I have been reviewing the IPCC AR4 WG1 report and other relevant material and, at this point, I see many holes in the conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 is the dominant forcing in climate change. In fact other documentation from other very respectable sources contradict this conclusion. [I will expand on some of those in the future.] Also, shortly I will provide more information on the effects of aerosols and settled particulates which some researchers are saying are stronger than CO2 forcing.

What strikes me so far in this review is that most of the people doing computer modeling do not understand the difference between highly correlated data and cause and effect. Most of the literature I am seeing assumes that computer plotted curves showing strong correlation between increased anthropogenic CO2 and the rising trend of temperature anomaly is conclusive proof that climate warming is caused by anthropogenic CO2. In other words they assume that the correlation between CO2 and temperature anomaly data proves cause and effect. But computer plots of data that show high correlation do not prove cause and effect. Before that leap can be made it has to be proven that the observed correlation between data plots is not a parallel association in which some other phenomenon causes (or separate phenomena cause) both results.

For example a comparison of world population growth correlates very strongly with both CO2 and temperature anomaly. Can’t one conclude that climate change is actually caused by the population growth? Some of the research I have read indicates the anthropogenic aerosols and settled particulates have much stronger effects on regional climates than CO2. Could the cumulative regional climate changes going on in diverse areas of the planet be the cause of global climate change? I think so.

The IPCC report lightly touches on phenomena other than anthropogenic CO2, but the report indicates that these phenomena have not been explored in detail because they are not well understood and/or there is insufficient data. So the IPCC philosophy appears to be to blame climate change on something they understand and use that assumption to make rapid and extreme political and economic changes rather than wait, do the science, and see how these other phenomena that they don’t now understand influences climate change.

In our previous exchanges I raised the issue of water vapor contribution to climate change. You dismissed it by saying that water vapor is a short lifetime “feedback” effect rather than “forcing” (i.e., having a direct effect on temperature). My response was that increased humidity can cause increased cloudiness which in turn can cause heating. Aerosols and hydrometeors work together in this process. My position is supported by these articles:

1. “Inside of Clouds May Be The Key to Climate Change” Science Daily, Feb. 25, 2007.

2. “Role of Aerosols in Climate Change examined”. Science Daily, Sep. 8 2008

3. “Aerosol Research Key to Improving Climate Predictions, Experts Say” Science Daily, Jan. 20, 2008.

4. “Aerosols May Have High Impact on Rainfall, Climate Change”, Science Daily, Feb. 23, 2009.

Also of interest are the following:

5. “Pollution from China And India Affecting World’s Weather”, Science Daily, Mar. 7, 2007

6. “NASA Study Finds Soot May Be Changing The Arctic Environment.” Science Daily, Apr. 15, 2005.

Before discussing the references I will provide some background for those readers who are not familiar with aerosols in the atmosphere and their effects on cloud formation and solar radiation. I have done extensive research, modeling, and application of the physics of radiation scattering by aerosols and hydrometeors. (Hydrometeors are water droplets, ice particles, and particles consisting of mix of ice and water). And I have written book sized treatises on the subject.

Aerosols are defined as microscopic particles dispersed or suspended in the air. They can be solid or liquid particles or mixtures of both. They may consist of dust (e.g., soil and vegetation fragments), carbon (smoke), and chemical compounds (e.g., sulfuric acid droplets) but are usually some mixture of these. Some natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms, and ocean plankton. In addition, some aerosol particles are produced by human activities. A hydrometeor is an individual water or ice (or mixture) particle that can form in humid air when the air pressure and/or temperature are reduced. When the hydrometeor particle size and the density of particles (i.e., number per unit volume of air) become large enough the particles form a fog or cloud. (Fog is a cloud that touches the ground.)

The presence of an aerosol in humid air or clouds can greatly modify the characteristics of clouds by a process of liquid accretion. The aerosol particles act as condensation nuclei on which water condenses and hydrometeors form. As long as favorable conditions persist the size of hydrometeors tends to grow and when the hydrometeor density and size are sufficient they scatter light and become visible in the form of clouds. As hydrometeors increase in mass they exceed the buoyant forces of the air and drop out in the form of rain, hail, snow, or sleet. But the effects on radiant energy transport are what are important here.

Radiant energy transfer through a layer of clouds and aerosols depends on the aerosol particle and hydrometeor dielectric properties, size distribution, density, and the geometry of radiant energy incidence. The dielectric properties of hydrometeors are determined by both the aerosol particle material properties and the form of water (i.e., liquid, ice, mixture of both) and hydrometeor shape. But it is a fact that the effects of hydrometeors on radiant energy transfer are much greater than the effects of most aerosols. (Martian dust storms and sulfuric acid aerosol clouds on Venus may be the primary exceptions.)

Both aerosol particles and hydrometeors scatter and absorb incident infrared, optical, and UV radiation. So, as it transits the aerosol or cloud, the radiant intensity of the incident radiation is reduced by the cumulative scattering and absorption of all particles in the medium. In many clouds the backscattered component can be very strong and the top layer of clouds “reflect” (actually scatters) incident solar radiation back into space. Similarly the lower cloud levels scatter upwelling radiation from the earth surface back toward the ground. So this radiation is trapped in the troposphere just as the greenhouse gas concept. Some of the radiation is absorbed by the hydrometeors and the resulting heat is transferred to the surrounding air. So, by backscattering radiation, the top layers of clouds have a cooling effect on the lower troposphere and earth surface but, by the trapping effect, the lower layers of clouds can have a warming effect.

For given cloud characteristics the net effect on the troposphere and surface temperatures depends on the cloud type (water vs. ice), altitude, depth, extent of coverage, and persistence. Under conditions where cloud coverage is thick, widespread over a large area and highly persistent, considerable warming of the troposphere is likely. If, eons ago, the earth had extensive long duration coverage of thick clouds the clouds could have either cooling or warming effects depending on the altitude and thickness of the clouds. Specifically cirrus clouds (i.e., stratospheric ice clouds) could cause cooling whereas a thick stratus cloud layer could cause warming.

My point in our previous exchange was that if this (and some other factors) were not taken into account, then the assumption that the cause of past ice sheet growth or reduction was totally caused by CO2 is doubtful. Did the researchers rule out the possibility that dense highly persistent stratus clouds covered most of the earth?

The salient points from the references support my position: [Note: in the following, phrases in brackets (such as this one) are added by me for clarification.]

Ref. 1:
1. The effects of clouds is [sic] becoming more critical in terms of modeling future changes in climate.
2. By comparing the observed temperature change record since 1850 with two different climate models, one that has low climate sensitivity and small amounts of aerosols and one that has high climate sensitivity and high amounts of aerosols, the authors showed that both models follow almost identical predictive paths in the past, but diverge significantly when predicting the temperature in the future.
3. [The study] also looks at the predictive capability of three climate models, a US NCAR-Oslo model, a French model and a Japanese model, and shows that differences are large, especially when the models predict both aerosols and their cloud effects in the assumed level of aerosols at the time, significantly changes the results.

Ref. 2:
1. Recent studies suggest that increased aerosol loading may have changed the energy balance in the atmosphere and at the Earth’s surface, and altered the global water cycle in ways that make the climate system more prone to precipitation extremes. [Some scientists are now using observed deviations in precipitation patterns to justify their CO2 based climate change conclusions.]
2. It appears that aerosol effects on clouds can induce large changes in precipitation patterns, which in turn may change not only regional water resources, but also may change the regional and global circulation systems that constitute the Earth’s climate.
3. The radiative [sic] effects of aerosols on clouds mostly act to suppress precipitation, because they decrease the amount of solar radiation that reaches the land surface, and therefore cause less heat to be available for evaporating water and energizing convective rain clouds.
4. Model simulations have shown that greater heating in the troposphere enhances the atmospheric circulation system, shifting weather patterns due to changes [in] convective activity.
5. The IPCC, in its latest climate change assessment report, declared aerosols to be “the dominant uncertainty in radiative [sic] forcing (a concept used for quantitative comparisons of the strength of different human and natural agents in causing climate change)”. Therefore, aerosols, clouds and their interaction with climate are still the most uncertain areas of climate change [research] and require multidisciplinary coordinated research efforts.

Ref. 3:
1. The influence of aerosols on climate is not yet adequately taken into account in our computer predictions of climate.
2. Improved representation of aerosols in climate models is essential to more accurately predict the climate changes.
3. Although Earth’s atmosphere consists primarily of gases, aerosols and clouds play significant roles in shaping conditions at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. Aerosols typically range in diameter from a few nanometers to a few tens of micrometers. They exhibit a wide range of compositions and shapes, but aerosols between 0.05 and 10 micrometers in diameter dominate aerosols’ direct interaction with sunlight. Aerosols also can produce changes in cloud properties and precipitation, which, in turn, affect climate.
4. The role of greenhouse gases in global warming is fairly well established, but the degree to which the cooling effect of human-produced aerosols offsets the warming is still inadequately understood.

Ref. 4:
1. Aerosols are fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. Sources of human-generated aerosols include industry, motor vehicles and vegetation burning. Natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms and ocean plankton. Human-generated aerosols have long been known to exert a cooling effect on climate.
2. Dr Rotstayn said aerosols are much more than a ‘negative greenhouse gas’ because they can actively force changes in winds and ocean currents by altering the distribution of solar heating at the earth’s surface.
3. New simulations with the CSIRO climate model also show big improvements in the simulation of El Niño and the associated natural rainfall variability over eastern Australia, when natural and human-generated aerosols are included in the model.

Ref. 5:
1. During the past few decades, there has been a dramatic increase in atmospheric aerosols — mostly sulfate [aerosols] and soot [carbon particles] from coal burning — especially in China and India.
2. Because of various climate conditions, the northern Pacific Ocean is more susceptible to the aerosol effect in winter. Aerosols can affect the droplets in clouds and can actually change the dynamics of the clouds themselves.
3. [This] provides indisputable evidence that man-made pollution [not CO2] is adversely affecting the storm track over the Pacific Ocean, a major weather event in the northern hemisphere during winter.

Personally, I think reference Ref. 5 points to a more critical problem than hypothesized climate warming due to increased CO2 – especially for the USA. Also the hydrometeors formed from the emitted sulfur aerosol particles are highly acidic. When they fall into the ocean they cause the ocean acidity to increase.

Reference 6 is very interesting. It states that observed ice melting in the Arctic may be caused by soot from pollution.

Ref. 6:
1. This research offers additional evidence black carbon, generated through the process of incomplete combustion, may have a significant warming impact on the Arctic.
2. There may be immediate consequences for Arctic ecosystems, and potentially long-term implications on climate patterns for much of the globe.
3. In recent years the Arctic has significantly warmed, and sea-ice cover and glacial snow have diminished. Likely causes for these trends include changing weather patterns and the effects of pollution. Black carbon has been implicated as playing a role in melting ice and snow. When soot falls on ice, it darkens the surface and accelerates melting by increasing absorbed sunlight. Airborne soot also warms the air and affects weather patterns and clouds.
4. Koch and Hansen’s results suggest a possible mechanism behind the satellite-derived observations of Arctic climate change. They found the timing and location of Arctic warming and sea ice loss in the late 20th century are consistent with a significant contribution from man-made tiny particles of pollution, or aerosols.
5. The research found in the atmosphere over the Arctic, about one-third of the soot comes from South Asia, one-third from burning biomass or vegetation around the world, and the remainder from Russia, Europe and North America.

Conclusion: Anyone who is basing climate change prediction solely on modeling the effects of CO2 may be mislead and misleading others. The last reference indicates that anyone (e.g., Al Gore) who insists that CO2 will cause the Arctic ice to melt in 5 years is either insentient or just plain stupid. Before we as a society set out to mitigate any affects of anthropogenic global warming, we must first understand the correct causation.

There are a number of other factors that depreciate the validity of CO2 as the predominant cause of warming. I will address some of these in future contributions.

Do you really expect anyone here to accept the information put forward by people employed by the coal industry?

I am of course speaking of the creators of this site:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html

And to the study by Lindzen and Choi, do you really expect anyone to think that that study is good evidence of anything when a climate denier like Roy Spencer discounts the study?

Lindzen is a corporate shill.

Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Member, Annapolis Center Science and Economic Advisory Council. Contributing Expert, Cato Institute. Contributing Expert, George C. Marshall Institute. Member, National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Lindzen is one of the highest prolife climate skeptic scientists, arguably because he has been a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and contributed to the Second Assessment Report. He regularly takes issue with the general conclusions drawn from the IPCC’s reports and has been at the forefront of the consistent attacks on the IPCC since the early 1990’s. His prolific writings assert that climate change science is inconclusive. His opinions are cited throughout the ExxonMobil funded groups and he regularly appears at events organised by them.

Ross Gelbspan reported in 1995 that Lindzen “charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled ‘Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,’ was underwritten by OPEC.” (“The Heat is On: The warming of the world’s climate sparks a blaze of denial,” Harper’s magazine, December 1995.) Lindzen signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration.
Lindzen described Exxon Mobil as “the only principled oil and gas company I know in the US.” “They have a CEO who is not going to be bamboozled by nonsense,” he adds. Professor Lindzen wants the debate on global warming kept alive. He also describes the Royal Society letter as a “disgrace,” adding “they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=17

As time permits I will make comments and contributions to this venue. It is somewhat fun. I am sure readers are curious about my own qualifications. I wish to remain anonymous for a couple of reasons. First I am the CTO of a company and do not want to expose the company to controversies – especially those so politically charged as climate change. Second, most of my 30+ years of work was done for organizations best described, as the British would say, “hush hush and all that you know”. (Imagine the English Accent.)

Regarding written works, I have published many papers. I have also written hundreds unpublished presentations, reports and some book sized treatises on such topics: (unpublished because of “hush hush”):

> radio, microwave, infrared, and light propagation in the atmosphere, in aerosols, in sea water, and even in the ground;
> Electromagnetic wave interactions with the sea surface and waves.
> Underwater acoustics;
> Laser and optical systems;
> Microwave radiometry, radar, and communication systems;
> Optical and laser systems

I have done system engineering on satellite borne meteorological sensors and invented and designed very complex airborne radar technology. So my experience runs the gambit from physical phenomenology to system engineering to design and development.

I have also been the organizer, chairman and paper reviewer for sessions at professional society conferences. I have contributed to numerous workshops at DARPA, NASA, and other agencies. And for certain agencies I did reviews of Soviet Union scientific and technical literature.

I’m not claiming you are wrong. As far as I am concerned, right now, nobody really knows what is right about this climate change issue. But it bothers me when I read or hear people say that climate warming due to CO2 is proven science. I don’t believe that. And anyone claiming it is so causes me to doubt their credibility. Although you appear to have strong feelings about your position, you seem to have a healthy degree of uncertainty. I will spend some time reviewing this and other information and then perhaps I can make some constructive comments. I have done extensive modeling of radiation transport in the atmosphere and aerosols in the atmosphere myself.

My fundamental position is that other possible causes for the observed warming events have not been adequately researched. I think too much funding and effort has been put on just the theory of anthropomorphic CO2 caused climate change. (This is not proper use of the word anthropomorphic but it is frequently used this way in the literature.) Most important to me is that you and others working the area do not defensively push the conclusion that it is settled science. We all have to keep in mind that the wrong answer can needlessly cause severe political and economic havoc to the entire world. So this is a very serious matter. Castigating those who disagree with the way the science is being conducted as “Deniers” is not proper discourse on the issue. That is the sort of thing that causes people to conclude it is politics or religion rather than science.

Their paper doesn’t prove causation, Hal, only correlation. I made that very clear in my post above, as did the authors of the paper. I said

The authors don’t claim to have answered everything, and like all good scientists, they point out that they haven’t proven causation, only shown very high correlation. Attribution studies to determine whether CO2 was a cause, an effect, or both will require more research.

And the authors said

The data presented do not preclude alternative mechanisms for driving climate change over the past 20 Ma; however, they do indicate changes in pCO2 were closely tied to the evolution of climate during the Middle and Late Miocene, and Late Pliocene glacial intensification, and therefore it is logical to deduce pCO2 placed an important role in driving these transitions.

So neither they nor I are claiming that this is the last word, that there are no other possibilities, or anything of the sort.

(Hal said) Also it must be proven that the cooling was not caused by lower solar radiant intensity and/or lower cosmic radiation penetration due to increased ozone.

Several of the referenced papers controlled for Milankovic cycles (Ref 2, Ref 3, Ref 8), which are the major drivers of changes in insolation over the course of thousands of years – as the authors point out in their first paragraph.

As for ozone, its concentration is directly proportional to the amount of UV present (assuming limited removal and sufficient molecular oxygen to absorb all the UV) – if the UV drops, then the amount of ozone drops too. The only real question is whether there is a major ozone disrupting event in that time period (like a long-duration volcanic eruption that pumps LOTS of sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere over the course of hundreds or thousands of years) or if there’s some way that the amount of atmospheric oxygen dropped so much that it couldn’t absorb all the UV photons hitting the atmosphere. I’m not aware of there being any examples of this in the Middle Miocene, however – no thick bands of volcanic rock, for example, dating to the Middle Miocene. If you do know of examples of this, I’d love to read it.

(Hal said) I flatly disagree with the argument that water vapor is not a forcing constituent. The levels of water vapor determine the prevalence, density, and particle size distribution of clouds. All of these factors affect the reflection and transmission of solar radiation and upwelling earth radiation. Both of these have strong effects on the temperature. As any meteorologist will validate, clouds trap heat in the lower atmosphere and in cold climatic zones clear skies result in lower surface temperatures.

First, let’s make sure we both understand the terms. A climate forcing element is something that drives a change in the energy balance of the planet and, in an ideal world, is independent of the current state of the Earth’s energy balance. A climate feedback element is something that responds to the current energy balance state and either increases or decreases (positive or negative feedback, respectively) the changes in the energy balance being altered by a forcing element. Most climate forcings have a long duration, measured in at least years. CO2 is an example, with its lifetime in the atmosphere of decades to millennia. Methane is a mix of forcing and feedback because it’s ~25x more powerful a GHG than CO2, but its lifetime in the atmosphere is measured in years.

Clouds come and go on extremely short time scales compared to that of climate (hours, days, maybe weeks vs. years, decades, and centuries). Similarly, clear water vapor (ie not condensed into clouds) also rises and falls rapidly, over the course of hours to weeks. As a result, climatologists largely consider water vapor to be a feedback. Yes, it drives changes in the Earth’s energy balance, but those changes literally vary with the weather.

(Hal said) The final error in your argument concerns the partial pressure of CO2. As I said, it is not the partial pressure that counts, its the total CO2 mass. Contrary to what you say, the partial pressure of CO2 is proportional to the total atmosphere mass not the total CO2 mass. Without knowing the total atmosphere mass we have no way of knowing the total CO2 mass. The argument assumes that the atmosphere 20 million years ago was essentially the same as the present atmosphere.

Not necessarily. This is the definition of partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in the atmosphere:

pCO2 = Ptotal * nCO2/ntotal,

where Ptotal = the total pressure of the atmosphere, nCO2 = number of moles of CO2, and ntotal = total number of moles of the rest of the gas. Given that the total mass of both CO2 and the atmosphere are directly related to the number of moles of each, pCO2 is proportional to both total CO2 mass and total atmosphere mass. As a result, using partial pressure enables the authors to essentially continually normalize their calculations to the total mass of the atmosphere at each datapoint.

Furthermore, we can assume that the atmosphere behaves similarly to an ideal gas (a good first assumption, and not too wrong for the purposes of this example), so we can rewrite the pressure Ptotal:

Ptotal = ntotal * R * T/V,

where ntotal is defined above, R =ideal gas constant, T = temperature, and V = volume of the atmosphere. Substituting the ideal gas equation, assuming that the volume of the atmosphere is constant (a reasonable assumption, even though it does change somewhat with temperature and composition), we get the following:

pCO2 = kV * T * nCO2,

where the total moles of the atmosphere cancels out and kV = R/V. This gives a simple relationship between the partial pressure of CO2 and the total mass of CO2 in the atmosphere at a given temperature. True, it’s predicated on a couple of assumptions, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to get more accurate by using an equation of state to model the atmosphere instead of the ideal gas law, and so a numerical solution out of a simple model shouldn’t be too far different from this equation. And there have been many studies of temperature over the last 20 million years, so T is known (within certain error bands) and thus the number of moles of CO2 (and thus total mass) could be estimated. If the authors wanted to do that math, that is.

Ultimately, though, the authors don’t have to do that. Their paper shows correlation of the partial pressure of CO2 (measured in parts per million by volume, ppmv) to changes in ice cover, and as I illustrated above, it’s almost trivial to extract total CO2 mass from the partial pressure of CO2. Running to that next step isn’t their purpose, and so they can leave the job of estimating the total mass of CO2 and the total mass of the atmosphere at the time to other scientists. In fact, such an estimate would be an independent check on this paper’s conclusions and is thus a worthy research project for another group of scientists to perform.

(Hal said)The bottom line is that basing global warming model validation on CO2 partial pressure and ice sheet concomitant growth is not valid unless all other factors at the time (20 million years ago) are ruled out. It is the responsibility of researchers who propose the theory to prove there can be no other cause of ice sheet growth 20 million years ago. Absence of that proof puts into question the validation of those global warming models.

The authors don’t have to rule out every possibility, Hal, since they’re not trying to prove causation. The authors presented a hypothesis and the data in support of that hypothesis. They carefully explained the limitations of their data and their conclusions based on that data. It’s now the responsibility of other scientists to propose alternative hypotheses and to poke holes in this paper. Experts will weigh the new paper and data and compare it to the old papers and data, determine if there were errors in the old papers that the new paper corrects, whether there are error in the new paper that partially or wholly negate the correlation, and so on.

Remember, the authors showed correlation, not causation. Solar changes, volcanic eruptions, meteorite impacts, changes in the location of the Sun’s orbit through the Milky Way, and so on could have been the trigger of an increase in pCO2, but then the CO2 functioned as a feedback on the scale of geologic ages (which are significantly longer than climate time scales). They’ve specifically not stated that they know all the answers, or that they’ve controlled for everything, only that they found a high degree of correlation between pCO2 and transitions in glaciation.

Patience is called for here, Hal. It’s an interesting paper, but it’s not going to be anything like a “last word.” Let’s not forget something critical that I said in the post above:

If this study’s results are corroborated, then this paleoclimate reconstruction will be yet another study supporting the widespread understanding that climate is very sensitive to CO2 concentrations. (emphasis added)

We don’t know if the results will be corroborated. Having read the paper, I’d say that there’s a decent chance they will be. But I could be wrong, the authors could be wrong, and the paper could fade away as a dead end. But if further review finds this paper’s conclusions to be substantially correct, then it will be a big deal because it extended CO2 correlation information from the end of the ice core record back millions of years.

Only time, and lots more careful research, will tell.

As to your other comment about credibility, if you see places where I’m using the math and data incorrectly, I welcome finding out how and why. Early in my own professional career as an electrical engineer, I made the exact error you described, and I like to think that I’ve learned something from that. I don’t claim to be perfect or to understand everything about the science underlying climatology and climate disruption. I’ve made mistakes in the past and will certainly make them in the future. I like to think that I’m open minded enough to admit my errors and learn from them so I don’t make them in the future, but ultimately that’s for you, and your fellow readers, to decide. Just be aware, though, that if you’re unwilling to back up your claim that I’m wrong about something, I will simply ignore you.

What is needed is validation of theory and conclusions based on known laws of physics and incontrovertible collateral data. How can one use sparse data to make valid conclusions on climate conditions 20 million years ago when, with all of the knowledge we have of the earth and solar system presently, we can’t make irrefutable conclusions? But to turn around and use 20 million year sparse data to validate models of current conditions is too a far of a leap.

Instead of evaluating the credibility a guy who has written more about this subject in recent years than I can readily recall, especially since he’s trying to give a quick answer to someone, how about taking the time to read all those critiques. If you’re as qualified as you indicate, I feel certain you’ll conclude that he’s plenty credible to do the work he’s doing.

“The nice thing about science is that math and data are what make someone credible. That I can do the math myself, that I can read the papers and understand them, that I understand the physics, chemistry, and atmospheric science – those are what make me credible.”

Having been a key investigator at several national research laboratories I am concerned with this comment. I specifically object to the statement that “The nice thing about science is that math and data are what make someone credible.” This is a totally false preposition. Having data and knowing math do not make one credible. What makes one credible is the correct validation of the data and the proper use of the science and math. In my career I have seen over and over that any person with a touch of knowledge on a subject and a computer with a powerful mathematical program like MathCad can prove almost anything to himself and to some other people. A person using these tools must be objective and any computed results must be carefully checked with standard known physical laws. Otherwise the person is very likely to produce results that are at best incorrect and at worst self delusional but certainly misleading to many uniformed people. This is precisely the problem with much of the climate change research that is being done.

The fact that sulfur aerosols cause cooling was amply demonstrated by the earth cooling after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo. The point here is that the possible existence of other constituents such as high levels of sulfur aerosols, methane, and ozone must be ruled out before one can make the leap that CO2 was the cause of growth of the sea ice sheets. Also it must be proven that the cooling was not caused by lower solar radiant intensity and/or lower cosmic radiation penetration due to increased ozone. I flatly disagree with the argument that water vapor is not a forcing constituent. The levels of water vapor determine the prevalence, density, and particle size distribution of clouds. All of these factors affect the reflection and transmission of solar radiation and upwelling earth radiation. Both of these have strong effects on the temperature. As any meteorologist will validate, clouds trap heat in the lower atmosphere and in cold climatic zones clear skies result in lower surface temperatures.

The final error in your argument concerns the partial pressure of CO2. As I said, it is not the partial pressure that counts, its the total CO2 mass. Contrary to what you say, the partial pressure of CO2 is proportional to the total atmosphere mass not the total CO2 mass. Without knowing the total atmosphere mass we have no way of knowing the total CO2 mass. The argument assumes that the atmosphere 20 million years ago was essentially the same as the present atmosphere.

The bottom line is that basing global warming model validation on CO2 partial pressure and ice sheet concomitant growth is not valid unless all other factors at the time (20 million years ago) are ruled out. It is the responsibility of researchers who propose the theory to prove there can be no other cause of ice sheet growth 20 million years ago. Absence of that proof puts into question the validation of those global warming models.

Your comment about methane is a reasonable concern, however, and I don’t immediately see it addressed in the paper or the supplemental online materials. I haven’t checked the references, however.

So there is certainly room for debate on various climate issues. However, “debate” is a word with a meaning, and it relies on good faith participation by those involved. It rather pointedly does NOT include those who would obfuscate, who would inject confusion instead of clarity, those who seek to delude in the name of ignorance or vested profit motive, and those who trade in fear, uncertainty and doubt.

In a nutshell, S&R is about signal, not noise. And we have gone out of our way to recruit writers who know the difference, who understand the limits of their knowledge and expertise, and who confront those limits in a spirit of honest, open inquiry.

I use the term “noisers” from time to time to signify those whose mission is to spread noise instead of signal, and Judy, you’re about as bad a case as I have seen. You’ve been allowed to continue here basically because Brian enjoys making a fool out of you, because he values your commitment to bringing him all the current bullshit (that is, he gets to practice on you), and because I personally find a lot of value in letting idiots speak because they do such a wonderful job of discrediting themselves.

However, in the end, your presence here significantly erodes our collective signal-to-noise ration, and we are now officially over it.

You essentially have four arguments – my scientists are better than your scientists, the models are all bullshit, humanity isn’t powerful enough to manipulate nature, and Al Gore is the devil. The Al Gore argument is the only one I haven’t torn apart multiple times and in multiple ways, and that’s because it has no bearing on the actual science behind climate disruption.

I’ve disproved the claims of your scientists in some cases and raise serious methodological concerns about them in others. I’ve pointed out repeatedly that the claims of many of your scientists are questionable at best, manipulative or out right lies at worst, and almost always unsupported by the best available science and statistics. In many cases, I’ve pointed out that your scientists are presently in the employ of companies who profit to the tune of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars annually, or who have been in their employ in the past. And in other cases, I’ve pointed out that your scientists aren’t actually scientists, have little to no relevant expertise, and/or have inflated their resumes and been caught doing so.

I’ve pointed out that your “the IPCC models are bullshit” argument is false at least twice, based on your own logical inconsistencies, with the Shindell paper mentioned above being the most recent example. Again, if all the IPCC models are bullshit, then Shindell’s new IPCC model based results are also bullshit. If Shindell’s new IPCC model based results are correct, then the IPCC models are also largely correct. If the IPCC model Shindell used was wrong before but is right now, then you’re a ideologically-driven partisan picking and choosing your data to match your preconceived notions. You’ve made it abundantly clear, both by refusing to accept the logical conundrum you’re in and by your prior arguments in this and dozens of other comments to my posts at S&R and Care2 that the third option is the correct one.

Your opinions on humanity not being powerful enough to manipulate climate and weather are not supported by your own stated opinions at Care2. As recently as September 1, 2009, you posted at Care2 about chemtrails causing droughts, “weather modification techniques,” “giant standing ELF waves which are transmitted by the Soviets intentionally to block the flow of normal weather patterns,” and so on. If humanity has the power to manipulate weather and climate on purpose, then logically we have the power to do the same unintentionally with greenhouse gas emissions, land use changes, pollutants, etc. Again, logically inconsistent. This is especially true since your reject science in at least three cases – chemtrails causing drought, ELF radiation modifying weather over the course of years, and human influence on climate.

And as for your Al Gore argument, you’ve damaged yourself with your conspiracy claims about the Club of Rome wanting to destroy 90%+ of the global population, ELF radiation, chemtrails, and H1N1 being used to depopulate the Earth (probably working for the Club of Rome, they are…) that I don’t need to argue against you. I just give you a place to talk and you destroy your own credibility when you start ranting about Al Gore.

You have no interest in the truth, Judy. You have no interest in understanding the mathematics, statistics, scientific disciplines, and data that underlie the conclusion that anthropogenic climate disruption is real. You have no interest in debate – all you care about is using as many soapboxes as you can find to spread unsupported fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And at this point you’ve run out of arguments to even do that effectively.

The Global Warming Scare is All Over but the Shouting

The great global warming scare is over — it is well past its peak, very much a spent force, sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end. You may not know this yet. Or rather, you may know it but don’t want to acknowledge it until every one else does, and that won’t happen until the press, much of which also knows it, formally acknowledges it.

I know that the global warming scare is over but for the shouting because that’s what the polls show, at least those in the U.S., where unlike Canada the public is polled extensively on global warming. Most Americans don’t blame humans for climate change — they consider global warming to be a natural phenomenon. Even when the polls showed the public believed man was responsible for global warming, the public didn’t take the scare seriously. When asked to rank global warming’s importance compared to numerous other concerns — unemployment, trade, health care, poverty, crime, and education among them — global warming came in dead last. Fewer than 1% chose global warming as scare-worthy.

The informed members of the media read those polls and know the global warming scare is over, too. Andrew Revkin, The New York Times reporter entrusted with the global warming scare beat, has for months lamented “the public’s waning interest in global warming.” His colleague at The Washington Post, Andrew Freedman, does his best to revive public fear, and to get politicians to act, by urging experts to up their hype so that the press will have scarier material to run with.

The experts do their best to give us the willies. This week they offered up plagues of locusts in China and a warning that the 2016 Olympics “could be the last for mankind” because “the earth has passed the point of no return.” But the press has also begun to tire of Armageddon All-The-Time, and (I believe) to position itself for its inevitable attack on the doomsters. In an online article in June entitled “Massive Estimates of Death are in Vogue for Copenhagen,” Richard Cable of the BBC, until then the most stalwart of scare-mongers, rattled off the global warnings du jour – they included a comparison of global warming to nuclear war and a report from the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, to the effect that “every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead, 325-million people seriously affected, and economic losses of US $125-billion.” Cable’s conclusion: “The problem is that once you’ve sat up and paid attention enough to examine them a bit more closely, you find that the means by which the figures were arrived at isn’t very compelling… The report contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data.”

The scientist-scare-mongers, seeing the diminishing returns that come of their escalating claims of catastrophe, also know their stock is falling. Until now, they have all toughed it out when the data disagreed with their findings – as it does on every major climate issue, without exception. Some scientists, like Germany’s Mojib Latif, have begun to break ranks. Frustrated by embarrassing questions about why the world hasn’t seen any warming over the last decade, Latif, a tireless veteran of the public speaking circuits, now explains that global warming has paused, to resume in 2020 or perhaps 2030. “People understand what I’m saying but then basically wind up saying, ‘We don’t believe anything,’” he told The New York Times this week.

And why should they believe anything that comes from the global warming camp? Not only has the globe not warmed over the last decade but the Arctic ice is returning, the Antarctic isn’t shrinking, polar bear populations aren’t diminishing, hurricanes aren’t becoming more extreme. The only thing that’s scary about the science is the frequency with which doomsayer data is hidden from public scrutiny, manipulated to mislead, or simply made up.

None of this matters anymore, I recently heard at the Global Business Forum in Banff, where a fellow panelist from the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change told the audience that, while she couldn’t dispute the claims I had made about the science being dubious, the rights and wrongs in the global warming debate are no longer relevant. “The train has left the station,” she cheerily told the business audience, meaning that the debate is over, global warming regulations are coming in, and everyone in the room — primarily business movers and shakers from Western Canada — had better learn to adapt.

Her advice was well accepted, chiefly because most in the room had already adapted — they are busy trying to cash in by obtaining carbon subsidies, building nuclear plants, or providing services to the new carbon economy.

My assessment for those wondering where we’re at: Yes, the train left the station some time ago. And it is now off the rails. http://www.skepticsglobalwarming.com/?p=19765