Presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) effectively dismantled “settled science” climate alarm claims with unsettling reality during an October 6 Senate Judiciary subcommittee exchange with Sierra Club President Aaron Mair.
Whereas the hearing chaired by Cruz was intended to investigate harmful effects of government overregulation on people and businesses in general — not just the EPA — Mair’s testimony made climate the central issue.
His written pre-statements charged that EPA’s foes live in “an alternative universe” where corporate “polluters” (CO2 plant food producers) use propaganda to persuade low-income Americans to oppose anti-pollution efforts.
He asserted that “people of color and low-income communities are disproportionately impacted by pollution and climate disruption should not be up for debate any more so than the science behind climate change itself.”
In response, Cruz emphasized that climate alarm-premised EPA overregulation “is stifling opportunity for people who want to achieve the American dream.”
He also challenged any scientific basis for Mair’s testimony during the hearing that “our planet is cooking and heating up and warming,” asking him if he was aware that satellite data has shown no warming trend over the past 18 years.
When Mair denied this evidence, Cruz asked him if he was familiar with broad recognition, even among alarmists, of a global warming pause. Following an extended pause of his own to confer with an equally befuddled staff member sitting behind him, Mair replied that the pause reference related to climate conditions “in the ’40s.”
Aaron Mair repeatedly refused to answer Cruz as to whether or not the Sierra Club would abandon its views on climate change if confronted with solid evidence. When Mair repetitively cited an alleged 97% consensus among climate scientists that “the science is settled,” Cruz correctly pointed out that this claim was based upon “one bogus study.”
That fabrication originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union survey consisting of an intentionally brief two question online survey sent to 10,257 Earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois.
Of the about 3.000 who responded, only a small subset of those, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic.
That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions. The first: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”
Few would be expected to dispute that the planet began thawing out of the “little ice age” in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real ice age ended roughly 12,000 years ago.)
The second question asked: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
Not addressed were what measures constituted “significant”. . . whether “changing” included both cooling and warming (and for “better” and “worse”) . . . or if significant contributions in responses included land use changes such as agriculture and deforestation.
Pressed repeatedly to answer whether the Sierra Club would change its position based upon publicly available satellite measurements showing a warming pause (despite rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and failed model predictions), Mair would only respond: “We concur with 97% of the scientists that believe the anthropogenic [human-caused] impact of mankind with regards to global warming are true.”
Asked again if Mair was unwilling to answer the question, the Sierra Club head replied: “We concur with the preponderance of the evidence — you’re asking me if we’ll take 3% over 97%? Of course not.”
Countering Mair’s unsupported assertions that “global temperatures are on the rise,” Cruz stated that we are being asked not to “pay attention to your lying eyes . . . don’t debate the science.”
He observed: “You know, Mr. Mair, I find it striking that for a policy organization that purports to focus exclusively on environmental issues, that you are not willing to tell this committee that you would issue a retraction if your testimony is objectively false under scientific data . . . That undermines the credibility of any organization.”
Following the hearing Cruz called it “astonishing” to hear the head of the Sierra Club defend EPA regulations based upon pseudoscience. This is particularly true within the context of a Senate inquiry addressing disproportionate EPA regulatory policy impacts upon “people of color and low-income communities.”
The EPA’s latest climate alarm-marketed regulatory scheme will force utilities to obtain about 28% of all U.S. capacity from anemic and unreliable renewable sources by 2030.
That Obama Administration war on so-called carbon “pollution” will come at a very high cost to electricity consumers, with disproportionate burdens falling upon exactly those disadvantaged populations. Now that’s an anthropogenic problem the Sierra Club, along with the rest of us, should truly worry about.
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This article first appeared at: http://www.newsmax.com/LarryBell/climate-global-warming-cruz/2015/10/12/id/695748/#ixzz3oQaA3La7
Facing observed facts is hard when the CO2 supposedly causes all of our problems and the mantra demands constant repetition.
Renewables are just unreliable, and expensive at the same time. Electricity demand fluctuates requiring a supply and demand balancing act. Nuclear generation is best run constantly 100% capacity. the fluctuations can be taken up with coal, and gas installations on a fairly predictable level. The input of PC favored energy from photovoltaic farms varies with seasons and cloud cover, in the UK we obtain 100% in July falling to just 12% in Febuary, with not at our peak demand around 18.00hrs every 24 hours.
Cruz only made two assertions, and grandstanded for the base (and I do mean ‘base’) for the rest of the time:
o the fact that in the last 18 years the satellite data show no demonstrable warming
o The problem with that statistic that gets cited a lot is that it’s based on one bogus study
Neither of which are remotely true. By a long shot.
So who knows what it is Poor Larry Bell thinks he is “arguing”, but it is not climate “facts”. Maybe he got an assignment and was required to write about it….
Best,
D
This only has a value if the CO2 theory is proven?
You obviously believe this, I have no doubt.
Show us your convincing argument that this is so, otherwise it remains an unproven theory with logic flaws.
I don’t know what your typie-typing has to do with Cruz’ two false assertions. Cruz made two false assertions and Bell was told to pretend they are facts.
Best,
D
Thats exactly what you do, pretending the CO2 theory is a proven fact.
Why lay this argument on others when its all you have yourself?
Thats exactly what you do, pretending the CO2 theory is a proven fact.
For the 10th time (will it finally sink in this time? Confidence is low), science doesn’t “prove”.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming scientific evidence – what you have no capability to show otherwise, because you have zero science to support your beliefs – is:
You have nothing – nothing – to refute this. Nothing. There is no denialist science to address this.
CO2 is the control knob on the climate. The physics is long- and well-known. You cannot overturn these basics of life on earth, because you cannot describe a NewPhysics that overpowers the physics found everywhere in the universe.
Sorry.
Best,
D
Nonsense, association and causation are very different. Temperature increases, and later CO2 follows suit. If it follows rather than leads, how can it be the cause? This is also illustrated in the ice core samples taken nearly 28 years ago.
A volcano erupts, and this negates all of mans efforts to reduce C02 anyway.
Reduce C02, and plant fertility decreases. That sounds bad to me, wouldl you try to sequester all the C02 perhaps? We would most certainly starve first.
What is this new physics that you talk of, my hnd was in the 1950’s.
Explain the mechanism of C02 warming, in your own words please that we might see your understanding.
o CO2 lags temp in Vostok record [10 points]
o CO2 means more plants/food/is good/is life [10 points]
https://www.facebook.com/ClimateDenialistTalkingPointGame
Best,
D
dart and arrows have points, so what?
I’m scoring your use of long-refuted talking points, don’t mind me.
Best,
D
Explain the mechanism of C02 warming, in your own words please that we might see your understanding.
GHGs are opaque to certain outgoing longwave radiation wavelengths, thus retaining insolation and preventing energy from radiating into space.
You cannot play the “quibbling” game to wish you can prove that my answer is unsatisfactory therefore globul warmins a HOX, BTW, as that is a weak play.
Best,
D
Its all very well saying they do, its just as easy to say they don’t. Explain how and why, if you can. Like I illustrated with gravity we can explain exactly how this causes a ball to roll down hill, and how we can quantify the forces involved. Now show exactly how heat is allowed in but not out again please. The mechanism must be explainable if you believe it surely?
If you think its absorbing and re-radiating heat why is it downwards only,
Do your calculations of energy transfer consider a flat plane or a sphere?
why is it downwards only
Who said it was?
You can pretend that your transparent reductio ad absurdum ploy isn’t a logical fallacy deployed in hopes to declare victory in advance all you want.
But the fact is CO2 captures some of the OLR given off by the planet, then resends some of that heat downward, causing the lower atmosphere & surface to warm. We have direct measurements of the change in forcing of adding CO2 in w/m^2, so I suggest if you want to quibble about quantification do it with those researchers.
CO2 is a GHG, and adding a GHG to a planet’s atmosphere warms it. You can’t quibble your way out of basic physics.
HTH
Best,
D
Then explain it to me!
I did, thanks!
Best,
D
its just as easy to say they don’t.
Is your claim that GHGs don’t act opaque to certain outgoing longwave radiation wavelengths, thus retaining insolation and preventing energy from radiating into space?
[citation needed]
Best,
D
I did not claim this, but I I want know how it affects climate?
You wrote its just as easy to say they don’t.
That means the assertion is you can explain how GHGs don’t act opaque to certain outgoing longwave radiation wavelengths, thus retaining insolation and preventing energy from radiating into space
Show us how easy it is.
Say how they don’t.
Best,
D
You are a circular idiot first grade. Just explain the mechanism for CO2 warming anything? All it really does is grow plants that absorbs CO2. A stabilising negative feed back beyond your limited comprehension it seems.
All energy will eventually be released into space. You must explain very clearly how this is not happening and warming our planet so we need to destroy economies in favour of your delusion.
Just explain the mechanism for CO2 warming anything?
How many times do we need to point out it was already done, and you lack basic cognitive capacity to grasp it? 100? 200?
/typing slowly for Jenkins comprehension
Best,
D
Huh? Downwards only? Pease educate yourself on the basic physics: http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
Illustrate how and why they work this way? Explain the frequency changes and how it matters otherwise you don’t know? I understand speed of light and different mediums, the speed reverts as they leave and the frequency changes also.
Explain the frequency changes and how it matters otherwise you don’t know?
Look, everybody, if Dano can’t explain every detail to Brin’s satisfaction, that means CO2 doesn’t warm the planet and AGW is a hoax!
Weak.
Best,
D
No what you seem to mean is you believe all without understanding. I don’t
What I mean is you refuse to get it.
Best,
D
Zero attribution that Cruz only made two assertions, and grandstanded for the rest of the time:
o the fact that in the last 18 years the satellite data show no demonstrable warming
o The problem with that statistic that gets cited a lot is that it’s based on one bogus study
Neither of which are remotely true. By a long shot.
No need to have that get lost in the tangent.
Best,
D
We have a few here who believe implicitly in the Carbon Theory, the mechanism remains sketchy and inconclusive. Patric Moore is a well known ecologist and scientist, he gave the following address here:- http://www.thegwpf.org/patrick-moore-should-we-celebrate-carbon-dioxide/
We should celibrate CO2, not try to demonise it. I post the first part his learned talk below in which he issues a challenge to prove CO2 was being depleted to a critical level at one time. The server will not allow the whole article.
Patric Moore.
My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank you for the opportunity to set out my views on climate change. As I have stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age. If there were such a proof through testing and replication it would have been written down for all to see.
The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”.
But there is certainty beyond any doubt that CO2 is the building block for all life on Earth and that without its presence in the global atmosphere at a sufficient concentration this would be a dead planet. Yet today our children and our publics are taught that CO2 is a toxic pollutant that will destroy life and bring civilization to its knees. Tonight I hope to turn this dangerous human-caused propaganda on its head. Tonight I will demonstrate that human emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.
But first a bit of background.
I was born and raised in the tiny floating village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific. There was no road to my village so for eight years myself and a few other children were taken by boat each day to a one-room schoolhouse in the nearby fishing village. I didn’t realize how lucky I was playing on the tide flats by the salmon-spawning streams in the rainforest, until I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver where I excelled in science. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, gravitating to the life sciences – biology, biochemistry, genetics, and forestry – the environment and the industry my family has been in for more than 100 years. Then, before the word was known to the general public, I discovered the science of ecology, the science of how all living things are inter-related, and how we are related to them. At the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the threat of all-out nuclear war and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. While doing my PhD in ecology in 1971 I joined a group of activists who had begun to meet in the basement of the Unitarian Church, to plan a protest voyage against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska.
We proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail an old fishing boat across the north Pacific ocean and help change the course of history. We created a focal point for the media to report on public opposition to the tests.
When that H-bomb exploded in November 1971, it was the last hydrogen bomb the United States ever detonated. Even though there were four more tests planned in the series, President Nixon canceled them due to the public opposition we had helped to create. That was the birth of Greenpeace.
Flushed with victory, on our way home from Alaska we were made brothers of the Namgis Nation in their Big House at Alert Bay near my northern Vancouver Island home. For Greenpeace this began the tradition of the Warriors of the Rainbow, after a Cree Indian legend that predicted the coming together of all races and creeds to save the Earth from destruction. We named our ship the Rainbow Warrior and I spent the next fifteen years in the top committee of Greenpeace, on the front lines of the environmental movement as we evolved from that church basement into the world’s largest environmental activist organization.
Next we took on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. They proved a bit more difficult than the US nuclear tests. It took years to eventually drive these tests underground at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. In 1985, under direct orders from President Mitterrand, French commandos bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, killing our photographer. Those protests continued until long after I left Greenpeace. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that nuclear testing finally ended in the South Pacific, and it most other parts of the world as well.
Going back to 1975, Greenpeace set out to save the whales from extinction at the hands of huge factory whaling fleets. We confronted the Soviet factory whaling fleet in the North Pacific, putting ourselves in front of their harpoons in our little rubber boats to protect the fleeing whales. This was broadcast on television news around the world, bringing the Save the Whales movement into everyone’s living rooms for the first time. After four years of voyages, in 1979 factory whaling was finally banned in the North Pacific, and by 1981 in all the world’s oceans.
In 1978 I sat on a baby seal off the East Coast of Canada to protect it from the hunter’s club. I was arrested and hauled off to jail, the seal was clubbed and skinned, but a photo of me being arrested while sitting on the baby seal appeared in more than 3000 newspapers around the world the next morning. We won the hearts and minds of millions of people who saw the baby seal slaughter as outdated, cruel, and unnecessary.
Why then did I leave Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership? When Greenpeace began we had a strong humanitarian orientation, to save civilization from destruction by all-out nuclear war. Over the years the “peace” in Greenpeace was gradually lost and my organization, along with much of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the earth. I believe in a humanitarian environmentalism because we are part of nature, not separate from it. The first principle of ecology is that we are all part of the same ecosystem, as Barbara Ward put it, “One human family on spaceship Earth”, and to preach otherwise teaches that the world would be better off without us. As we shall see later in the presentation there is very good reason to see humans as essential to the survival of life on this planet.
In the mid 1980s I found myself the only director of Greenpeace International with a formal education in science. My fellow directors proposed a campaign to “ban chlorine worldwide”, naming it “The Devil’s Element”. I pointed out that chlorine is one of the elements in the Periodic Table, one of the building blocks of the Universe and the 11th most common element in the Earth’s crust. I argued the fact that chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. Adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health and the majority of our synthetic medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. This fell on deaf ears, and for me this was the final straw. I had to leave.
When I left Greenpeace I vowed to develop an environmental policy that was based on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, anti-humanism and fear. In a classic example, a recent protest led by Greenpeace in the Philippines used the skull and crossbones to associate Golden Rice with death, when in fact Golden Rice has the potential to help save 2 million children from death due to vitamin A deficiency every year.
The Keeling curve of CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere since 1959 is the supposed smoking gun of catastrophic climate change. We presume CO2 was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before human activity could have caused a significant impact. I accept that most of the rise from 280 to 400 ppm is caused by human CO2 emissions with the possibility that some of it is due to outgassing from warming of the oceans.
NASA tells us that “Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth’s Temperature” in child-like denial of the many other factors involved in climate change. This is reminiscent of NASA’s contention that there might be life on Mars. Decades after it was demonstrated that there was no life on Mars, NASA continues to use it as a hook to raise public funding for more expeditions to the Red Planet. The promulgation of fear of Climate Change now serves the same purpose. As Bob Dylan prophetically pointed out, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”, even in one of the most admired science organizations in the world.
On the political front the leaders of the G7 plan to “end extreme poverty and hunger” by phasing out 85% of the world’s energy supply including 98% of the energy used to transport people and goods, including food. The Emperors of the world appear clothed in the photo taken at the close of the meeting but it was obviously Photo-shopped. They should be required to stand naked for making such a foolish statement.
The world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and it mandate. The Panel is composed solely of the World Meteorological Organization, weather forecasters, and the United Nations Environment Program, environmentalists. Both these organizations are focused primarily on short-term timescales, days to maybe a century or two. But the most significant conflict is with the Panel’s mandate from the United Nations. They are required only to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.” So if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous” there would be no need for them to exist. They are virtually mandated to find on the side of apocalypse.
Scientific certainty, political pandering, a hopelessly conflicted IPCC, and now the Pope, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, in a bold move to reinforce the concept of original sin, says the Earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” and we must go back to pre-industrial bliss, or is that squalor?
And then there is the actual immense pile of filth fed to us more than three times daily by the green-media nexus, a seething cauldron of imminent doom, like we are already condemned to Damnation in Hell and there is little chance of Redemption. I fear for the end of the Enlightenment. I fear an intellectual Gulag with Greenpeace as my prison guards.
Let’s begin with our knowledge of the long-term history of the Earth’s temperature and of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Our best inference from various proxies back indicate that CO2 was higher for the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history than it has been since the Cambrian Period until today. I will focus on the past 540 million years since modern life forms evolved. It is glaringly obvious that temperature and CO2 are in an inverse correlation at least as often as they are in any semblance of correlation. Two clear examples of reverse correlation occurred 150 million years and 50 million years ago. At the end of the Jurassic temperature fell dramatically while CO2 spiked. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum, temperature was likely higher than any time in the past 550 million years while CO2 had been on a downward track for 100 million years. This evidence alone sufficient to warrant deep speculation of any claimed lock-step causal relationship between CO2 and temperature.
The Devonian Period beginning 400 million years ago marked the culmination of the invasion of life onto the land. Plants evolved to produce lignin, which in combination with cellulose, created wood which in turn for the first time allowed plants to grow tall, in competition with each other for sunlight. As vast forests spread across the land living biomass increased by orders of magnitude, pulling down carbon as CO2 from the atmosphere to make wood. Lignin is very difficult to break down and no decomposer species possessed the enzymes to digest it. Trees died atop one another until they were 100 metres or more in depth. This was the making of the great coal beds around the world as this huge store of sequestered carbon continued to build for 90 million years. Then, fortunately for the future of life, white rot fungi evolved to produce the enzymes that can digest lignin and coincident with that the coal-making era came to an end.
There was no guarantee that fungi or any other decomposer species would develop the complex of enzymes required to digest lignin. If they had not, CO2, which had already been drawn down for the first time in Earth’s history to levels similar to todays, would have continued to decline as trees continued to grow and die. That is until CO2 approached the threshold of 150 ppm below which plants begin first to starve, then stop growing altogether, and then die. Not just woody plants but all plants. This would bring about the extinction of most, if not all, terrestrial species, as animals, insects, and other invertebrates starved for lack of food. And that would be that. The human species would never have existed. This was only the first time that there was a distinct possibility that life would come close to extinguishing itself, due to a shortage of CO2, which is essential for life on Earth.
A well-documented record of global temperature over the past 65 million years shows that we have been in a major cooling period since the Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago. The Earth was an average 16C warmer then, with most of the increased warmth at the higher latitudes. The entire planet, including the Arctic and Antarctica were ice-free and the land there was covered in forest. The ancestors of every species on Earth today survived through what may have been the warmest time in the history of life. It makes one wonder about dire predictions that even a 2C rise in temperature from pre-industrial times would cause mass extinctions and the destruction of civilization. Glaciers began to form in Antarctica 30 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere 3 million years ago. Today, even in this interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age, we are experiencing one of the coldest climates in the Earth’s history.
Coming closer to the present we have learned from Antarctic ice cores that for the past 800,000 years there have been regular periods of major glaciation followed by interglacial periods in 100,000 year-cycles. These cycles coincide with the Milankovitch cycles that are tied to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt. It is highly plausible that these cycles are related to solar intensity and the seasonal distribution of solar heat on the Earth’s surface. There is a strong correlation between temperature and the level of atmospheric CO2 during these successive glaciations, indicating a possible cause-effect relationship between the two. CO2 lags temperature by an average of 800 years during the most recent 400,000-year period, indicating that temperature is the cause, as the cause never comes after the effect.
Looking at the past 50,000 years of temperature and CO2 we can see that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. This is as one could expect, as the Milankovitch cycles are far more likely to cause a change in temperature than a change in CO2. And a change in the temperature is far more likely to cause a change in CO2 due to outgassing of CO2 from the oceans during warmer times and an ingassing (absorption) of CO2 during colder periods. Yet climate alarmists persist in insisting that CO2 is causing the change in temperature, despite the illogical nature of that assertion.
It is sobering to consider the magnitude of climate change during the past 20,000 years, since the peak of the last major glaciation. At that time there were 3.3 kilometres of ice on top of what is today the city of Montreal, a city of more than 3 million people. 95% of Canada was covered in a sheet of ice. Even as far south as Chicago there was nearly a kilometre of ice. If the Milankovitch cycle continues to prevail, and there is little reason aside from our CO2 emissions to think otherwise, this will happen gradually again during the next 80,000 years. Will our CO2 emissions stave off another glaciation as James Lovelock has suggested? There doesn’t seem to be much hope of that so far, as despite 1/3 of all our CO2 emissions being released during the past 18 years the UK Met Office contends there has been no statistically significant warming during this century.
At the height of the last glaciation the sea level was about 120 metres lower than it is today. By 7,000 years ago all the low-altitude, mid-latitude glaciers had melted. There is no consensus about the variation in sea level since then although many scientists have concluded that the sea level was higher than today during the Holocene Thermal optimum from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago when the Sahara was green. The sea level may also have been higher than today during the Medieval Warm Period.
Hundred of islands near the Equator in Papua, Indonesia, have been undercut by the sea in a manner that gives credence to the hypothesis that there has been little net change in sea level in the past thousands of years. It takes a long time for so much erosion to occur from gentle wave action in a tropical sea.
Coming back to the relationship between temperature and CO2 in the modern era we can see that temperature has risen at a steady slow rate in Central England since 1700 while human CO2 emissions were not relevant until 1850 and then began an exponential rise after 1950. This is not indicative of a direct causal relationship between the two. After freezing over regularly during the Little Ice Age the River Thames froze for the last time in 1814, as the Earth moved into what might be called the Modern Warm Period.
The IPCC states it is “extremely likely” that human emissions have been the dominant cause of global warming “since the mid-20th century”, that is since 1950. They claim that “extremely” means 95% certain, even though the number 95 was simply plucked from the air like an act of magic. And “likely” is not a scientific word but rather indicative of a judgment, another word for an opinion.
There was a 30-year period of warming from 1910-1940, then a cooling from 1940 to 1970, just as CO2 emissions began to rise exponentially, and then a 30-year warming from 1970-2000 that was very similar in duration and temperature rise to the rise from 1910-1940. One may then ask “what caused the increase in temperature from 1910-1940 if it was not human emissions? And if it was natural factors how do we know that the same natural factors were not responsible for the rise between 1970-2000.” You don’t need to go back millions of years to find the logical fallacy in the IPCC’s certainty that we are the villains in the piece.
Water is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and is the only molecule that is present in the atmosphere in all three states, gas, liquid, and solid. As a gas, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but as a liquid and solid it is not. As a liquid water forms clouds, which send solar radiation back into space during the day and hold heat in at night. There is no possibility that computer models can predict the net effect of atmospheric water in a higher CO2 atmosphere. Yet warmists postulate that higher CO2 will result in positive feedback from water, thus magnifying the effect of CO2 alone by 2-3 times. Other scientists believe that water may have a neutral or negative feedback on CO2. The observational evidence from the early years of this century tends to reinforce the latter hypothesis.
How many politicians or members of the media or the public are aware of this statement about climate change from the IPCC in 2007?
“we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
There is a graph showing that the climate models have grossly exaggerated the rate of warming that confirms the IPCC statement. The only trends the computer models seem able to predict accurately are ones that have already occurred.
Coming to the core of my presentation, CO2 is the currency of life and the most important building block for all life on Earth. All life is carbon-based, including our own. Surely the carbon cycle and its central role in the creation of life should be taught to our children rather than the demonization of CO2, that “carbon” is a “pollutant” that threatens the continuation of life. We know for a fact that CO2 is essential for life and that it must be at a certain level in the atmosphere for the survival of plants, which are the primary food for all the other species alive today. Should we not encourage our citizens, students, teachers, politicians, scientists, and other leaders to celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is?
It is a proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in the atmosphere today. Even at the today’s concentration of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition. The optimum level of CO2 for plant growth is about 5 times higher, 2000 ppm, yet the alarmists warn it is already too high. They must be challenged every day by every person who knows the truth in this matter. CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it as is the fashion today.
We are witnessing the “Greening of the Earth” as higher levels of CO2, due to human emissions from the use of fossil fuels, promote increased growth of plants around the world. This has been confirmed by scientists with CSIRO in Australia, in Germany, and in North America. Only half of the CO2 we are emitting from the use of fossil fuels is showing up in the atmosphere. The balance is going somewhere else and the best science says most of it is going into an increase in global plant biomass. And what could be wrong with that, as forests and agricultural crops become more productive?
All the CO2 in the atmosphere has been created by outgassing from the Earth’s core during massive volcanic eruptions. This was much more prevalent in the early history of the Earth when the core was hotter than it is today. During the past 150 million years there has not been enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses due to burial in sediments.
Let’s look at where all the carbon is in the world, and how it is moving around.
Today, at just over 400 ppm CO2 there are 850 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. By comparison, when modern life-forms evolved over 500 million years ago there was nearly 15,000 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, 17 times today’s level. Plants and soils combined contain more than 2,000 billion tons of carbon, more that twice as much as the entire global atmosphere. The oceans contain 38,000 billion tons of dissolved CO2, 45 times as much as in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, which were made from plants that pulled CO2 from the atmosphere account for 5,000 – 10,000 billion tons of carbon, 6 – 12 times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.
But the truly stunning number is the amount of carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and turned into carbonaceous rocks. 100,000,000 billion tons, that’s one quadrillion tons of carbon, have been turned into stone by marine species that learned to make armour-plating for themselves by combining calcium and carbon into calcium carbonate. Limestone, chalk, and marble are all of life origin and amount to 99.9% of all the carbon ever present in the global atmosphere. The white cliffs of Dover are made of the calcium carbonate skeletons of coccolithophores, tiny marine phytoplankton.
The vast majority of the carbon dioxide that originated in the atmosphere has been sequestered and stored quite permanently in carbonaceous rocks where it cannot be used as food by plants.
Physics: it works on earth.
You have yet to produce a blockbuster NewPhysics finding that explains how nothing happens if greenhouse gases are increased by 40% in a planet’s atmosphere.
Best,
D
Whats this new physics you speak of? Physics is physics. Theories are not laws or indeed always the truth. Just a possible explanation of the mechanism to be refined or discarded.
Your babbling describes your wish that CO2 added to the atmosphere won’t heat the earth.
The only way that is possible is if there is a special, superduper awesome NewPhysics operating on earth.
Since you cannot show any evidence that a NewPhysics operating on earth, that means that reg’lur physics works on earth. Thus, adding CO2 to the atmosphere results in the earth warming.
As we can see, every day.
Best,
D
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f5cf43a30f7ed526fe2ee459131f98c9f4c83c5e62ef9df076d79b6e5d1e4535.gif https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/67e5bca9c7552475d5109950e08fad0691cd2101ee11f89db1c10bce90e5ae2d.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fb722e4784d808e3b8c6b94d7fd58a8d83dfaf7d9bab4619497af4d292dda817.jpg
Temperature drives CO2 from water, the release is always after the increase in temp, not before. Until you explain the linkage I can’t accept your position that CO2 is a problem..
Your denial of logic is astounding!
I can’t tell which talking point you are butchering, so I’ll take both sets of points on offer:
o CO2 lags temp in Vostok record [10 points]
o Natural sources of CO2 are too big for human sources to matter [10 points]
https://www.facebook.com/ClimateDenialistTalkingPointGame
Best,
D
You really are a waste of time, never any explanation thats to the point or meaningful. Its for you to explain this theory you believe in, and this you fail to do time and time again. Why should we believe in something that you do not explain clearly. You deny logic and seem to be a brain washed gramophone repeating your mantra.
Its for you to explain this theory you believe in, and this you fail to do time and time again.
You are being dishonest. Again. I’ve already done it. You are confusing yourself with your tactics.
No need to be dishonest because you are sad. You cannot show any evidence that a NewPhysics is operating on earth, that means that reg’lur physics works on earth. Thus, adding CO2 to the atmosphere results in the earth warming.
Best,
D
Waste of Space there is no new physics.
Oh, good. So the old physics that says “add CO2, warm a planet” is what works on earth then.
Good to know.
Best,
D
Your confused with cause and effect, no hope for you. If its as you say explain?
Your (sic) confused with cause and effect
Better tell a century and a half of scientists, quickly, before they go off the rails.
Where are you going to get a time machine to go tell Fourier, Tyndall and Callendar?
Best,
D
Tell us the point so we might examine it? Dropping names without a point is plain stupid or an attempt to deceive. Unless you can ex[plain how CO2 works and why you are wasting time trying to bamboozle folks. Typical green leftie. with zero credibility.
Unless you can ex[plain how CO2 works
Do you lack capacity to grasp that I already did, or are you being dishonest about my already having explained it? Which is it?
Best,
D
You have never explained the mechanism, I doubt your science is capable of understand what a mechanism is even if it bit you on your backside.
Deflection.
Best,
D
Then explain the mechanism?
Already did.
Best,
D
Bullshit again.
No need to lie to deflect away from your inability to comprehend I already did.
Best,
D
You mentioned Exeter as though I had never heard of it. Idiot that you are.
This one lacking mental capacity to comprehend, check.
Best,
D
I encourage you to go chat with some of your fellow nationals at the University of Exeter. Lots of recognized expertise there to expand your mind – no bullshit.
Ten years agoI used to know the head of Thermo Fluid Dynamics in Exeter when we were involved in an invention that was being developed. A sound chap, unfortunately he moved so I have no idea where Tom is now.
Tell us the point so we might examine it?
Do you lack capacity to grasp that I keep making the point over and over, and you keep deflecting?
That is: you keep deflecting away from the point, which was made a dozen times and is “add CO2, warm a planet” is what works on earth.
Best,
D
Please educate yourself: http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
It will just say that explanation is insufficient, therefore it cannot believe the theory.
Best,
D
Are you refuting that heat drives CO2 out of water?
The solubility of CO2 declines as water temperature rises. What`s your point?
A glimmer, heat releases CO2 from water, how might CO2 next be the cause of heating? Cause and effect may never be reversed.
You are postulating positive feedback which would have destroyed the system millions of years ago. We have a negative feedback of more CO2, more plant growth absorbing CO2 and producing Oxygen. Green houses are fed CO2 to grow tomatoes, without the crops are very much reduced.
“how might CO2 next be the cause of heating”:
Once again educate yourself on the basics: http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
Yes, increased plant growth due to rising CO2 may dampen the rate of climate change but it can’t be viewed in isolation of all the other climate forcings, positive and negative.
Of course not, we must consider the effect of all forces, some of these are so small as to be inconsequential and overridden by greater forces. Elevating minor forces to critical levels is being done for political ends, this seems plain to many of us.
A pendulum hangs straight and stable, set it swinging and we see energy changing from potential to kinetic, and back to potential energy in a beautiful sine wave sequence held stable by negative feedback. The Oscillation decaying gradually through air resistance and friction.
Turning the device through 180 degrees so the pivot is below the CG and you theoretically can achieve a static state of perfect balance. If it starts to swing in any direction positive feedback kicks in and it will not recover stability. Our climate would have been destroyed millions of years ago without negative feedback.
To argue that climate is about to be reversed this way the mechanism must be fully described in detail that general public will understand. This is not happening what we see and hear is smart arses say you are to uneducated, to thick, believe me I’m clever etc. This will not do, if one really understands it can be explained simply without fudging.
Dano should stay silent, a pompous smart arse who knows only what he is told to know.
Says the hapless commenter who hasn’t been able to back a single statement with evidence, and has repeatedly failed to refute the fact of basic physics: adding CO2 to a planet’s atmosphere warms the planet.
Best,
D
Facts dear boy, CO2 level is driven by temperature and not the reverse as you claim without explanation of how and why.
CO2 level is driven by temperature
[citation needed]
Best,
D https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f722a34330eaffb0e9a467364ccc1fec3adf738a5602665fe9ec9ab36c6ed570.png
Obersavation in your own home with water from your tap, warming produces bubbles of gas and chilling retains it, Sheesh!
No citation, got it. Just making things up.
Best,
D
“the mechanism must be fully described in detail that general public will understand”.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Now tell us what you don’t understand. Don’t be pompous about it, just answer the question.
“Elevating minor forces to critical levels is being done for political ends, this seems plain to many of us”.
What minor forces? If you are referring to climate forcing resulting from the human-caused increase in GHGs what evidence do you have to make this outrageous, and misinformed statement?
Did you do your homework? http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
What is it that you don`t understand or can`t accept?
Education, or believing without question?
“Patrick [sic] Moore is a well known ecologist and scientist…”
In his homeland of Canada, Moore is a well-known lobbyist and PR guy…he has zero credibility when it comes to climate science.
Zero credibility? That is a charge that might be levelled at most greenies but this one is qualified in science, most are just politicly motivated. Now guys you need to explain exactly how CO2 is going to destroy our planet. Lets look at it calmly, to reduce CO2 and change our lives and economies is serious stuff. Now explain why we must do this or go away as you are time wasters.
Set your political biases aside and as a first step, calmly educate yourself about the science: http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
Once you are up to speed I’d be happy to discuss the range of potential policy responses.
Gee thanks, perhaps you need to remove your head from your horses rear end.
Policy responses gives the game away you are just so full of PC buzz words. An enema might work wonders.
Speaking of giving the game away, how is your search for a time machine coming?
Best,
D
What , are you demented or something?
Remember? In order for your statement to be true, you have to go back in time and correct Fourier, Tyndall, and Callendar and get them to change physics on earth.
It’s the only way your nonsensical nonsense will actually work in actual reality.
Or are you defelcting and dissembling and bumbling away from that bumble?
HTH
Best,
D
You are demented.
And you are deflecting away from the fact you are wrong.
Best,
D
Go look up Evidence-Based Policy and then (calmly) come back and tell us what you’ve learned.
if you had a medical condition, would you seek advice from a drug lobbyist or a medical specialist?
Not so straightforward as that perhaps. I was on Statins for several years as prescribed by my doctor. It seems that my bad experience with them is common. They are killers for many, probably most long term. I believe in knowledge and come to your own conclusions not influenced by fiscal considerations and experts.
So what you just said is that you aren’t influenced by scientific experts (the people actually generating the science) but meanwhile you are out promoting rubbish from lobbyists like Moore. Yep, that sounds about right.
Said that?
“…not influenced by fiscal considerations and experts.” if you are not influenced by the work of experts, who are you influenced by? Mystics and occultists? Or just the lobbyists?
…at least they didn’t describe him as co-founder of Greenpeace, so it’s a start.
Best,
D
Why? I understood he was. Are you saying this is untrue now?
You were duped.
Best,
D