Here is a post that I made on realclimate (a pro AGW website). It was "moderated out". I was told that they stack the deck against skeptics, and now I know that to be true.
****
Matthew Orme says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
19 February 2010 at 9:51 PM
Start with this. CO2 is the building block for life. If we eliminated it, life (carbon based) would cease to exist.
Here is a simple truth. Climate models predicting AGW can/could not predict the past. (ie., plug in all the data, and get a “prediction” that matches what actually happened (warming in the 40’s, cooling in the 70’s, warming in the 80/90’s and nothing in the late 90’s to today (per Phil Jones, argue with him if you disagree).
BTW, the models do not include insolation as a variable. And we do not understand the role of clouds. Do they trap heat, or reflect sunlight? You have an opinion I am sure, but the science is uncertain.
If the models cannot explain what actually occurred, how can we rely on them to predict the future?
What does any credible scientist do when observations do not fit a theory? Throw out the theory. that’s the basis of science. Propose a theory, collect data, see if the data fits the theory, if not scrap the theory and come up with one where the data actually fits the model.
I became a skeptic the moment I saw the hockey stick graph. I have a degree in geology (an actually relevant science). I studied in the early 70’s and later in the 90’s. We studied the MWP, and LIA (remember CO2 is the basis for limestones etc). When those climate changes were “erased”, I knew that something was afoot. Geologists as a whole do not support a causal link between CO2 and Temp. The record actually shows that CO2 follows temp, with a lag of 800-1000 years. In 1000-1200 AD, there were vineyards in Northern England, and farming in Greenland.
It’s all about the money, not the human condition. IPCC predicts 130,000 additional deaths due to warming with a doubling of CO2. (feel free to correct my recollection if incorrect). However, taking the dirtiest/cheapest coal fired power plants, and building enough of them to provide electricity so that people that burn wood/dung indoors could cook with electricity would save 1.5 MILLION lives a year. That’s just from cooking, not all the other life shortening things that are due to lack of cheap energy. A simple cost/benefits analysis says that you do not invest trillions do do essentially nothing.
To quote a scientist, “lack of cheap energy makes for short brutal lives”
****
Freeman Dyson, physicist and member of the Institute for Advanced Study said, "The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models... They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models."[56] "My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."[57]
There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 drives temperature. When you take this assumption out of the picture, everything else falls apart. When you put incorrect assumptions into a computer model, you get false predictions.
Anyone with an open mind should watch the BBC special "The Great Global Warming Swindle" email me and I will be glad to lend you my copy. I watched an inconvenient truth, you should watch the counter argument. Here is a reprint of an article from the San Francisco Examiner (a republican hot bed if ever there was one) that summarizes the documentary http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1945
Global temperature has declined since 1998. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide has gone in the other direction, increasing 15–20%. (see link below)
Has anyone noticed that the last couple winters have been particularly cold? Of course The Holy Church of Global Warming says that cold winters are evidence of Global warming. Nice isn't it. If it gets warmer, global warming. If it gets colder, global warming.
At no time during our planet's history have increases in CO2 preceded an increase in temp. In fact the following chart shows that compared to former geologic times, our present atmosphere, like the Late Carboniferous atmosphere, is CO2- impoverished! In the last 600 million years of Earth's history only the Carboniferous Period and our present age, the Quaternary Period, have witnessed CO2 levels less than 400 ppm. Click for a clearer image. (Black line = CO2, Blue line = Temp.)
This subject has now become a religion. Religions refuse to listen to anything that does not conform with the persons beliefs. Science differs because it constantly tests a hypothesis. Mann's "hockey stick" graph has now proven to be a fraud btw.
When the prophet Al Gore put up the CO2/Temp graph in his movie, he failed to tell viewers that CO2 lagged temperature by 800 to 1000 years. Paleoclimatologists believe that this is because it takes this long for the oceans to warm up/cool down. When the oceans warm up, they release gasses including CO2, and when the cool, they absorb gasses. This is why there is so much marine life in cold water.
Gore, by the way, owns a cap/trade brokerage house and stands to make a bundle. The Wall Street Journal summed it up by saying that Cap and Trade was a giant revenue generating machine exceeding income taxes, in the guise of saving the planet. No wonder the Dems are salivating over it. Read the article showing that it won't work here
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124587942001349765.html
In simple terms, CO2 rises because the temperature warms, not the other way around.
Guess how warm the planet was 1000 years ago. It was in the middle of the Medieval Warming Period. There were vineyards in northern England, and the Vikings were farming in Greenland. This was followed by the Little Ice Age, which caused the vikings to abandon Greenland, and life for Europeans was miserable. Look at the paintings during the period. The Thames river froze, as did the Delaware River (look at the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware). Neither of these rivers freeze today. Depending on who you believe, the Little Ice Age ended around 1900 (some put it as late as 1950). Guess what happens to the planet at the end of an Ice Age. It warms up (duh).
IPCC discounts both these as products of the Northern Hemisphere only, yet they are tracked in the Antarctic Ice cores (where the 1000 to 800 year CO2/temp lag is recorded). this is a perfect example of cognative dissonance. (Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up)
One must also ask why water vapor is ignored by global warming alarmists. Water vapor constitutes 95% of the green house gas in the atmosphere, while CO2 makes up 3.6%.
Role of Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases
(man-made and natural) as a % of Relative
Contribution to the "Greenhouse Effect"
| Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics | Percent of Total | Percent of Total --adjusted for water vapor |
| Water vapor | ----- | 95.000% |
| Carbon Dioxide (CO2) | 72.369% | 3.618% |
| Methane (CH4) | 7.100% | 0.360% |
| Nitrous oxide (N2O) | 19.000% | 0.950% |
| CFC's (and other misc. gases) | 1.432% | 0.072% |
| Total | 100.000% | 100.000% |
Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. If you get a fall evening and the sky is clear, heat will escape, the temperature will drop and you get frost. If there's cloud cover, the heat is trapped by water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the temperature stays warm. If you go to In Salah in southern Algeria, they recorded at noon 52°C. By midnight, it's -3.6°C. That’s a 56°C drop in temperature in 12 hours. It's caused because there is very little water vapour in the atmosphere and is a demonstration of water vapour as the most important greenhouse gas (source: Interview with Tim Ball). see this article http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm
"During the 20th century, the earth warmed 0.6 degree Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit), but that warming has been wiped out in a single year with a drop of 0.63 degree C. (1.13 F.) in 2007. A single year does not constitute a trend reversal, but the magnitude of that temperature drop — equal to 100 years of warming — is noteworthy. Of course, it can also be argued that a mere 0.6 degree warming in a century is so tiny it should never have been considered a cause for alarm in the first place. But then how could the idea of global warming be sold to the public? In any case, global cooling has been evident for more than a single year. Global temperature has declined since 1998. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide has gone in the other direction, increasing 15–20%. This divergence casts doubt on the validity of the greenhouse hypothesis, but that hasn't discouraged the global warming advocates. They have long been ignoring far greater evidence that the basic assumption of greenhouse warming from increases in carbon dioxide is false." http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/2009/04/termites-emit-ten-times-more-co2-than.html
Now take a look at insolation. The chart below shows the sun's output over time. Notice how well it tracks historical temperatures, and what the relative output is today. This graph speaks for itself.
People just love catastrophic reasons for change. As a geologist who studied paleontology, I never believed in the asteroid dinosaur killer either. There is just no evidence that all the dinosaurs just dropped dead one Tuesday afternoon. I believe that they died as a result of the planet calming down, which slowly cut atmospheric oxygen by half. During the dinosaurs reign, volcanic activity was extremely high, spewing out lots of CO2. This caused a major growth in plant life, who converted the CO2 into O2. Atmospheric oxygen was double what it is today. Dinosaurs do not have diaphragms like mammals, but breath like birds. It takes a lot of O2 to run an engine the size of a Seismosaurus, and essentially, they suffocated (slowly over time as the fossil record shows) Mammals can survive with much less O2, since they can easily breath in more air.
I'm tired of writing. more later.
