Rearranging the Deckchairs

volcanoes, animals and vegetation each produced infinitely more carbon dioxide than human activity

Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The emperor’s green new clothes

Got that? Not just more – infinitely more. Where is it?

In fact we are now producing more CO2 all day, every day than one of the biggest volcanic eruptions of the past 100,000 years produced on its worst day – and more CO2 per day than all of the world’s volcanoes put together.

technorati tags:globalwarming, greatglobalwarmingswindle, melaniephillips, moron, volcanoes, CO2

Well, this seems like that debate that everybody says they want:

Along with Richard Somerville (UC San Diego) and Brenda Ekwurzel (Union of Concerned Scientists), I’ll be appearing at a debate on Wednesday (March 14th) about whether Global Warming is a crisis (or not). That might have gone without notice (like most of my public talks), except that our opponents are Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott. The preliminary position statements (from me and from Philip Stott) are available on the ABCnews site. It’s sold out, but the proceedings will be broadcast on NPR (for instance, WNYC 820 AM on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 2PM) and there will be a podcast (though I don’t know if it will stream live). There’s an online poll as well for what that’s worth.

RealClimate » Global Warming debate

technorati tags:globalwarming

Another curious aspect of the data, not mentioned in The Great Global Warming Swindle,is that as well as there being a lag on the way up there is also a lag on the way down. The significance being that global temperature can fall even while CO2 levels are still rising, which is kind of a kick in the teeth for the CO2 = Global Warming fanboys

Now,whilst this data does not definitely disprove that CO2 plays some part in global warming it certainly doesn’t constitute proof that it does either.

Famous for 15 megapixels

Of course nobody claimed it did, not even Al Gore methinks. This is certainly unintuitive but then multi-variable feedbacks normally are.

Actually it’s really not that hard to come up with a reason why an effect should decrease even when a cause is increasing.

Example: pressing down on the accelerator of a car normally makes the car go faster.

Now try the same thing while aiming the car at a wall, or when it is nearly out of fuel.

technorati tags:globalwarming, greatglobalwarmingswindle

The material presented was a mixture of truth, half truth and falsehood put together with the sole purpose of discrediting the science of global warming as presented by the main world community of climate scientists and by the IPCC.
[...]

1. First, it is important to note that the main lines of evidence for human-induced climate change not addressed in the programme were:

• growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mainly due to fossil fuel burning to a level greater than for at least 600,000 years;
• observations of global warming at the earth’s surface (in magnitude and pattern) consistent with the increase in greenhouse gases, the basic science of which has been known and understood for over 200 years

JRI – The Great Global Warming Swindle

Sir John Houghton was co-chair of IPCC Scientific Assessment working
group 1988-2002, and Director General of the UK Meteorological Office
1983-1991.

technorati tags:globalwarming, greatglobalwarmingswindle

Volcanoes and CO2 again. Bishop Hill notes the following:

74,000 years ago, the Toba volcano erupted in a VEI 7 explosion that pumped more than 10,000 times as much CO2 into the air as Mt. St. Helens did. At the maximum, Mt. St. Helens was giving off 22,000,000 kg of C02 daily, so Toba was putting out at least 22 billion kg per day. The ash cloud was so thick that it caused cooling that nearly wiped out the human race.

There are indications in the ice core records that show the cooling from Toba, but where is the global warming that should have resulted from all the CO2 put into the atmosphere? According to what I’ve read, the CO2 should have remained in the air long after the ash settled and that should have caused at least a warming spike, but there’s no sign of extraordinary warming in the climate records. Shouldn’t there always be a cooling/warming cycle after a volcano erupts? Cooling from the ash cloud, warming from the CO2 that lingers?
Source

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I tried to respond to Bishop Hill on this question over at his blog, but squarespace ate my comment (a frequent problem on squarespace blogs that I think is caused by a bad interaction with my Flock browser). It was also around then that I discovered that copying the text I wrote in Flock doesn’t actually save it if I exit the browser when I’m running it on Linux. Grrr. So I’m posting it here instead. :-)

Frank,

I don’t know anything about the volcanos argument. Can you give me some links to support what you are saying? Which contributors are you saying have been repeatedly found to be unreliable? All of them?

For me, Lindzen and the maker of the documentary in particular. There aren’t actually a lot of contributors to the documentary with authority to challenge. At least two that I saw were weather forecasters and not climatologists. Some of the others do have authority but not in this field. At least one scientist that appeared claims they were misled and misrepresented, and they do in fact believe in man made global warming.

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