On Sunday a colleague and I discussed the general issue of correlation versus causation in science. He suggested that 1. There must be a body of work establishing a causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and warming, and also 2. Some work that quantifies the extent of the warming from the anthropogenic carbon dioxide. He assumed as much because our government, the Australian government, is planning major perturbation to our economic system on the basis that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is contributing to dangerous global warming. He assumed that the Australian government would not undertake such an action lightly, indeed that such an action would be premised on good evidence establishing a proven causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global warming. I replied that I was not so sure.
He said he would do a search of the scientific literature on Monday. I said it would be interesting to compare what he turned up from this systematic search of library databases with a few random requests on the internet.
So, Sunday evening I posted a note at my blog, at John Quiggin’s blog and at a yahoo climate science group of mostly so-called climate change skeptics.
Perhaps not surprisingly one of the first to claim that a body of work existed was John Quiggin; a well known climate alarmist. Professor Quiggin went as far as to claim that there are “hundreds of papers on both the causal link and the question of sensitivity” but could only cite a few papers which dabble with the issue of sensitivity later in that blog thread.
By early Monday evening (when I started writing this blog post) the thread at Professor Quiggin’s blog had thrown up only three papers that I thought could potentially provide a causal link and a quantification of the extent of warming. Interestingly one of them was published as long ago as 1938. I had listed the papers earlier in the day at the threads at both Professor Quiggin’s and my blogs to see if other papers were put forward in preference to these, but they weren’t. The papers are:
1. Callendar, G.S., 1938. The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., Vol 64, 223–237.
2. Hofmann, D.J., J. H. Butler, E. J . Dlugokencky, J . W. Elkins, K. Masarie, S. A. Montzka and P. Tans, 2006. The role of carbon dioxide in climate forcing from 1979 to 2004: Introduction of the Annual Greenhouse Gas Index, Tellus B, Vol 58, 614-619.
3. Crowley, T. 2000. Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years. Science Vol 289: 270-277.
The Hofmann et al. paper initially looked the most promising to me, is available on the internet (click here) and is the first that I shall consider. (I plan to post comment on the Crowley or Callendar paper tomorrow.)
While the title of the Hofmann et al paper does suggest a “role” is established for carbon dioxide as a forcing/warming agent, in fact it is just assumed in the body of the paper.
The authors simply taken a set of gases (including carbon dioxide) and ascribed an effect: climate forcing. They do not demonstrate a mechanism, or even shown a correlation, between levels of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global warming.
So, I shall have to conclude that this paper fails the criteria (1. There must be a body of work establishing a causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and warming, and also 2. Some work that quantifies the extent of the warming from the anthropogenic carbon dioxide).
Reading the paper I was struck by the extent to which the authors assume that the increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since 1750 is primarily a result of “anthropogenic emissions” without explaining why.
There is an extensive scientific literature discussing the notion of causation and how this might be established, for example between environmental stressors and observed effects in natural systems. This literature emphasises that where there are potential alternative explanations for an observed correlation these should be considered.
In the case of carbon dioxide and global warming, Lance Endersbee (former Dean of Engineering and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Monash University) has suggested a direct physical relation between increasingly levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and increasingly average global sea surface temperatures over the last few decades (click here) suggesting the carbon dioxide is being released from the warming oceans.
Thanks to everyone who has posted and/or emailed papers and comment following my three random requests on the internet last night.
I intend this to be just the second in the series. I shall endeavour to consider the submissions beginning with those that appear the most promising and as a series of blog posts. Of course guest posts, and with alternative opinions, are welcome.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
“Reading the paper I was struck by the extent to which the authors assume that the increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since 1750 is primarily a result of “anthropogenic emissions” without explaining why.”
That is how science works, relying on the work of other people. If every paper had to re-invent the wheel, science would not get anywhere.
The FAQS address you questions, I think.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-faqs.pdf
Mechanism:
Martin, P.E., and E.F. Baker (1932). “The Infrared Absorption Spectrum of Carbon Dioxide.” Physical Review 41: 291-303.
Kaplan, Lewis D. (1952). “On the Pressure Dependence of Radiative Heat Transfer in the Atmosphere.” J. Meteorology 9: 1-12.
Early work on climate sensivity:
Plass, G.N., 1956, Infrared Radiation in the Atmosphere, American J. Physics 24, p. 303-21.
Plass, G.N., 1956, Carbon Dioxide and the Climate, American Scientist 44, p. 302-16.
Plass, G.N., 1956, Effect of Carbon Dioxide Variations on Climate, American J. Physics 24, p. 376-87.
Manabe, Syukuro, and Richard T. Wetherald (1975). “The Effects of Doubling the CO2 Concentration on the Climate of a General Circulation Model.” J. Atmospheric Sciences 32: 3-15.
Anthropogenic origin of atmospheric carbon increase:
Suess, Hans E. (1965). “Secular Variations of the Cosmic-Ray-Produced Carbon-14 in the Atmosphere and Their Interpretation.” J. Geophysical Research 70: 5937-52.
Suess, Hans E. (1968). “Climatic Changes, Solar Activity, and the Cosmic-Ray Production Rate of Natural Radiocarbon (in Mitchell, Ed., Causes of Climate Change, 1965 Conf.).” Meteorological Monographs 8(30): 146-50.
Jen, or anybody who is actually interested in the history of climate science, I recommend:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#a_Craig
by Spencer Wert.
This essay by Wert is also excellent:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm
From Science 2 May 2008
” Mother Nature Cools the Greenhouse , but hotter Times Still lie Ahead”.
A new paper shows that regional and even global temperatures are being temporarily held down by a jostling of the climate system, driven in large part by vacillating ocean currents”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5876/595
Jen,
If I genuinely wanted to understand how the engine in my car works I would ask a mechanic. I wouldn’t ask for the answer on a blog about insects or fortune telling. Likewise, if you were genuine you would direct your questions about climate science to actual climate scientists rather than an economist and those who read his blog. You are only tarnishing your already rather tatty reputation.
Birdie – don’t forget the similar paper from Nature:
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/002997.html
Is CO2 on holiday Birdie? Natural factors cool, but can’t warm?
“Is CO2 on holiday Birdie? Natural factors cool, but can’t warm?”
Apples and oranges. I believe the issue you’re referring to is the anticipated swing of the PDO which will bring with it more ENSO-neutral patterns for a decade or so.
Thing is, this isn’t a “natural factor.” It’s an emergent pattern of the atmospheric system. You have to think about it as a superposition of two signals: the roughly linear warming trend and the oscillating PDO trend. When you add the two together, you’ll get some periods of enhanced warming (the 90’s culminating the ’98 Nino), and some flatter periods, as a negative swing in the PDO would damp or mask the warming signal when the signals are superimposed.
So it really is apples and oranges. Of course natural factors can cool; on my blog I just authored a post this morning about the short-term cooling effects that volcanic aerosols can sometimes cause. And, of course natural factors can warm; part 2 of my recent post will focus on the long-term effect of vulcanism, which tend to cause a net warming. But we’re just not talking about a “natural factor”; we’re talking about patterns within the climate system. Not even remotely the same thing.
Everybody talks about “anthropogenic” but nobody knows what it is. Yet even hard-to-find IPCC figures confirm its magnitude: Of the several hundred gigatons of carbon dioxide the earth processes each year, man’s contribution is about 3%. Of the fraction that’s left over each cycle, man’s contribution is about 3%.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf
The ice core record rubs it in our noses: A warming earth exhales CO2 just as a cooling earth inhales it. But all we do is sneeze. Climatology has the correlation directly backwards. And in that direction it marches on.
Counters – Tsonis et al claim to have accounted for all the temperature changes in the 20th century using the collective behaviour of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation. Major climate shifts have occurred or will occur around 1913, 1942, 1978, 2033, and 2072 and they also predicted a 0.2 Celsius cooling between 2005 and 2020 which should be followed by a 0.3 Celsius warming until 2045 or so – then cooling for the rest of the 21st century. Of course, we could superimpose the effect of extra atmospheric CO2 on top, but it my suggestion is it makes diddly squat difference and isn’t the driver.
Paul,
Just because a group of researchers have demonstrated an alternative method of reconstructing the last century’s climate behavior does not mean that they’ve refuted the AGW claim or, more importantly, even developed a plausible alternative explanation. Hear me out…
With the exception of the ENSO, all these “oscillations” we hear about are not solid climatological constructs. They are convenient catch-all’s to collectively identify a set of seemingly apparent short-term and small-scale climate shift. That someone could combine them all togethor and tweak them to recreate our recent climate history is not impressive; if others wanted too, I’m sure they could do precisely the same thing by tweaking volcanic activity levels, solar forcing/insolation, or a myriad of other variables which affect the climate system.
Ultimately, you’re left with something that parsimony resolves quite nicely. Again, all these oscillations are just collective terms for apparent climate trends which are shorter-term and spatially separate. We can argue that the climate system is governed by the sum total of these oscillations should the rest of the system be kept equal. However, we’re dramatically violating parsimony because there is little evidence that these oscillations do in fact exist and occur regularly.
On the other hand, we can keep things constant and alter CO2 – something we know is rising and can very easily demonstrate is rising due to human industry (to dispute this fact is ridiculous; CO2 is most definitely rising, and there is no plausible factor from the natural environment which can keep pace constantly and consistently with the rise we’ve seen over the past 150 years). Now, we don’t have to violate parsimony; it’s easy to demonstrate from line-by-line radiative transfer (and even from basic physical modeling and analysis) that temperature over the long term will rise.
It’s simply Occam’s Razor. But in a more complex way, natural variation is nothing more than an intriguing hypothesis; it has little, if any empirical evidence to support it.
This does not surprise me at all – It’s Arrhenius’ 1906 paper that was the catalyst for the AGW hypothesis – reduction in atmospheric CO2 causes ice ages. Hnece increasing CO2 must warm the planet. The hypothesis is that simple but Arrhenius never proved it, and expected others to disprove it, as he categorically states in his 1906 paper translated from the German by Gerlich etc.
There are no peer reviewed papers proving Arrhenius’ hypothesis. It’s an assumption and the classic case of deductive science where climate sensitivity is accepted to be true by consensus.
This is not science.
Mel,
if your mechanic told you that your axles are nearing a tipping point and all four of your wheels were going to go flying off unless you bought a used car from him, would you? You are confusing intellectual complexity with access to information. Blogs like this one thrive because “climate science” is an amorphous, abstract concept, defined by a group of unscrupulous individuals who deliberately obfuscate and manipulate to achieve their political goals. Blame Al Gore. Incidentally, your metaphor is less than apt. If I wanted to learn about plumbing, I see a plumber. About electricians, an electrician. About framing, a carpenter. These are concretes. Now what if someone says that they want to know how to “build a house” – they might start with a general contractor. I suppose if your GC told you to replace all your plumbing but didn’t tell you why it was necessary, you’d go for it? You’re not alone, and it’s a sad state indeed.
Jennifer,
Your argument appears to structured to say that it is the human relocation of CO2 that is causing global warming. Everything that I have read, and my engineering experience, tells me that it is the accumulated sum of the build up (forces) of CO2 that is becoming the trigger for the further release of natural CO2, and more importantly methane, that is the threat to our near future. That threat is not so much that our environment will change, as it is that the rate of change will overwhelm the stability of our civilisation. Change is now inevitable. There are adaptions that can be coped with such as the innundation of lakes that you are concerned about, lakes that are destined, in the near future, to become bays of a very much larger flooded river estury as sea levels rise.
The real concern for me is where is your argument heading. Are you trying to say that this is all perfectly natural, we should ignore the science and continue as we are? This postion fails to recognise the equally serious issue of carbon depletion. Believe it or not concentrated carbon is a very valuable resource. One could be forgiven for thinking that there is a perpetual supply of it. Not so. One could be forgiven for thinking that the only use for carbon is burning. Not so. The reality is that we are ever more dependent on carbon as the stuctural building block of our civilisation. Yet as we burn the once in a planet lifetime accumulation of carbon (coal, oil, gas) we are dispersing this immensely important material to be spread uniformally around the planet’s surface. I recal an ex prime minister crowing that Australia has 300 years supply of coal in the one breath and then in another declaring that Australia should take responsibility for the worlds nuclear waste, a commitment for tens of thousands of years. Following that leadership would see Australia with coal as Nauru is to phosphate in all too short a time and without the readily available carbon to build all of the carbon based materials that maintain our modern civilisation. Just sit and think for a minute about all of the things that the 7 billion people of the world take for granted that are derived from concentrated carbon.
Everywhere you look you will see carbon. It is not like water or sand, it will run out. And as the earth heats up, regardless of the cause, that protective carbon veneer that is the backbone of our civilised world will become ever more important. That is the second main reason why our energy demand must switch now to solar direct power rather than fossil fuel (concentrated carbon) based.
Counters – Tsonis et al produced an interesting peer reviewed paper – no one has proved or refuted AGW.
“That someone could combine them all togethor and tweak them to recreate our recent climate history is not impressive; if others wanted too, I’m sure they could do precisely the same thing by tweaking volcanic activity levels, solar forcing/insolation, or a myriad of other variables which affect the climate system.”
Yeah – it’s called climate modelling – when non- warming arrives make a new one to predict non-warming for the next 10 years. Good game.
Clearly we’re all doomed by ppmv aerial plant food gas – only Marxism can save us!
Louis, I thought that was the Popperian thesis as to how science works. On this basis you’ll never accept that anything scientific is proved, so Michael Duffy’s bank manager can rest secure. Perhaps the challenge should have been phrased as a negation of particular hypotheses.
Graham
You miss the point – Arhhenius framed an hypothesis but declined to prove it, instead inverting the burden of proof to others – intellectual arrogance in other words.
It’s much like “I reckon so and so is true” and if you don’t like it, disprove it. Science by authority?
Arrhenius never offered any means of testing his hypothesis, but wrote that if all the CO2 was removed from the atmosphere and did not causes a drop in temperature, then that would refute his hypothesis. In other words disproving it by asking us to do the impossible.
That was an unfalsifiable proposition, and hence not science.
If you propose some hypothesis, you are obliged to demonstrate its verity, under the current limits of knowledge.
John Wheeler more or less said the same thing concerning black holes, we can’t disprove their existence, so hence they must exist.
The challenge was correctly framed – where is the experimental evidence, published in a refereed paper that demonstrates that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere increases its temperature.
There are no such papers, so Michael Duffy’s money is safe.
Scientific theories not based on a solid empirically determined basis is actually pseudoscience, and AGW is most definitely in this category.
BilB,
You write: “The real concern for me is where is your argument heading”.
What many people, even those who know me well, seem to find difficult to accept, is that I am not usually too concerned about where an argument is heading. At least not from a consequences or political perspective.
I am motivated by a thirst for knowledge, by a strong desire to better understand the world around me.
I am simply interested in understanding the facts-of-the matter and from different perspectives.
Graham are you saying the burden of proof should be reversed and that’s good science?
Where’s my cheque?
http://www.pensee-unique.fr/TemperatureTrendsVGray.pdf
I am trying to find the study reported in the BBC that determined that present human release of CO2 was 40,000 times greater than the earth’s long term ability to absorb it.
Still looking. I have saved a reference to it somewhere. But where?
Lets face it. The fundamental model for greenhouse is dead from the neck up. I’m endlessly surprised that both sides of the argument simply adopt the ruling paradigm when its really just quite laughable.
The specific order in which the calculations roll out make no sense. And the implied assumptions of the model are quite literally flat earth assumptions.
Anyone knows that the best place to put central heating is in the basement. And all Kettle-makers that ever lived designed their kettles with the element near the bottom of the kettle. But the ruling paradigm is so divorced from reality that it is indifferent as to where in the troposphere or the oceans the change in joules is introduced.
Relying on watts per square metre rather than the up-down penetration of joules ethnically cleanses the time factor out of everyones perspective.
There is just no way to amend or save this paradigm. It has to be scrapped outright. Guys like McIntyre and others have done a great job in auditing the use of data and statistics. But no-ones done a conceptual audit on the ruling paradigm itself.
The tenor of the debate is pretty disgraceful really. Since it represents a hall of parallel mirrors where each side is picking each-other up on mistakes. Whereas the climate rationalists pick up the alarmists on substantive mistakes and the alarmists tend to nitpick the fact is that any serious progress has to be made via the systematic testing of the assumptions of the paradigm itself.
I myself don’t go for any watts-per-square-metre JIVE. It seems obvious to me that the whole thing ought to be done of the basis of heat budgets and strata. And that the focus ought to be on joules in and out on different timescales and different strata.
But in the end a still superior paradigm might come out of a general rethink.
On both sides of the argument, since the subject crosses many specialties, anyone having taken a public position is loathe to ask questions. Climate rationalists are too willing to take certain assumptions as bi-partisan, perhaps for fear of the international goon-show that will come at them if they show themselves not up to speed on some small matter or other.
Economists deal with many small models. Most of them pretty dubious. But my generation at least knew that most of these models were pretty bogus and never confused them with reality as the Australian non-Austrian economists appear to. So it was very easy for me to spot the fundamental silliness of what this climate paradigm was all about.
“Is CO2 on holiday Birdie? Natural factors cool, but can’t warm?”
I think the 1998 El Nino was an excellent example of natural factors warming.
In the long run, natural factors do, of course, warm, or cool, as well. Those natural factors don’t seem to be significant at present.
“But in a more complex way, natural variation is nothing more than an intriguing hypothesis; it has little, if any empirical evidence to support it.”
Yeah. Before the mid-18th century, we observe in the ice cores (empirical evidence?), for instance, no natural variation in temperatures. Or do you mean internal variability? No matter, no one else really cares.
“You are confusing intellectual complexity with access to information. Blogs like this one thrive because “climate science” is an amorphous, abstract concept, defined by a group of unscrupulous individuals who deliberately obfuscate and manipulate to achieve their political goals. Blame Al Gore.”
I know one of the researchers personally. He is not at all amporphous, he is intelligent and very human. His goal is science, it’s what he loves, and with or without AGW, that’s what he’d be doing regardless. Gore has nothing to do with this, the AGW research was alive and kicking long before Gore turned up. These paranoid conspiracy theories about ‘political goals’ would be funny if they weren’t serious.
“But in a more complex way, natural variation is nothing more than an intriguing hypothesis; it has little, if any empirical evidence to support it.”
Goodness me. Whose the dope who said this. Its almost not worth scrolling through the confederacy of idiocy just to find out.
“The real concern for me is where is your argument heading. Are you trying to say that this is all perfectly natural, we should ignore the science and continue as we are?”
What science? Or more to the point WHAT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE? Thats what we were looking for. Or hadn’t you noticed?
After all the hectares of scribbling on this subject of AGW there remains the annoyance of the missing HOT SPOT and Spencer’s teams problem of finding any positive feedback.
More importantly there remains the problem (if you believe AGW ) of China, India, Brazil refusing to tango.
In a little more than 20 years they will produce over 50% of the planet’s co2 emissions while Aust and NZ combined won’t produce more than .5% at most.
We presently produce a whopping big 1.1%( and heading south) so berating us on this blog or elsewhere doesn’t make a scrap of difference.
An interesting use of co2 from power stations etc is fast blooming of selected algae to create a bio mass to produce any fuel you can name,ethanol, diesel,hydrogen,petroleum etc.
From the youtube videos I think the rate of growth is phenomenal something like 40,000+ litres produced pa from one acre, ( greenhouse) while normal biodiesel crops such as canola, corn, palm oil etc produce at best some hundreds of litres.
BTW the algae produces hydrogen if it is feed a diet of sulphur all explained on some very well credentialled company videos, remarkable to me at least.
The Smorgan family are using one of the best methods ( and selected algae) under licence from the USA to carry out trials at the Hazelwood power station in Victoria, so instead of sequestration underground in the future we may see co2 used to produce fuel.
I have been a GW sceptic for years, but I am starting to get worried by the direction of some of the sceptical arguments.
Warning: if we start arguing either that man-made emissions are not adding to CO2 in the atmosphere, or that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere has no effect on temperature, WE WILL LOSE THE DEBATE.
There are even claims that CO2 is not increasing, based on extremely dubious measurements from the 1940s. This just muddies the waters.
Unfortunately, sceptics have yet to get their story straight. This would be ok if was just a question of a search for abstract knowledge. But the arguments seem to be all over the place.
This is a joke isn’t it Jennifer? Either that or you just didn’t bother reading anything anyone else sent. It’s laughable to suggest that the readers of this blog only sent you three papers. It’s also plain nasty. They took th etrouble of finding references and you play a juvenile game of “nah nah nah nah nah Can’t hear you”
Doing any science at the moment Jennifer? What are you currently studying? Been publishing recently?
Do you remember how to do a Lit Review? Or is it so long since you actually studied something that you’ve forgotten how. Or maybe you’re not interested in science anymore, it’s all politics now isn’t it.
Graeme shouting “WHAT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE” when you ignore any of the links to papers being presented just makes you look like an idiot.
O Jennifer my Jennifer,
Naughty naughty! I explicitly stated when I gave you this reference that it was to be used to provide more up-to-date figures and data for Callendar’s 1938 paper, which gives the overview of the physical mechanisms and the relevant formulae. I did not intend it to be a single paper fulfilling both your criteria, as my original note makes clear.
More recent papers tend not to bother supplying a Callendar-like overview of the whole problem, since it is assumed that everyone who didn’t come down in the last shower is capable of reading IPCC reports if they want a summary of the whole field.
Nor do Hofmann et al “not explain why” CO2 increase since 1750 is anthropogenic. It is due to the burning of fossil fuels. They state quite clearly on page 5:
“Interannual changes in CO2 can be put into two categories:
emissions due to the combustion of fossil fuels, and natural variations in sources and sinks of carbon due to variations in climate and fires. The former provides the main reason why CO2 mixing
ratios have increased since 1750. The latter modulate the annual increase in CO2, but have always been smaller than the former since direct atmospheric measurements began at the Mauna Loa
Observatory in 1958.”
and go on to discuss the natural sources of variation and their level (ENSO, volcanic eruptions and large fires) in more detail, with references.
Tell me, are you disputing that people burn fossil fuels, or that fossil fuels emit CO2, or that that CO2 has to go somewhere?
In addition, the very first reference, in the overview introductory chapter, refers to this publication IPCC (2001); perhaps you’ve heard of it? They state they are using the 1750 baseline because that is the IPCC standard – would you consider checking this reference before you throw accusations of “assuming… without explaining why?”
Luke: I’m not sure if that very interesting paper on vulcanism addresses the anthropogenic component. But I’m prepared to split the $1000 with you.
“It’s laughable to suggest that the readers of this blog only sent you three papers.”
Just one would do the trick if one could be found. But no such paper exists.
What you would want is DETECTION AND ATTRIBUTION. But when anything of this nature is attempted you cannot find a CO2-influence.
Its been a pretty awesome rope-a-dope. On account of the number of dopes out there.
I was serious all that time when I was asking you guys for evidence. And I was serious in my assurances that you had none. The only conclusion is that whatever influence the extra-CO2 has is too small to show up and therefore if its a small warming effect it MUST be good. That conclusion is unassailable in logic.
JUST……..ONE……..STUDY.
All you need is one.
We might have to take time out to explain to the leftists just what the term “evidence” means.
Its not the same as “sentiment” and its not the same as “assertions” if that helps any.
braddles:
“I have been a GW sceptic for years, but I am starting to get worried by the direction of some of the sceptical arguments.”
Yer not wrong there mate! You’d think that after 10 years of NO MORE WARMING, all the good hard work by McIntyre, Spencer, Chilingar, Koitsoyannis, Stockwell etc etc sceptics would be learning to give up on the ‘weird science’ and beat the AGW bandwagon at the main game (wher it can be beat, you betcha) but no, post-post-modernism there is still no lack of fruit loops on both sides ready to jump out of the bushes and spout off….(or jump back in the bushes and ……off).
Back to the hard science. Here’s a cross-cross-post, hey ya gotta chase the honking geese on this blog somehow (;-):
Here is the relationship between sea surface chlorophyll a (i.e. a key measure of cyanobacterial primary productivity) as measured by the OBPG SeaWiFS satellite processed colour sensing and the daytime SSTs as measured via 11 micron sensing by the MODIS Aqua satellite across the Southern Ocean (SO) (below 30S) for recent years.
Notice the marked seasonal component to primary productivity and the remarkable offset between primary productivity and SSTs. This latter feature shows that for the SO at least it is not SST which drives primary productivity – it is in fact the preceding pulse of CO2 dissolving in the water which allows productivity to rise.
http://reason.gsfc.nasa.gov/OPS/cgi-bin/Giovanni/Giovanni_cgi.pl?west=-180&north=-30&east=180&south=-90&type=3%23Time+Plot+%28point+or+area+averaging%29&Product_A=0%23%23%23SeaWiFS+Chlorophyll+a+concentration&Product_B=5%23%23%23Aqua+Sea+Surface+Temperature+%2811+micron+day%29&landocean=landocean&b_year=1997&b_month=September&e_year=2008&e_month=February&end_date=2008%2F02%2F29&data_limit=126&cbar=cpre&cmin=&cmax=&tpbar=tpdyn&tpmin=&tpmax=&tpint=&asc_res=1.0&global_cfg=.%2Fglobal.cfg.pl&data_sys=mpcomp&pid=ocean&action=Generate+Plot
BTW, I heartily recommend use of this NASA site:
http://reason.gsfc.nasa.gov/OPS/Giovanni/mpcomp.ocean.2.shtml
One of the things the SeaWiFS satellite chlorophyll a measurements show during the last decade is just how volcanic action does stimulate downwind primary productivity. The most dramatic example of that is the continual high primary productivity on the East Patagonia Coastal Shelf region – downwind of the perpetually active Andean volcanoes of Western Patagonia and Southern Chile.
Nice post Neville.
Jennifer on the JQ Blog I suggested you look at the laws of thermodynamics. Why – entropy!
Hi James,
I’m not sure what your qualifications are, but you assume an awful lot.
A good scientist doesn’t assume too much. Furthermore, to assume that most of the increase in Co2 over recent decades is athropogenic is to perhaps assume too much.
What is increasingly clear, including from your comments and emails, is that there doesn’t appear to be a body of scientific work published in reputable journals that examines the causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global warming and that also quantifies the extent of the warming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
Unfortunately, however, it seems most politicians and media-types assume this to be the case. Perhaps like you, they assume too much?
You are a big phoney Jennifer.
This is nothing more than a publicity stunt.
If you were actually interested in the mechanisms etc. you’d be down in your local University library.
People sent you links to papers and you chose to ignore them, just shows that the skepticism you hold is nothing but denial.
“What is increasingly clear, including from your comments and emails, is that there doesn’t appear to be a body of scientific work published in reputable journals that examines the causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global warming and that also quantifies the extent of the warming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide.”
This is a ludicrous assertion, you were given 50+ papers to read in the previous post that you ignored. What is actually becoming clear is you have no idea how to conduct scientific research.
From the Hofmann paper;
“Radiative forcing is calculated using a radiative transfer model using the spectral properties and global abundance of a parameter of interest, and gives a useful estimate of global mean response of a potential climate perturbation.”
The only model I have seen described is the Weart semi-infinite opaque layered one which defeats saturation on the basis of excitation and deexcitation rate differences; it is simply and erroneously based on Zeno’s Arrow and infinite divisibility; it ignores saturation, logarithmic decline, wavelength alteration due to SB and Wien; but mostly it does not address the reemission of the photon and the further energy loss due to vibration; NT has stated that it must be more of an energy trap than if the IR goes straight upwards and bypasses the CO2; no, it could at best be only equivalent; photon in, photon out; but extra energy, at a molecular level is expended; at a molecular level a molecule of CO2 interacting with IR will have a net energy loss. At the macro-level, NT has also pooh-poohed my view on rotational energy exchange with the atmosphere on the basis that the emitted carbon is light; 6 gigatonnes a year is light; yes well, that’s funny in a Jenny Craig sort of way; but fair enough, if NT doesn’t like that macro concept here is another model which negates the semi-infinite AGW one;
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15567030701568727
Chilingar et al describe a convective model for atmospheric heat transfer which swamps the limited heat transfer by radiative means, which is predominantly done by water vapor; they too look at the increase in atmospheric weight produced by the release of CO2 which has the effect, via Henry’s Law, of increasing oceanic absorption of both CO2 and O2, thus mitigating atmospheric pressure and causing a slight cooling.
There is no model to describe heating by CO2; CO2 is a marker/product/indicator of natural processes which effect temperature movement.
Hey Jennifer, I’ll supply you with as many scientific papers as you want. I just don’t work for free. You asked for “some work/some research results” and I supplied them. “A body of work” is a rather larger collection of entities.
Furthermore, you didn’t ask for any papers showing that the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is anthropogenic, which is a separate research question. You asked for papers showing the link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide (thereby assuming its existence) and heating. These have been delivered to you.
Tell me, if you had put a request up on your blog asking the public to email you a picture of a fish, and only 3 people had done so, would you then conclude that fish don’t exist?
What exactly is the “awful lot” that I, personally, am assuming? You claim to know a lot about what I think for someone who admits to not knowing what my qualifications are, let alone my thought processes…
“Hey Jennifer, I’ll supply you with as many scientific papers as you want. I just don’t work for free. You asked for “some work/some research results” and I supplied them. “A body of work” is a rather larger collection of entities.
Furthermore, you didn’t ask for any papers showing that the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is anthropogenic, which is a separate research question. You asked for papers showing the link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide (thereby assuming its existence) and heating. These have been delivered to you.
Tell me, if you had put a request up on your blog asking the public to email you a picture of a fish, and only 3 people had done so, would you then conclude that fish don’t exist?
What exactly is the “awful lot” that I, personally, am assuming? You claim to know a lot about what I think for someone who admits to not knowing what my qualifications are, let alone my thought processes…”
Ditto 🙂
Jen
You should state what you would accept as “proof”.
Otherwise this is far too open-ended.
If a replicate planet earth (or perhaps a 10 member ensemble for sampling chaos) is needed for an experiment over a few hundred years (or even decades) then proof might be a tad difficult.
So how about giving us some idea what you’d accept ?
James,
I am happy to post comment from you as a new thread that explains, in our own words, how the two papers you sent me yesterday fulfil the criteria.
But at the moment I think you are misrepresenting the content of the papers and the concepts of both causation and sensitivity – at least as they are understood in the scientific literature.
Also, I am interested to know what your background is, as it may give me some understanding of what you understand by these concepts and also by the concept of evidence.
Cheers,
Graham,
The fluxes are integrated over in all GCMs and many energy balance models.
I’m in kindy and have no background in anything.
Jennifer, what do you mean by the concepts causation and sensitivity – at least as they are understood in the scientific literature? A concise answer would be appreciated.
Can you give an example of causation in say your area of expertise, biology, that fulfils your requirements you demand?
The thing about that Weart history is it’s sort of vague on how climate science overcomes the Knut Ångström discovery that a smidge of CO2 will saturate the IR spectrum. No matter how much you add you can’t do better then saturation. Arguing how much over the saturation point you are is like arguing how pregnant John Edward’s girlfriend was.
There’s a bit of handwaving. There’s an exhortation to look at the atmosphere in new ways.
Weart: “Herr Koch had reported to Ångström that the absorption had not been reduced by more than 0.4% when he lowered the pressure, but a modern calculation shows that the absorption would have decreased about 1%.”
OK Weart is talking about how much co2 has to be removed before it makes a detectable difference.
Now watch what he does in the next paragraph.
Weart: “The greenhouse effect will in fact operate even if the absorption of radiation were totally saturated in the lower atmosphere. The planet’s temperature is regulated by the thin upper layers where radiation does escape easily into space. Adding more greenhouse gas there will change the balance. Moreover, even a 1% change in that delicate balance would make a serious difference in the planet’s surface temperature.”
He wants to say that more co2 will pile up in the upper atmosphere causing it to warm up.
Wrong.
There’s a bit on how the various absorptions become more discreet the higher you go and the lower the air pressure gets, but that’s been proven a non factor. The upper atmosphere isn’t warming up – see Monckton et al.
Roll up Roll up!
See the new magic show!
Today is the new world of Marohasy Science!
Watch as she asks questions and see how the meaning changes with her mood!
Watch as answers vanish in a puff of Marohasy Brand “Logic-ish”!
See her powers of Rationalogicality!
Watch her dismiss papers as having no meaning without actually reading them!
Hi Jennifer,
I am puzzled that you claim that the papers should have discussed the concept of climate sensitivity and the nature of causality, neither of which is referred to in your initial post and the second of which has been debated in the philosophical literature since Hume, if not before.
Is this still for your friend who hasn’t thought much about things? He seems very specific about what he hasn’t thought much about.
“You should state what you would accept as “proof”.”
Oh no not that racket. This is where the fraudster substitutes the word “evidence” for the word “proof” and so misrepresents the other side.’
How about some EVIDENCE. You are a million miles from PROOF. You ought to just come up with evidence. And if you can get full-spectrum convergent evidence than that would be considered PROOF.
That brings me to another point. Finding the truth isn’t about falsification no matter what Popper says. Its about convergent verification. Falsification is part of the process but what you are really after is convergent verification.
In biology something that you can get convergent verification for would be the idea that the heart is analogous to a pump.
In climate science you would want to know that the paradigm was inductively/deductively sound and that it was backed up by empirical evidence. Well neither of these is the case.
But don’t run ahead of yourself. You just need some evidence for starters. Trying to substitute PROOF for EVIDENCE is a racket thats just getting old.
This is slightly (OK, quite a bit) off topic, but on the topic of rationality… Tim Flannery has now officially lost it. In public, no less.
“In this summer of 2008, it feels as if our future is crystallising before our eyes. Food shortages, the credit crisis, escalating oil prices, a melting Arctic ice cap and the failure of the Doha trade negotiations: one or all of these issues could be the harbingers of profound change for our global civilisation.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/09/scienceandnature.climatechange
Entertaining, if nothing else.
DMS
Nexus 6. Do you not know what evidence is?
How about you explain what you think evidence is so that we can see where you are falling down. You are basically lying here. You are claiming the problem is with someone else putting the evidence bar up too high. Thats not the case. Thats an old rort of the science-fraud side of the debate. What has happened instead is that you guys refuse to come up with evidence.
“If you were actually interested in the mechanisms etc. you’d be down in your local University library. ”
How about just coming up with some evidence you ignorant fraudulent phoney jerk?
Is that too much to ask?
I don’t think thats too much to ask.
“anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global warming”
So has anyone quantified the anthropogenic CO2 component yet? Of the 100 ppm supposedly added to the atmosphere since 1850, the IPCC figures I cited
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf
suggest that about 3% is human-made. So even if more CO2 has caused a degree of warming (for which there is no evidence), the human contribution would be around 0.03 degrees.
Primary productivity and temperature on the East Patagonia coastal shelf, September 1997 to February 2008. No cities, low local population, no mass export of anthropogenic nutrients out of the rivers:
http://reason.gsfc.nasa.gov/OPS/cgi-bin/Giovanni/Giovanni_cgi.pl?west=-80&north=-36&east=-30&south=-56&type=3%23Time+Plot+%28point+or+area+averaging%29&Product_A=0%23%23%23SeaWiFS+Chlorophyll+a+concentration&Product_B=5%23%23%23Aqua+Sea+Surface+Temperature+%2811+micron+day%29&landocean=landocean&b_year=1997&b_month=September&e_year=2008&e_month=February&end_date=2008%2F02%2F29&data_limit=126&cbar=cpre&cmin=&cmax=&tpbar=tpdyn&tpmin=&tpmax=&tpint=&asc_res=1.0&global_cfg=.%2Fglobal.cfg.pl&data_sys=mpcomp&pid=ocean&action=Generate+Plot
http://reason.gsfc.nasa.gov/OPS/cgi-bin/Giovanni/Giovanni_cgi.pl?west=-80&north=-36&east=-30&south=-56&type=2%23Area+Plot+%28time+averaging%29&Product_A=0%23%23%23SeaWiFS+Chlorophyll+a+concentration&Product_B=5%23%23%23Aqua+Sea+Surface+Temperature+%2811+micron+day%29&landocean=landocean&b_year=1997&b_month=September&e_year=2008&e_month=February&end_date=2008%2F02%2F29&data_limit=126&cbar=cpre&cmin=&cmax=&tpbar=tpdyn&tpmin=&tpmax=&tpint=&asc_res=1.0&global_cfg=.%2Fglobal.cfg.pl&data_sys=mpcomp&pid=ocean&action=Generate+Plot
No real correlation with SSTs – just a bunch of lovely Andean volcanoes puffing away into the winds providing the fertilizer….for a diverse bunch of cyanobacteria who certainly aren’t counting any of those human-labelled CO2 molecules. Just think of all that nasty CO2 being mopped up….
Alan Siddons:
“….suggest that about 3% is human-made. So even if more CO2 has caused a degree of warming (for which there is no evidence), the human contribution would be around 0.03 degrees.”
Whoops, very, very, big boo boo there – it’s not a ballsed-up lower high school linear relationship Alan – got a real lot of background reading to do old son….
And this from the bloke who started this thread? Are we sure his real name isn’t Cheesus K. Reist?
This sort of stuff would give the noble term ‘sceptic’ a really, really bad name (much worse than at present).
Hi Jennifer,
I am happy to write you a guest post explaining why I believe the papers I supplied met the specified criteria, on a “without prejudice” basis; that is, my exposition does not alter my claim for $1000 against Mr Duffy. After all, I (or you) might reveal my (or your)-self wrong in our understanding of the papers, but an independent arbitrator might nevertheless hold that the paper meets the criteria and so Mr Duffy should pay up.
Since you have stated that you have a critique of the Callendar paper in preparation, I will wait for that before preparing an exposition and response.
Does an increase in CO2, whether anthropogenically sourced or not, cause an increase in temp at either a molecular or global level? NO. None of the papers prove otherwise. I’ve addressed the shortcomings of the Hoffman paper, and the defects of Arrhenius and Callendar; Hansen is beyond the pale; Mann is discredited except in his own eyes; Ammann and Wahl are obscurantists and Sherwood and Allen are gameboy practitioners. If it has been warming its been due to natural processes, and Steve Short’s blooms are going to eat us into a cooler period via a massive increase in albedo.
Look Houghton. You are going to have to come up with actual evidence. There is no substitute for evidence.
And Steve Short. How about instead of standing around looking smug why don’t you explain why you differ from Mr Siddons. No need to be rude. You won’t be gaining any brownie points with the science fraudsters on the basis of such triangulation.
The legal effect of the disclaimer, “without prejudice” is that the detail is inadmissable until the sustantive matter has been tried; it is a negotiating tactic and sits well with the bluster, bullying and obfuscation of the true worth of the AGW position.
Graeme Bird:
“And Steve Short. How about instead of standing around looking smug why don’t you explain why you differ from Mr Siddons.”
It doesn’t matter that the CO2 has risen over the historical short term. It has done it before as Beck’s chemical data set shows and it will do it again.
Non-scientists who refer to the ice core record do not realize that ice takes time to pack down and, during that period, the ‘trapped’ CO2 is partially ‘smeared out’ (redistributed) via interstitial diffusion etc so that short term pulses/peaks (short term in geological terms that is) disappear.
In fact, when the post-1957 Keeling method curve was ‘married’ to the pre-1957 curve there was even there execution of a little ‘pre-nup’ agreement to the tune of about 83 years to make sure those two curves could be ‘married-up’. Don’t believe me? Go check.
My key point is that the ocean’s ‘standing crop’ of photosynthetic cyanobacteria (blue-green algae to the out-of-date) are lying around in wait for any extra CO2 fertilization of the atmosphere.
They have been doing this for eons e.g. every time volcanos pop off and flood basalts emerge etc.
Cyanobacteria are not perfect – it takes them time to ‘gear up for the job’ and they are constrained dependent by N, P, Fe and Si nutrient supply. But they are also a very complex consortium of different genera and species – hence they are a highly adaptable consortium. Various species require less or more of various nutrients and each has it’s preferred temperature range.
The only mechanisms which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere are simply chemical dissolution (a relatively coarse function of SST) AND net conversion to cyanobacterial biomass and biogenic calcite due to the ‘primary productivity’ (a more complex function of both SST and atmospheric CO2 level)
If atmospheric CO2 has not risen as rapidly as the rise in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which is true then, by definition, net flux TO the oceans MUST HAVE INCREASED.
Therefore we have to consider the climatic effects of that rise in flux rate, which IMHO must now largely be the result of increased oceanic primary productivity. Why? Because we are constantly reminded that average global SSTs have gone up and we all know CO2 solubility has an inverse relationship to water temperature, don’t we?
Anyone following other past threads would know from my posts that the net effect of blooming cyanobacteria is to lower SST due to the creation of:
evaporation-inhibiting organic monolayers;
albedo-increasing coccolithophoric blooms; and
increased DMS-nucleated low level cloud,
thus producing marked changes to the lower troposhere via the resultant increased albedo, reduced relative humidity and increased lapse rate effects.
It is false logic to infer that a relatively low and constant rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 levels automatically leads to the conclusion that there can be no dramatic NEGATIVE forcing effects IN THE OCEAN of that increase on global air temperatures.
We can therefore expect, albeit likely in erratic fits and starts, indirect cooling effects from rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions as a consequence of the increased CO2-fertilization of oceanic cynanobacteria.
The weather effects of the latter part of the last decade i.e. well after the strong 1998 El Nino may well represent the beginnings of increased effects along the lines noted above.
Certainly, we can say that there is no evidence whatsoever of the great Southern Ocean (SO) (i.e. below 30 S) failing to ‘process’ the increased CO2 – if anything the clear evidence for both SH temperatures being lower than NH and SH CO2 levels being lower than NH suggest the recent trend is in favour of increasing cyanobacterial primary productivity of the SO in recent years.
Satellite chlorophyll a determinations (a measure of sea surface cyanobacterial productivity) show that the strongest upwards trends in these levels in recent years have been concentrated in waters of temperature less than 15 C (including the Arctic where we know the waters have been warming).
“..indirect cooling effects from rising antrophogenic CO2 emmissions as a consequence of the increased CO2 -fertilization of oceanic cyanobacteria”.
Dear Steve,
In my part of the world , the blue -green algae blooming is with a very mild word described as a nuisance. The algae is toxic to fish, animals and humans and causes paralysis and diarrea.
There are daily surveys with air planes to report the extent of the algae and how close the belts are to the shore.
Here’s a Norwegian link and daily survey/ information on coastal algae ( in English) :
http://algeinfo.imr.no/eng/
Here’s a NASA link to keep track of global and regional primary productivity via chlorophyll a and SSTs measuremnts by satellite over the last decade etc:
http://reason.gsfc.nasa.gov/OPS/Giovanni/mpcomp.ocean.2.shtml
In my part of the world, you would be a baby.
Got some new ones for you Jennifer.
Bet you won’t read them though…
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVR-4CDWM9J-B&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=6afe76012f81473192984583c614e551
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000100000020200801000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
See the problem you have is that you don’t actually know much about this kind of science and will have real trouble determining which papers are relevant to your questions.
Look you total moron. Just 1 study will do if indeed it has the evidence. Now which one has the evidence?
Which one has the DETECTION AND ATTRIBUTION evidence?
None of them right?
You are trying to tie people up in stupid.
Talking about little children, then I can mention there’s an ongoing geological summit in Oslo , that also had climate on the agenda on Friday.
Charles Hall , ecologist , from State University of New York , stated ” scientists with equal qualifications have opposite and strong views , but the climate debate is characterized as 6 year olds playing in the sandpit”.
List included Bob Carter from Australia. ( List of participants: Henrik Svensmark fra Danish National Space Centre
Bob Carter fra Marine Geophysical Laboratory ved James Cook University
Peter Barrett fra University of Wellington i Australia
Olav Kaarstad fra Statoil
Connie Hedegaard, dansk klima- og energiminister
Eystein Jansen fra Bjerknessenteret i Bergen
Gerald Haug fra Eidgenössische Technische Hochschulei Zürich i Sveits
Lennart Bengtsson fra Max Planck Institute for Meteorology i Tyskland og University of Reading i Storbritannia)
Bob Carter stated ” there’s has not been any statistically relevant warming of the planet since 1995″.
This was opposed by Norwegian Eystein Janssen ( IPCC), who stated ” it’s been warmer the previous 10 years. We can’t expect that every year should be warmer than the previous one. If we look at the past 100 years , then 25% of all 10 year periods have indicated a cooling , but despite of this we still have a global warming. This is the way the system is working”.
And the point is……?
A quick scan of the comments above shows that no one has been able to come up with empirical refuation that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere causes it’s temperature to rise.
Conversely one could also point to a refereed paper which decribed how a reduction in CO2 in air causes cooling.
Either of these hypotheses seem not to have been tested by physical experiment and reported in a refereed journal.
Quickly scanning some of the papers linked here, none fit these criteria.
So Michael Duffy’s money is quite safe, and AGW remains pseudoscience until proven otherwise by physical experiment, not technically sophisticated thought experiments, the Socratic or dialectic method.
Graeme, there is something wrong with you. You need to calm down… 🙂
Jennifer’s first question was “establishing a causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and warming”
The first shows appropriate laboratory experiments.
I found Steve’s comments on algae fascinating.
As I come from a Philosophy background, let me pose one of those ethical dilemmas we like: Hansen is alone in a laboratory with the miracle algae. He has the only DNA for the silver bullet in a test tube. The plant can be released into the ocean where it will chew CO2 and grow into a tasty, nutritious vegetable, not unlike brocollini, capable of feeding the developing world (as well as ‘stabilising whatever it might be out there in the you-know-what that needs stabilising).
There is a solitary cleaner shuffling about the lab and no-one due in until morning.
Would this prove to be the tipping point? Does Hansen tip the tube?
James Haughton is unwise to rely on Hofmann et al when citing them as stating quite clearly on page 5:
“Interannual changes in CO2 can be put into two categories: emissions due to the combustion of fossil fuels, and natural variations in sources and sinks of carbon due to variations in climate and fires. The former provides the main reason why CO2 mixing ratios have increased since 1750. The latter modulate the annual increase in CO2, but have always been smaller than the former since direct atmospheric measurements began at Mauna Loa in 1958”
That last assertion is simply not true, as on average since 1958 57 percent of total CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and land use change has been taken up by the biospheric sinks (Canadell et al., 2007, PNAS, Table 1). Hofman et al also need to explain to us why when solar incoming radiation is 342 W per sq.metre p.a. (according to Kiehl and Trenberth 1997), their estimate of global radiative forcing from CO2 in 2004 is 1.6 W per sq.m. p.a., i.e. less than 0.5% of the solar, the latter is more important than the former. BTW, Kiehl and Trenberth have yet to explain why the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does not work in the upper troposphere (their Fig.7 shows 324 W per sq. m. p.a. of “back radiation” from CO2 in the troposphere to earth despite the former being cooler than the latter). K&T also curiously show only 168 W per sq.m p.a. of the solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface, but the surface manages to radiate 390 W/sq.m/p.a. This implies more violation of Newton and Einstein, but then they were never climate scientists.
James, can you help?
NT
The first does not show appropriate lab experiments. The system is N2-CO2 – air is chemically different.
You do understand the science don’t you?
Come on, Jen!! Still waiting for an example of causal linkage from your field of expertise (with a supporting paper, of course). You know a bit about ecology – hit us with a good ecology paper.
Your silence says rather a lot about this little exercise you’ve undertaken.
P.S. Hope your friend’s new found passion for AGW study is coming along well.
“It doesn’t matter that the CO2 has risen over the historical short term. It has done it before as Beck’s chemical data set shows and it will do it again.”
You take Beck seriously? Now I know you are a nong. Beck has no idea.
“Non-scientists who refer to the ice core record do not realize that ice takes time to pack down”
So you talked with some of them and confirmed your supposition. Or you just made it up?
Steve Short – can you quantify, even approximately, the strength of those three ocean-cooling effects due to algal blooms?
Also, I wonder if you’re familiar with the book “Ecological Geography of the Sea” by Alan Longhurst? I ran across it recently and found it fascinating. It’s all about how climatic physics shapes planktonic primary production.
Cough, cough , Steve, you’re not by any chance associated with the PLANKTOS guys , that want to save the planet using phytoplankton to combat climate change????
Sorry , but you have seemed to be an intelligent man, so I keep asking if you truly believe in this theory that btw has been debunked here on Jen’s site.
FYI, the end of the Geological Congress in Oslo, with a climate session was very hot , and one delegate also called another delegate a parody.
Fortunately , the Danish Eneregy Minister saved the Congress when she finally stated ” we would face real problems the day when we all agree!”
So just who is the nong here?
(1) No matter what one may think about Beck (and he clearly isn’t a genius), he should at least get credit for highlighting one simple fact and it is this: There is EASILY a sufficient body of evidence from many tens of thousands of direct chemical measurements of atmospheric CO2 pre-1957 i.e. before the adoption of the Keeling method, of significant variability of distribution of CO2 both in time and in place around the planet. Most of those measurements were made by highly scrupulous chemists, mostly Germans, using a method which any good chemist familiar with it agrees gave a precision to ±1-2% from at least 1900 onwards. Several of those chemists were Nobel Prize Laureates (surprise- just like Arrhenius). To reject ALL that body of data in one fell swoop (e.g. as in the pathetically vindictive reviews of Beck’s paper), is JUST another rotten apple in the great basket of such rotten apples that is the AGW bandwagon – right up there with the pre-1957 Keeling CO2 curve ’83 year offset adjustment’ to the ice core 1800 – 1956 CO2 curve, the GISS/Hansen temperature record adjustments and re-adjustments, the hockey stick repudiations of the MWP and LIA by Mann, Amman and Wahl (choke), the repudiation of the surprisingly high rate of warming at the end of the Younger Dryas, the post-Terminations CO2 lagging issue, repudiation of 200 years of solution thermodynamics to create ocean acidification ‘real soon now’ fantasies, Gore’s shonky hurricane frequency predictions, etc…. need I go on, and on, and on?
(2) The 2004 paper by Polyakov et al. at the International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska, Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia and the Naval Research Laboratory, Stennis Space Center, Mississippi recently quoted by Beck as a likley cause of regionally variable CO2 levels pre-1957 IMO is sound. Quote: “Finally, it is found that the Arctic air–sea–ice system and the North Atlantic sea surface temperature display coherent low-frequency fluctuations. Elucidating the mechanisms behind this relationship will be critical to an understanding of the complex nature of low-frequency variability found in the Arctic and in lower-latitude regions.” Ironically, this is essentially just what Keenleyside et al found by modeling – to the AGW bandwagon’s shock horror! Take away a consistent and increasing major input and of course CO2 is going to be more variable on past historical time scales. Nothing in the ice core records precludes that due to the smearing-out effect which occurs before snow packs down to hard crystalline ice.
Beck may not be a genius, but he is certainly no SJT-for-brains.
Michell Porter:
“Steve Short – can you quantify, even approximately, the strength of those three ocean-cooling effects due to algal blooms?”
We’re working on it. Mitchell, please look very, very closely at these graphs of seasonal cycles in a zone of high oceanic primary productivity not affected by proximity to areas of high human population and hence high nutrient inputs (coast of Patagonia):
http://reason.gsfc.nasa.gov/OPS/cgi-bin/Giovanni/Giovanni_cgi.pl?west=-80&north=-36&east=-30&south=-56&type=3%23Time+Plot+%28point+or+area+averaging%29&Product_A=0%23%23%23SeaWiFS+Chlorophyll+a+concentration&Product_B=5%23%23%23Aqua+Sea+Surface+Temperature+%2811+micron+day%29&landocean=landocean&b_year=1997&b_month=September&e_year=2008&e_month=February&end_date=2008%2F02%2F29&data_limit=126&cbar=cpre&cmin=&cmax=&tpbar=tpdyn&tpmin=&tpmax=&tpint=&asc_res=1.0&global_cfg=.%2Fglobal.cfg.pl&data_sys=mpcomp&pid=ocean&action=Generate+Plot
(1) The cyanobacterial primary productivity (measured by satellite sensing of Chlorophyll a) precedes the SST (Sea Surface Temperature) rise.
(2) Total primary productivity is the AREA under the black curve (Integral of Chlorophyll a x Time) Total (seasonal) sea surface heating is the AREA under the green curve (Integral of SST x Time)
(3) As the SST rises (seasonally) the primary productivity decays (due to the tolerance of the verious cyanobacterial species present) BUT the AREA under each immediately subsequent sea surface heating curve is roughly INVERSELY proportional to the AREA under the immediately preceding (and overlapping) primary productivity curve.
Professor Marohasy doesn’t have to prove anything to any warmer et als around the place.
Professor Marohasy does not have to raise to any hated debate.
The blog question is reasonable.
The proof is required of the supporters of Man made CO2 causing runaway global warming.
Not fudging after the fact and saying wait for empirical proof, the debate is old. Man made CO 2 increase has been around for a long time as long as the principal of deforestation and so on.
The emotional argument put by politicians based on paid scientific advice to order was we must act the time is now.
We now have a new improved time line and that old time line does not work. When paid scientists provide agreement to politicians on demand we keep getting new time lines.
We have had political speak the world will die and so many years from now by so many powerful people based on paid advice.
The plateau after 1998 is enough of an empirical.
It is not explained nor a lot of things.
Don’t quote past science, address the question where is the proof. This is not a legal argument on tort, (I will quote this bighead in refutation).
The proof.
Show the empiricals that man made CO2 is a significant global warming driver.
I don’t have to prove anything. Professor Marohasy doesn’t have to prove anything the onus is on the people supporting the original hypothesis against real life empiricals.
There is one win out of the debate, it’s moved from CO2 to the real universe and not paid public servants pretending to be scientists.
See in the real world if you provide paid advice it better measure up or else it’s called a little thing called fraud.
It is actionable.
Ask a blog question and become a Professor – can we all play?
No luke prove your case or piss off.
ooooo nasty little man – I did a thread back.
“Unfortunately, sceptics have yet to get their story straight.”
Why not be part of the solution and have a point?
Well, there I was, glumming around the net in a bit of a stupor when I stumble on this cesspool.
Oh my, didn’t that lift my spirits to find a bunch of cave dwellers fighting the good fight and raging against the light.
It could be schadenfreude but I can’t help but think there’s some poetic justice when the right wing nutters work themselves into a lather like this.
You’re still fighting against the idea of AGW? How quaint!
Seeing you lot get worked up makes me think there might be a God or karma. God bless you all, your pain makes me think their might be hope after all.
“Beck may not be a genius, but he is certainly no SJT-for-brains.”
The scientists who made those measurements made excellent measurements, of CO2 in their locality. That was why Mauna Loa was set up, to sample the actual mixed level of CO2. You can’t believe it was jumping all over the place for years, then as soon as Mauna Loa was set up, suddenly started behaving itself?
SJT; Mauna Loa measures at Mauna Loa; uniform mixing of CO2 is one of the shibboleths of the church of AGW; Beck was castigated at RC because he showed regional levels of CO2 well in excess of average uniform mixing estimates; this criticism, personal and vicious as usual, was based on the unconscious assumption that Beck’s regional data was a uniform measure and great lengths were went to say how massive global events would be necessary to acount for this; well, no, it just highlighted another foible of AGW; look at this image;
http://www.exploratorium.edu/climate/atmosphere/data1.html
If Weart’s and IPCC’s semi-infinite opaque layer model of CO2 heating were correct there would not be massive CO2 windows which show unequivocally uneven mixing of CO2; as well as the failure of CO2 to do the heating at a molecular level and at a global atmospheric level, as the virial theorem and the equipartition principle show, there is also this demonstrable regional evidence of how CO2 cannot satisfy the AGW model, even if it did heat at the molecular level.
“The scientists who made those measurements made excellent measurements, of CO2 in their locality.”
Yes indeed, unfortunately for you some of those localities for those ‘excellent measurements’ in the 20th century pre-1957 also included some strange places like: Eastern Greenland, India, South Africa, South America and yes, on a few occasions even Antarctica.
You clearly have not had the patience to work through all the references that Beck provides.
In addition you are unfamilar with the way the global average CO2 levels are estimated. For example, Mauna Loa is not the global average.
Even only just last year the difference between (say) Mauna Loa and (say) Easter Island one sixth of the Earth’s circumference apart, was only just under 1% and it has typically averaged around that level of difference for at least 10 years.
Around 30 years ago there were only a couple of official CO2 measuring stations (using the then new Keeling method) in the entire SH!
Odd isn’t how both Callendar and Keeling, the originators of AGW themselves used the chemical method pre-1957 and even then only their own data was ‘permissible’ (to them that is)?
Even after Keeling introduced the new IR-based method no-one in the years immediately following were able to show that the chemical method, as it then applied (and had applied in more or less the same form since around 1900), in the hands of experienced users, gave results that were significantly inferior at say above the ±2% level (one sigma).
Remarkable how a little naivety mixed with a paucity of research combined with dollop of arrogance stretches a long way.
Come on Cohenite – perhaps they might be different land and ocean surfaces, circulations, clouds etc to give an uneven pattern. Don’t you find it strange that before Mauna Loa we’re led to believe that CO2 is all over the place and yet after the SIO measuring stations levels seem to have a predictable global similarity. Come on !
Gawd help me; luke is channelling Leyton; come on indeed; I’m going to bed.
Jennifer,
Great blog! You certainly know how to rile up the ever-present Warmer stalkers. All of their amazingly precise and intelligent responses aptly demonstrate the thrust of your question.
All you did was ask for something that details the evidence of their position and they go completely over the edge.
Oh, and Mark (8/12 10:47PM) Really great insight and comments. You sure showed us!
We’ve been asking “Where’s the beef” for about two decades now and despite $50 billion plus, the church of AGW can’t provide anything but their typical insults. Very telling.
Louis Hissink said….. “Scientific theories not based on a solid empirically determined basis is actually pseudoscience, and AGW is most definitely in this category.”
I couldn’t agree more…. Computer models of assumptions, is not science… just guessing.
The Sun is significant in it’s effect on climate. Water vapor is significant in it’s effect on climate. CO2 is insignificant. That’s not an assumption. That’s a fact.
Just wanted to add a few comments and pose a few questions.
1.)Several bloggers refer to climate scientists — What exactly defines a “climate scientist”? Seems to me a lot of ‘climate scientists’ are actually mathematical modelers. As far as I can tell they don’t really study the ‘climate’ very much — they study their models.
2.) If the atmosphere is warming (or cooling), how do you measure this with any accuracy? The Earth’s surface is, I believe, approx. 200 million sq miles and the atmosphere has a height of several, or several 10’s of miles– depending on where you define the boundary between Earth and Space — that’s quite a large volume. The measurement of small changes in the heat content of this volume would not be trivial. The idea of using weather stations’ temperature data doesn’t seem realistic to me — it is neither a representative nor a sufficiently large data set to provide any meaningful results, never mind all the consistency (lack of) problems.
3. I would suggest that people who pooh pooh earlier measurments of atmospheric CO2 as not being sufficiently accurate, are mistaken. Early chemists were very good at titrations, which is how they masured atmospheric CO2. They also were quite clever and I would suggest, if anything more rigorous than today’s scientists. The idea that measurments taken prior to 1959 are not valid because they not sufficiently accurate or the scientists involved were not as astute as today’s, borders on arrogance.
Also, has anyone questioned the validity of measuring CO2 on top of an active volcano on a small island surrounded by the Pacific Ocean? I am sure they have, and there are justifications, but surely, a more accurate representation would be to measure CO2 at several sites — would this really be so difficult?
4. Can anyone explain the annual variability in CO2 at Mauna Loa? Why was the increase in 1998 2.9 ppm whereas in 2006 1.8 ppm? From 1998 to 2006 both India and China’s economies grew and oil usage worldwide rose substantially, yet interannual variability was and remains very high.
5. On a lighter note, what happened to all the hurricanes?
6. Why is warming bad? In the 70’cooling was bad. The idea of an unchanging climate is more of a religous or utopian concept — e.g the garden of Eden — since life by its very existence is part and parcel of the climate, are people who want to ‘stop climate change’ implying that we need to wipe life off the face of the Earth?
Old Chemist: yep once you let that life stuff get started on a planet it will never be the same again.
Gets things like a 20% oxygen atmosphere and as Steve Short is showing, biology looks to be an important driver of CO2 quantity in the atmosphere.
I agree we should honour the data that Beck highlighted and not simply dismiss it. It does require explanation not personal attacks.
Cohenite: Did you check the question “why is CO2 such an important greenhouse gas” in your 11:15 link?
Here’s what I found: “But even in small amounts, carbon dioxide is an important contributor to the greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases tend to concentrate high in the atmosphere, and at the very cold temperatures found at these altitudes, they are poor radiators of energy away from the planet’s surface.”
No numbers given. No mention of water vapour.
Gibbering nonsense.
Old Chemist asked: “Can anyone explain the annual variability in CO2 at Mauna Loa? Why was the increase in 1998 2.9 ppm whereas in 2006 1.8 ppm? From 1998 to 2006 both India and China’s economies grew and oil usage worldwide rose substantially, yet interannual variability was and remains very high.”
The main explanation seems to be El Nino/La Nina. The 1998 figureyou mention was of course in an El Nino year, and 2006 was La Nina. The reason is that the level of biospheric photosynthesis drops in El Nino years (droughts) and rises in La Nina (more rain, better crops). Plotting the “airborne fraction” of atmospheric CO2 arising from fossil fuel emissions, you will be able to determine from the peaks and troughs which were Nino and which Nina years with amazing accuracy. I doubt you will find this in IPCC!!
“The only mechanisms which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere are simply chemical dissolution (a relatively coarse function of SST) AND net conversion to cyanobacterial biomass and biogenic calcite due to the ‘primary productivity’ (a more complex function of both SST and atmospheric CO2 level)
Steve what is the matter with you? Thats all very clever but the last thing we want to do is remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Thats the daftest idea since bottled water.
Don’t even play the stupid persons game. Thats what I’m getting hear. Your science appears to be good. But there might be some MORAL failure going on here like you want to triangulate with the stupid alarmists but still keep sceptic street-cred.
Or how could you have possibly wanted to reduce CO2-levels?
“We can therefore expect, albeit likely in erratic fits and starts, indirect cooling effects from rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions as a consequence of the increased CO2-fertilization of oceanic cynanobacteria.”
Oh right. Now I get what you are driving at. Yeah thats interesting. We always get this automatic assumption that CO2 is a positive feedback. But no-ones got the evidence for that and yet here you are showing up with a pretty good story about it being a negative feedback.
Hey why don’t you try and tell realclimate about your causal chain leading to a negative-CO2 feedback?
I’ll bet you get seriously moderated with that information. Those guys are just clowns.
Softly, softly, catchee monkey…..
Tim Curtin, how nice of you to drop by.
You raise two questions directed at me.
First:
“James Haughton is unwise to rely on Hofmann et al when citing them as stating quite clearly on page 5:
‘Interannual changes in CO2 can be put into two categories: emissions due to the combustion of fossil fuels, and natural variations in sources and sinks of carbon due to variations in climate and fires. The former provides the main reason why CO2 mixing ratios have increased since 1750. The latter modulate the annual increase in CO2, but have always been smaller than the former since direct atmospheric measurements began at Mauna Loa in 1958′
That last assertion is simply not true, as on average since 1958 57 percent of total CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and land use change has been taken up by the biospheric sinks (Canadell et al., 2007, PNAS, Table 1).”
You are confusing the change in the total with the total. Hofmann states that a larger contribution to the interannual *change* in CO2 levels is made by combustion of fossil fuels than *changes* in natural sources and sinks. He is not talking about the total level of absorbtion by biospheric sinks.
In answers to your questions about basic physics, I refer you to Professor Barry Brooks’ answers to the identical questions you posted on his blog:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/08/10/dr-david-evans-born-again-alarmist/#comment-27
with a note that it isn’t very nice behaviour to try to play me off against him, as it seems you are attempting.
Oh, re: your answers to Old Chemist, I refer you to page 26 of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report “Physical Science Basis” working group technical summary, which clearly states, contrary to your “doubt”:
“El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events are a major source of interannual variability in atmospheric CO2 growth rate, due to their effects on fluxes through land and sea surface temperatures, precipitation and the incidence
of fires. {7.3}”
How does it feel to be wrong, in public, so often? You must have a much thicker skin than I have.
Li’l old cross poster me.
Just to look at the long term paleoclimatic history of the Earth suggests that the CO2 sensitivity (temerature rise for a doubling of CO2 levels) would be about 1.5 C (GEOCARB III modeling). Until very recently this seemed like a reasonable estimate – even though it would have a precision of about 1.0 C at the 2 standard deviation level.
However, quite recently a flaw has been found in the reasoning behind this because GEOCARB III does not take into account the emission of gases other than CO2 and the relatively short lived SO2 from volcanic action and the associated lightning.
The recent discovery of creation of large amounts of fixed nitrogen (nitrogen oxides) from volcanic action and the associated lightning, all of which will have pronounced feedback effects on terrestrial carbon fluxes, suggests that the GEOCARB IIII estimate of paleoclimatic CO2 sensitivity is itself also probably an over-estimate.
T.A. Mather, Volcanoes and the atmosphere: the potential role of the atmosphere in unlocking the reactivity of volcanic emissions, Philosophical Transactions A. In Press.
We also need to remember that the human race itself has more than doubled the global fixed nitrogen flux.
Vitousek, P. M., Aber, J. D., Howarth, R. W., Likens, G. E., Matson, P. A., Schindler,
D. W., Schlesinger, W. H. & Tilman, D. G. 1997 Human alteration of the global
nitrogen cycle: sources and consequences. Ecol. Appl. 7, 737-750.
The human race has not experienced volcanism on the scale that the planet is capable of, since the advent of civilization. The most recent magnitude 8 explosive eruptions (sometimes popularly know as ‘supereruptions’) were approximately 74 and 26.5 thousand years ago (Toba, Indonesia and Taupo, New Zealand, respectively, from compilation by
Mason et al., 2004).
Studies of the aftermath of Pinatubo (1991) have already tended to reduce the best estimates of CO2 sensitivity towards the lower edge of the IPCC (2007) ‘band’.
More intensive paleoclimatic studies of the global climatic effects of Toba and Taupo might well also trend the best estimate of CO2 sensitivity in the downwards direction.
Gruber and Galloway (2008) An Earth-system perspective of the global nitrogen cycle. Nature , 451, 293-296
“Softly, softly, catchee monkey…..”
Thats not going to work in this situation Steve. This is leftist fraud. This is a commie substitute religion. In fact we won’t be quits with this constant lying and idiocy until we get used to mass-sackings.
Sack the offender and everyone around him in 360 degrees fashion. Just save the taxpayer a lot of money.
Can anyone here cite a paper in the peer-reviewed primary scientific literature of the last 10 years that
1. Establishes a causal link between the orbit of the moon and tides at sea
and
2. quantifies the extent of the tides in terms of the moon’s position.
I’ve been outside at night. I can’t feel the moon lifting me off my feet but so-called “scientists” expect me to believe this nonsense and the main stream media publishes tide tables as if they were based on sound science.
Can anyone here cite a paper in the peer-reviewed primary scientific literature of the last 10 years that
1. Establishes a causal link between lightning strikes and human deaths
and
2. quantifies the alleged damage in terms of lightning voltage.
I use electricity everyday and I have never been hurt. I am sure some people have died of fright when struck by lightning and I have seen plenty of reports of “flash, bang, fall down dead” where the cause of death is just assumed without question. I’d like to know the links between rubber shoe manufacturers and this canard about lightning being dangerous.
Alan,
So we KNOW that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will produce warming, do we? Pity there isn’t any experimentally confirmed EVIDENCE published in a refereed paper that documents this assumption.
This is, by the way, the original question Jennifer more or less asked in her first post.
So far no one has been able to supply a paper fitting this specification.
Graeme:
“Thats not going to work in this situation Steve….In fact we won’t be quits with this constant lying and idiocy until we get used to mass-sackings.”
You could well be right, Graeme. End of the day, I’m just another mug punter. That’s precisely why I have a little ‘Plan B’.
See my rant on the the other thread (;-), Good for a laff!
Well Bird get elected – ROTFL & LMAO !!
I think we need a law to deport you to Ball’s Pyramid. Might get more votes.
Louis – getting ahead of yourself aren’t you – we’ve had no serious response from our host. Has she considered all the submissions to date and provided an answer one each. Nope. You wouldn’t want us to think it wasn’t a serious question would you Louis? 🙂
Luke,
No, because it’s well known there are no refereed papers on this particualar issue. You and your clones have not found any, mainly because you don’t know what you need to look for.
So twaddle off argy bargy, as SJT asserts you are only here for.
Louis – getting ahead of yourself aren’t you – we’ve had no serious response from our host. Has she considered all the submissions to date and provided an answer one each. Nope. You wouldn’t want us to think it wasn’t a serious question would you Louis? 🙂
“James, can you help?
Posted by: Tim Curtin at August 12, 2008 07:00 PM”
Tim, this has been succinctly dealt with at BraveNewClimate, where you tried to trip up a real climate scientist with the same question.
You were refuted, and asking again elsewhere will not make it better for you second time round.
“The skeptic is correct that correlation does not PROVE causality”
and
“No one can PROVE global warming. It is like using circumstantial evidence in court and the conclusion is based on the weight of evidence in favor of the conclusion”
. Thomas Crowley, author of “Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years” from Edinburgh on Jennifer Marohasy’s “critique”: @ John Quiggins Blog
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/08/10/the-cis-and-delusionism/#comment-215676
I wish I had a time machine just so I could go back in time decades and sack John Quiggin.
But we must look to the future. This controversy has separated the honest from the liars, the scientists from the science-worker imposters, and the reasoned analysts in other fields from the merely ridiculous posers.
In economics 76 ridiculous posers signed a petition for Australia to join the Kyoto idiocy. Now when you get that many failed analysts in one line of work it means that the know-nothings are shutting out those who can actually do the job. Its not a matter of these dim bulbs being merely ineffectual. Clearly they are actively harmful.
I should like to set up an INSTITUTE FOR MASS SACKINGS AND TAX EXEMPTIONS that doubles as a political party.
You see communism in all its variants keeps cropping up in Christendom. It has done so for 1000 years. But prior to the democratic era it was always ruthlessly put down before the victims could network their way near the levers of power and start killing people in the millions.
That all ended with the democratic era. So what this means if we don’t want to be ruthlessly exterminating these hateful iterations of this virus in the Western world, we have to find other ways for democracy to prevent an outbreak in this eschatological-utopianism.
MASS-SACKINGS EARLY ON.
We want mass-sackings of taxeaters who we suspect might even be regarded as a risky prospect to fall for these various perversions and extrapolations of the book-of-revelations.
We want the spirit of Andrew Jackson to inhabit our polity. His detractors called it the “spoils system” but really it was all about not letting anyone ever fool himself that he is entitled to his current place on the public teat.
John Quiggen said;
“The only thing to do with the remaining delusionists is to keep them away from political power as much as possible.”
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/08/10/the-cis-and-delusionism/#comment-215450
The next step is putting them in internment camps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_camps#Internment_camps
Jennifer
“A good scientist doesn’t assume too much. Furthermore, to assume that most of the increase in Co2 over recent decades is athropogenic is to perhaps assume too much.”
Are you serious? No one ever assumed that. They looked at the evidence and that is what it showed. It’s not hard, and it doesn’t even need any *models*.
I thought you were once a scientist. When did politics cause you stop behaving like one?
Graeme Bird,
“Thats not going to work in this situation Steve. This is leftist fraud. This is a commie substitute religion. In fact we won’t be quits with this constant lying and idiocy until we get used to mass-sackings.”
Great parody of a right-wing anti-science ignoramus! Couldn’t do better myself. 😉
Graeme Bird,
Your last parody above is funny but too obvious. A bit of subtlety would make it more plausible.
You are an idiot TrueSkeptic. And a tribal gang moll. Now lets have that evidence.
Aren’t you CO-Bedwetters just the cats pajamas when it comes to endless filibusting.
The problem TrueSceptic is that he seriously believes every word. Explains why there are earthquakes actually.
Lets have that evidence Luke. That stupid slut wasn’t in any position to say where I went off the beam so her comments were pointless. Her comments in fact are always totally mindless. Here and on Deltoid. Content-free.
Lets have some content Luke. You ought not be working at the RMIT with your level of incompetence and epistemological idiocy.
Graeme Bird,
Evidence for what? That your posts are parodies? There is no way I can prove that.
The alternative is that you are highly delusional, possibly psychotic. I fear that you might be a danger to yourself or others. Seriously.
Why “moll”? Your have no reason to suppose anything about anyone posting here.
Luke,
I haven’t come across this “Graeme Bird” before. Is it always like this? Perhaps it’s a Turing Test Candidate? It surely can’t be a human being that can exist in reality?
Graeme Bird,
“Stupid slut”? You have serious mental problems, don’t you?
You need psychiatric help. I say that in all seriousness and with the hope that your condition is curable, or can at least be ameliorated.
No sister. You have to go to your doctor and get a brain transplant and a slut tumour removal.
Now lets have that evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming or lets have your blanket retractions and an admission that you’ve been a stupid lying slut.
Evidence….. for the LIKELIHOOD….. of catastrophic warming….
Got it?
Now get moving. And for goodness sakes clean yourself up. You look disgusting.
Do the blog moderators read the content of the threads? Do they actually care what is written here? Seems not. It gets archived, so Marohasy, Biggs and Neil will have some nice little reminders of the standards they deemed acceptable. A lasting testimony to this, one of the very best environmental blogs on the planet. Pfft!!!
Pull your head in Travis. TrueSkeptic is a supporter of blatant science-fraud and was engaging in anonymous defamation on more than one forum.
Graeme Bird,
Defamation? Where?
And let me tell you that accusations of defamation from you are just way off any scale of hypocrisy I could have imagined before reading your posts here.