:06 pm post. The fact is that you cannot falsify that reasoning, which completely destroys your “carbon” Belief system. So you whine about irrelevant peripheral issues. It’s the ‘red herring’ fallacy, AKA: “Look over there! A kitten!” You are deliberately avoiding the central issue: there is no empirical evidence to support your CAGW belief.

I note that grimsrud is still scrambling to avoid answering my October 6, 6:06 pm post. He avoids responding to it for one reason: he cannot falsify the conclusion, which destroys his entire Belief system. Poor eric. Continue whining, it amuses us.

From ericgrimsrud on October 11, 2012 at 8:15 am:

Note also that another post by Boehm slightly before that shown above is now gone! In it Boehm had clearly said that the natural emissions of CO2 were “three quarters of million gton” , three orders of magnitude higher than mine.

Nah, it’s still there. As mentioned in my timeline, that D Böehm comment is here, where it was before, where it still is, and hasn’t gone anywhere. “Human emissions are only around 3% of the total of about three quarters of a million gtons.”
You may be remembering it slightly differently. But still, a total of “about three quarters of a million gtons” minus only 3% human emissions would still leave natural emissions of about 3/4 of a million gtons.
Is your memory that faulty, do you have a reading problem, or is there another reason for you desperately trying to push your “WUWT is editing comments!” belief with this ongoing string of non-examples?

DB, What I actually said was: “Have you not heard of the PEMT maximun during which a huge natural carbon release 56 mYears ago produded massive warming throughout the planet lasting for some 150,000 years ?” Now that is not a silly question. Is that evidence of CO2’s effect too obvious for you ?

ericgrimsrud,
It is not the “PEMT”, as you keep calling it. It is the PETM — the “Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum”. You have repeatedly mis-spelled that acronym, indicating that you are just throwing out talking points you picked up from one of your thinly-trafficked alarmist blogs. You really have no great knowledge of the PETM. And the relevant time frame is the modern Holocene, not the PETM.
You tucked tail and ran from my step-by-step logical argument showing that CO2 has no measurable effect on temperature. Being unable to refute that argument, you have conceded the battlefield of ideas. To falsify my conclusion all you need to do is provide a verifiable chart showing that ΔCO2 leads ΔT. But you cannot do that, because there is no such chart. That is why you continue to post irrelevant nonsense. You hope to distract from the plain fact that your CO2=CAGW Belief has been falsified, by using your red herring arguments. As you can see, that doesn’t work here.

D Böehm,
Your WFT “CO₂ follows temp over decades” graph has a problem, which I find happens when one differs their option call-out from the order of appearance on the Help page. Although the MLO data starts in early 1958 and you clipped HADCRUT3 to “From: 1958” to match, MLO doesn’t display until the midpoint of the first 5-year running mean of the Isolate function, and the late From is bringing up something earlier that couldn’t be from the Isolate option.
Here is a cleaner version. Since MLO is not complete in 1958 I start from 1959 and call that out first for both, select a 13 month Mean for proper centering, then Isolate, and then Normalize to avoid playing with scaling.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1959/mean:13/isolate:60/normalise/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1959/mean:13/isolate:60/normalise
Hope you like it.

[Snip. Policy. — mod.]

From ericgrimsrud from October 12, 2012 at 7:59 am:

Please!!! There is only one interpretation out there for the PETM. A huge CO2 bust throughout the planet caused a large T increase.

Please indeed. That’s old thinking, as seen in this 2007 piece, “Climatic Chain Reaction Caused Runaway Greenhouse Effect 55 Million Years Ago”. Warming from CO₂ released by volcanic activity or something caused methane hydrates (clathrate) to melt, leading to a massive methane release, said methane then transforming into CO₂. This goes in with the Clathrate gun hypothesis:

In its original form, the hypothesis proposed that the “clathrate gun” could cause abrupt runaway warming in a timescale less than a human lifetime,[1] and might be responsible for warming events in and at the end of the last ice age.[2] This is now thought unlikely.[3][4]
However, there is stronger evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth on a number of occasions in the past, over timescales of tens of thousands of years; most notably in connection with the Permian extinction event, when 96% of all marine species became extinct 251 million years ago.[5]

So not only was it not a CO₂ release but actually CH₄, it also wasn’t a quick ‘burst’ but a long build-up.
More-current understanding is seen in this 2011 piece, “Methane May Be Answer to 56-Million-Year Question: Ocean Could Have Contained Enough Methane to Cause Drastic Climate Change”.

…
Some who study the PETM blame the worldwide burning of peat, volcanic activity or a massive asteroid strike as the source of the carbon, “but there’s no crater, or any soot or evidence of the burning of peat,” said Gerald Dickens, a Rice professor of Earth science and an author of the study, who thinks the new paper bolsters the argument for hydrates.
…
While the event that began the carbon-discharge cycle remains a mystery, the implications are clear, Dickens said. “I’ve always thought of (the hydrate layer) as being like a capacitor in a circuit. It charges slowly and can release fast — and warming is the trigger. It’s possible that’s happening right now.”
That makes it important to understand what occurred in the PETM, he said. “The amount of carbon released then is on the magnitude of what humans will add to the cycle by the end of, say, 2500. Compared to the geological timescale, that’s almost instant.”
…..

Interesting reading. Apparently the oceans were warmer then than they they are today, about as much methane hydrate built up as we have today, but it was in a thinner stability zone than modern deposits.
So when the “clathrate gun” gets fired, the “trigger is pulled” by a small amount of warming, which starts the release of the methane by melting some methane hydrates, which yields more warming, more hydrate melting thus more methane releasing, and then the runaway greenhouse effect until the stored methane hydrates are depleted, and the resulting CO₂ is eventually absorbed.

If someone is confused on that one, they have no chance of being open to the present case of AGW.

Puh-lease! You seek to compare modern human releases of CO₂ to the PETM, when you have neither the timescales nor the specific gas and release mechanisms correct. Thus it is you who is clearly confused.
And while you have dallied with an ultimately false worry about only 3% of the total global releases of a beneficial gas whose potential global warming effect is saturated, you have missed the big picture. With about as much hydrates stored as before the PETM albeit in a wider stability zone, there is a high risk of a similar event. With the natural warming occurring, the clathrate gun trigger may have already been pulled, and the reaction is unstoppable.
August 16, 2009: Warming Of Arctic Current Over 30 Years Triggers Release Of Methane Gas
September 3, 2009: Methane Gas Likely Spewing Into The Oceans Through Vents In Sea Floor
March 5, 2010: Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
April 24, 2010: Study Finds Surprising Arctic Methane Emission Source
June 18, 2012: Seeping Arctic Methane Has Serious Implications for Florida Coastline
Why should people join you in your panic over harmless human puffs of CO₂, when You have completely missed The Greatest Menace To The Climate?
In the throes of your nakedly anti-human bias, did you completely miss the Coming Climate Catastrophe because It’s a natural process and what’s natural can’t be a threat to life?
Oh, by the way, as can be read in this September 2012 WUWT piece, researchers found Arctic-area undersea methane vents that have been active for hundreds of years, long before any possible noticeable AGW.
So either you were wrong about the PETM and the methane hydrates are the thing to worry about, with there being clear evidence the long path to a runaway greenhouse effect has begun,
Or you were wrong about the PETM but the methane hydrates are not something to worry about.
In any case, as shown repeatedly, you are wrong about carbon dioxide. So why would anyone believe you about AGW being real and a credible threat?

Kadaka,
FYI, it does not matter whether the PETM was caused by busts of CO2 or CH4. CH4 turns into CO2 with a half life of 10 years. Also, it does not matter if the busts occurred over a period of 100 years, 1000 years or even 10,000 years. On the time scale involved here all of these can be considered to be essentially “instantaenous” because the warming effect lasted about 150,000 years.
IN any case, it is clear that the bust of CO2 caused the warming and like the present situation the emission of CO2 preceeded the warming.
So yes it does appear that my statement “Please!!! There is only one interpretation out there for the PETM. A huge CO2 bust throughout the planet caused a large T increase.” is correct.
Eric

Methinks that your arguments are not being heard and I would change the record Ericgrimsud.
I think you are dislusional in saying Richard and D B are in anyway connected to you, after all you said originally You did not know a Richard Courtney. Do your homework and take a sleeping pill.