You might have seen these remarks from Weather Channel founder John Coleman about climate change:

It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline.  All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth.  What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

They’re making the rounds, and a friend recently sent them my way. But even ignorami such as your humble servant can see Coleman makes several claims that are not only dubious, but flat-out wrong. Here are two examples:

(1) He claims to have “dug through thousands of pages of research papers” and insists that “the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels.  They don’t have any other issue.  Carbon Dioxide, that’s it. . . . “.

Nope. Methane and other compounds also contribute to climate change. See here and here, for instance.

Then there’s the contribution to climate change from the deforestation of carbon sinks in, e.g., the Amazon—which has led to the promising notion of carbon ranching:

One hectare (about 2.5 acres) of forest cleared and converted to ranchland or crops produces a piece of land worth, on average, $200 to $500. But that’s nothing compared to the value of preserving the rainforest as a sponge for carbon dioxide.

On European markets, the right to emit one ton of carbon dioxide trades today at more than $20. With each hectare of intact rainforest storing around 500 tons of carbon dioxide, that means that each hectare has a value of $10,000 as carbon dioxide storage, far more than the value of even the most productive tea or soy plantation.

(2) Coleman also says “Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares.  That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline.  Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years.”

But again, this is easily checkable and refutable. See here ("The eight warmest years on record (since 1850) have all occurred since 1998, with the warmest year being 2005") and see this chart (reproduced in smaller format above).

When are climate-change skeptics going to bring their A game?

Do they have an A game?

I love warm climate!

Thank you all for your very civil comments. And thank you for the pointers. I have a whole afternoon’s worth of information to check up on. Sometimes you learn more from those that you disagree with.
The subject matter is much more important than who is right or wrong at the moment.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
Part of a Sufi poem

Greta,

I apologize for Roger. He rarely wants debate, just an opportunity to lambast opponents with attitude, his trivializing “contempt”. Feel the love.

I’ll try to debate. If I get out of line, smack me. Won’t work but will make you feel better.

To your:
Robert Essenhigh Ohio State University
I say try:
Ole John Nielsen University of Copenhagen

You can google Ole to get a chemist vs. chemist debate or if you want something vastly less technical, I’ll give it a go from a layman perspective.
If you can’t find the debate, I can find a link.

Essenhigh says the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere is limited. Well, it has been going on since the Industrial Revolution and may be partially accumulative. Where does the CO2 come from ? Stored up in plant matter, same as you indicate for dolomite rocks. Stored. Released when burned.

Essenhigh says things may go back to normal after 10 or 20 years and we should just adapt in the meantime. Well, that means warming is happening and we should at least try to deal with it as best we know how.

He then launches into speculation that once the Arctic melts, all that water will evaporate and fall back as snow, possibly triggering a new ice age. I find that wildly, wildly, speculative, but interesting don’t you think ?

I did not mean to imply that you thought that NASA scientists did not know what they were talking about. That was not the intent. I only meant to remind you that they really are rocket scientists, to reinforce the notion that skepticism over science is good, quite justified, but there is an upper limit to it.

If IPCC scientists say they are “reasonably certain” that ain’t proof but it might be good enough to act on. That was my point. Obviously, not articulated well.  There is a fine line between informed skepticism and ignorance, and I feel like we accidentally cross that line in these layman debates many times in both directions.

The notion that cyclic weather changes is a “weak” theory - my opinion only. We are having extreme weather and that coincides with CO2. Correlation is not causation. Only theory, but I find the old chesnut about how it was balmy thousands of years ago to be “weak” compared to the mass of evidence things today are not normal, and that it coincides very nicely with manmade interactions.

With that in mind, have you seen the NOAA report released just yesterday ? I think they get a little bit cocky, too fanatical, but they do have the weather satellites to enable them to actually analyze and accumulate real data, as well as all the climate info from measured greenhouse gas concentrations, solar radiation, volcanoes, water temperature, precipitation, water currents, as opposed to just giving countless press conferences on purely meaningless bullshit.

What could be more pathetic than a political IPCC report ? Blogging about it I guess.

The NOAA report is not reassuring.

Greta,

Thank you for breaking up your posts.

I have another complaint about your so called “scientific” approach to this subject. I don’t know where you learned your process from but, let me explain how legitimate scientists do it.

Step one: Form a conclusion based on political necessity.

Step 2: Gather evidence to support your conclusion, ignore evidence that does not. Saying things like “can we afford to take the chance???” will help.

Step 3: Question the motivation behind anyone who criticizes you and, if that fails, insinuate that they are mentally warped by calling them “deniers”...as in Holocaust denier...or make up a new mental disorder by sticking “phobia” on the end of whatever your position is. Example: carjackophobic. By doing this you can make what would usually be seen as healthy caution into an irrational fear of something harmless.

Step 4: Explain that catastrophic human destruction is imminent unless gov’t takes over enormous portions of the private sector and extends control into the furthest corners of private life.

And finally, step 5...the most important of all...explain that huge grants are needed to continue studying the problem.

Then sit back and wait for the Nobel Committee to call.

Mr. Biscuit
Like you never said “stick to a few points and we can slice and dice.”
I re-read the IPCC report this afternoon and its language of “likely, very likely and my favorite more than likely” still strikes me as less than convincing.
Your interesting ploy of posing questions withour providing any answers of your own is an old one.
Your statement that “When you said that the heat comes before the CO2 doesn’t sound right” although a little too technical for me can be explained in this way.

Case 1:CO2 drives temperature, as currently most frequently asserted; and

Case:2 Tempreature drives the level of CO2.

Both appear at first to be possible, but both then generate crucial origin and supplementary questions. For Case 1 the origin question is: What is the independent source of CO2 that drives the CO2 level both up and down, and which in turn, somehow is presumed to drive the tempreature up and down?
For Case 2, it is: What drives the temperature, and if this then drives the CO2 where does the CO2 come from?
For Case 2 the questions are answerable; but for Case 1 they are not.
Robert Essenhigh Ohio State University
I never said that CO2 is just a byproduct and has no impact on heating. And I certainly know what constitutes a greenhouse gas both natural and man made.
There is nothing “weak” about the very valid theory that GW is both cyclical and temporary. Where do you think the CHANGE comes from in climate change?
I thought that the point of the CO2 being stored in limestone and dolomite was interesting. Perhaps not.
I never said that the NASA scientists did not know what they were talking about. I SAID that the Nasa site was high school level. And so it was. Designed for High School Students. And very informative. Do you actually read the posts Mr. Biscuit? Or just skim enough to critique if the opinion does not coincide with yours? I do apoligize for the eco-facist remark that was very uncharacteristic and a shoddy cheap shot. I form my opinions according to my knowledge of a subject. I subscribe to no particular party and never have. Sometimes liberals are correct on an issue and sometimes conservatives are.
More times than not the group think is just dead wrong.

Greta,

“It was interesting to see that the criticism was one of style and not of substance.” Nope. I did not like the substance either.

Like I said, stick to a few points and we can slice and dice.

It’s a leap of logic to say the IPCC study is no good just because the scientists are “not sure” or “need more study”. The notion many scientists who signed the IPCC report don’t support it is internet myth, discredited or at least questioned.

When you say the heat comes before the CO2 that does not sound right. The warming may occur first, and the warming may then cause furthur CO2 releases, and may thaw permafrost to release methane, but the result is still the same, so what’s the point. The cat is out of the bag.

It isn’t true that CO2 has no impact and is just a byproduct of heating. Wrong. Speaking of high school level science, CO2 is called greenhouse because it acts to trap heat from sunlight, so the more CO2 the more heating (to some extent).

You toss out carbonate rock and gravitational pull as if that is some kind of alternative theory. It is true some claim the warming is only cyclic or temporary, but that’s very weak. No matter where climate change comes from, we still need to adequately assess and react to it.

It all comes down to a leap of logic. Because you don’t see absolute incontrevertible proof global warming exists you don’t want to listen to the scientists. That seems to sum it up.

Also your use of terms like “eco-fascist” betrays your political orientation, as if that were not already clear from your previous posts. At least you don’t yell and scream much like some around here. (women are nice)

A whole lot of the warming debate is politics disguised as some form of pseudo-science. Put it another way. If the NASA folks talk down to you on a high school level it does not mean they aren’t rocket scientists themselves or that they don’t have any idea what they are talking about.

“The only people absolutely convinced are the ones that I talk to who have seen that Hollywood movie. I have gotten shouted down by many of them.”

Greta -

They saw it in a movie!  It’s gotta be true!  Al Gore explained it, in detail!  It must be right!

Mr. Smith
I hope that your eyeballs have recovered. My apoligies. I never meant to disturb them. Whether that means a translation to paragraphing is up for grabs.I was always in trouble for that in high school and college. Some things never change.
It was interesting to see that the criticism was one of style and not of substance. Usually my particular approach to the climate change question draws howls of abuse from the eco-facists.
The NASA link was high school level but very informative. One interesting sentence read “Scientists do not FULLY understand why Earth has ice ages.” And yet they have centered whole theories sold as facts on computer models that claim to know that they do KNOW why global warming occurs. Although you will see methane and aerosols etc. in graphs. CO2 in the form of fossil fuels is always the number one on the list of ingredients.
“Most believe that big changes in Earth’s orbit and axis due to the graviational pull of other planets play a large part. These changes alter the amount of energy received from the sun.”
A great deal of the earth’s CO2 is trapped in carbonate rock. Limestone and dolomite for instannce. They believe that the earth would be a lot warmer today if this CO2 were released into the atmosphere.
Tiny changes in earth’s balance can sometimes cause huge convulsions in the climate.
Sometimes these small changes have been responsible for very rapid warming and ice melting at breakneck speed.
Has anyone read the IPCC report? Many of the scientists who signed the report actually disagreed with the findings. I have read literally thousands of reports and they are always filled with words and phrases like, we believe, it remains to be seen, we are not entirely sure, maybe, future studies are needed. The only people absolutely convinced are the ones that I talk to who have seen that Hollywood movie. I have gotten shouted down by many of them. By the way a lot of the erosion in those Pacific atolls was caused by the native fishermen blast fishing. Everything went up in spray. Just one small inconvenient fact in a whole lotta merde.

The sum total of all the denier arguments seem to be glib non-scientific statements we should “ignore that little man behind the curtain”.

If you put “global warming” in the search line of Bart’s NASA website it says the majority of scientists believe there is a manmade component to global warming and that scientists are very concerned about our ability to adjust to expected temperature changes, but hey what do they know at NASA, the fools. Some dillweed on Barticles says the opposite glibly and persuasively, and that’s all it takes.  That’s all it takes. Off to the races.

Ignore the little man behind the curtain.

Roger, I’m quite sure you are correct that precision measurements were needed for the USAF, but that does not invalidate the aggregate statistical data. The following snippet was taken from:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/thermometer-0924.html

“Oddly enough, the digital thermometers that replaced them aren’t always as accurate as their ancestors, but they are safer and more practical; they don’t shatter and they don’t contain a highly poisonous substance.”

Antique thermometers are sufficiently accurate. Computer models are quite difficult to assess but measuring temperature, a low tech no-brainer. It worked beautifully back in 1850. The computers of that era, unfortunately, did not work so well.

Greta, not too rantish but you again did a scattergun, numerous statements, some halfway acceptable, many highly dubious. If you could state just one or two I could slice and dice.

I’m leery of cap and trade too, but it seems like less of a looney conspiracy to believe the Gorelocks are simply and honorably trying to milk an observed problem both for gain and for the good of us all rather than trying to bribe thousands of scientists to create a faux problem, a big hoax, just so they can cash in on it and make money.

If you want to believe this is a massive worldwide hoax there isn’t much I or the NASA website can do for you, but then we have a public who believe in UFOs, Saddam was al-Qaida, and men walked with dinosaurs.  As conspiracy theories go, this one is incredibly ridiculous. 

I at least agree that Ireland could have justification for not hitting the bandwagon, but those justifications are 100% political, not scientific. The political implications in my opinion often outweigh the scientific in importance.

Dear I Wish To Remain Anonymous,

Thanks for the tip. But I grok that already. (Did you actually click on the links?)

There’s a difference between a dubious “new study”—such as the one cited here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story?coll=la-home-center

-- and things that are by now far less open to debate. Are scientists really reading with a cynical, critical eye—let alone trying to disprove—material such as this (http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/earth_worldbook.html) and this (http://periodic.lanl.gov/default.htm)?

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