Carbon Dioxide Is Innocent

See “Water is the Weather Wildcard” by Viv Forbes at The Pickering Post:

The climatists claim that atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global warming. But the past seventeen years of rising CO₂ without rising global temperatures shows this to be untrue.
So now they say that carbon dioxide causes wild weather.  This too is untrue.
Water covers over 70% of the globe, is about fifty times more abundant than CO₂ in the atmosphere and it is a far more effective “greenhouse gas”.
There can be no rain, snow, hail, ice or floods without water.  And the absence of water produces deserts and droughts.
And it is water, not carbon dioxide, which plays a crucial role in the feared climate tipping points.
During periods of global warming, water plays a mainly moderating role.  As oceans, seas and lakes are warmed by solar radiation, water drives three cooling feedbacks.
Firstly, increased evaporation cools the surface water and the adjacent atmosphere.
Secondly, the moist warm air rises, cooling as it expands in the lower atmospheric pressure.  Eventually this cooling air releases its moisture as rain, hail or snow which cools the surface on which it falls, and then cools it more by renewing evaporative cooling.  Or the extra moisture forms clouds that shade the surface and also reflect solar radiation.
Thirdly, the moisture in the air releases its latent heat when it condenses high in the atmosphere. Much of this surface heat then gets radiated to space.
Water thus reduces the chances of runaway global warming.
Water, however, can magnify any cooling trends.  A covering of snow and ice quickly reflects more incoming solar radiation, thus increasing the initial cooling.  Not even the feeble warming effect of carbon dioxide will prevent this.  In fact, when oceans cool, they dissolve more carbon dioxide thus reducing the ability of the atmosphere to retain atmospheric warmth.  Ice ages are precipitated once winter snow is not melted by summer sun.  They have never been prevented by high carbon dioxide levels in ancient atmospheres.
These are all proven processes, not theories in computer climate models.
It is water in all its forms, not carbon dioxide, that is the heavy-hitter in all weather processes.
Carbon dioxide is the side-show.

Murry Selby: Greenhouse Gases and Global Temperature

CO₂ does not drive climate change.

The New but Dying Lysenkoism

See “The Disgraceful Episode of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory”, by Peter Ferrara, in “Forbes”:

Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming.  That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly increased government powers and control over the private economy.  Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries.  Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.
Those who promote the theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award.  Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory.  Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?
Those in positions of scientific authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money, publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.

See also, by the same author, “To the Horror of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here”.

In Defence of Carbon Dioxide

See “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide”, by Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer, in The Wall Street Journal:

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide.  Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant.  That’s simply not the case.  Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.
The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.
The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history.  Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago).  For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a “pollutant” in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants.  […]
We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth’s atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times.  The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

A Query

A Question for Supporters of the Supposedly Scientific but Self-Serving, Partisan Propagandists of the Failed Conjecture of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

It’s “ipcc
this” and “ipcc that”
all across the land;

the argument from
authority is getting
wholly out of hand.

Do tell us: what part
of “intergovernmental”
don’t you understand?

Even the very silly Prof. Tim Flannery—in The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (Melbourne, 2008)—notes that:

the pronouncements of the IPCC do not represent mainstream science, nor even good science, but lowest-common-denominator-science—and of course even that is delivered at glacial speed.  [p. 246]

Immediately, however, the professor, in assuete denial of consecutive thinking, observes:

If the IPCC says something, you had better believe it—and then allow for the likelihood that things are far worse than is says they are.  [loc. cit.]

UPDATE I (7 May):  see “Two Views on Science, Pollution & Pristine Lakes” by Donna Laframboise (of Delinquent Teenager fame):

Today’s moral lesson: scientists aren’t holy men, pronouncing the gospel truth.  They may, in fact, be closer to circus performers. 

UPDATE II (9 May):  see “Secret UN ‘ZOD’ climate deliberations: UK battles to suppress details” by Andrew Orlowski:

It’s a common misconception—a sign of the media’s deference to scientists, perhaps—that the IPCC consists of a properly appointed actual panel somewhere.  As [Peter] Stott [of the UK Met Office] cheerfully confirmed, beyond a small technical administrative support team called the TSU, there isn’t really “an IPCC” at all.  Self-selecting scientists kick off the assessment process, often gatekeeping material by their friends and colleagues, hard-green campaign groups etc.  From the Second Draft stage of the review process the room is full of government officials—the international bureaucracy effectively takes over.  The rules are set by the participants, making it up as they go along, Lord of the Flies-style.  The Osborne-Stocker exchange illustrates a normal example of one scientist colluding with another in an attempt to prevent the public finding out how the process works.  Stott described in court the process which allows any member of the public to “self-certify” as an Expert Reviewer and join the process at the First Order Draft (i.e., the second) stage.

UPDATE III (24 May):  download a PDF of What is Wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for a Radical Reform, by Ross McKitrick.

Roy Spencer with John Stossel

“To shut down CO₂ is to shut down civilisation.”

See also “Global Warming Agenda, Bad Policy” and Dr. Spencer’s own site.

Ian Plimer on His Climate Primer

From the awarmist ABC comes “Plimer launches kids’ climate sceptic book” wherein Matt Peacock tries his best not to discuss the substance of Prof. Plimer’s book:

Matt Peacock:  To the geology professor and climate sceptic whose book, How to Get Expelled from School: A Guide to Climate Change for Pupils, Parents and Punters, was launched last night by the former prime minister, John Howard.

Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide, claims that much of the concern about global warming’s the result of political activism, opportunism and is unrelated to science.  But that’s not his only controversial view.

Professor Plimer also argues that white asbestos, known as chrysotile, is not really asbestos, and three years ago he even asserted that it was not a carcinogen.

Earlier, I asked him whether his new book really would see kids expelled.

Ian Plimer:  It’s going to teach them to ask the fundamental questions: is climate change normal? And once climate change has established as being normal, terms such as “denier” and “sceptic” have no validity and the teachers then have to deal with the key scientific questions like, which part of the last 330 years of warming is natural and which part is due to human activity?

Matt Peacock:  The Science Teachers Association and others have taken exception to your book already.  Does that worry you?

Ian Plimer:  Not at all.  I see the products of the science teachers.  I see 500 of them every year.  I have for the last forty years.  These kids coming out today have the lack of basics of chemistry, physics, mathematics, logic and English.  These kids today are being taught environmental activism and they have to be retaught the basics before they can understand how the world works.

I’m not surprised at people who are probably activists are a little bit concerned.

Matt Peacock:  Well you’re a professor of mining geology, simply put a rock expert.  How does that quality you on meteorological and climate sciences?

Ian Plimer:  Every rock you look at you ask a simple question.  What was sea level doing?  What was the climate doing?  And every geology textbook, going back hundreds of years, deals with past climate.

And we’ve only got to our present climate from past climates.  The climate industry ignores the past.

Climate science is a very new science.  Geology is a great part of climate science.  You cannot ignore geology.  If you do, you get a completely different view of the way the planet works.

But that’s the way that the climate industry wants us to look at climate because geology has those really uncomfortable questions.  It shows that sea level goes up and down and climate goes up and down and the land goes up and down and it’s much more complicated than traces of a trace gas in the atmosphere.

Matt Peacock:  Well can I ask you a simple question about your expertise, rocks?  A few years ago you told me chrysotile was not asbestos, is that right?

Ian Plimer:  Chrysotile’s a serpentine mineral.  That is absolutely correct.  Mineralogically it’s a serpentine mineral.

Matt Peacock:  So it’s not asbestos?

Ian Plimer:  It is called commercially “asbestos”. The mineral chrysotile is a serpentine mineral.

Matt Peacock:  Even the asbestos industry calls it “asbestos”.  I mean the town Asbestos mines chrysotile.

Ian Plimer:  As I said it’s called commercially “asbestos”.

Matt Peacock:  But scientifically...

Ian Plimer:  However—

Matt Peacock:  With respect, Professor, it’s called “asbestos” scientifically too.

Ian Plimer:  I’m sorry.  You are just a journalist.  I have spent my life studying minerals.  Look up any basic mineralogy textbook—the sort of thing that we give to 18-year-old students at university—and you'll see that chrysotile is a serpentine mineral.

Matt Peacock:  Called “asbestos”.

Ian Plimer:  A family of serpentine minerals—

Matt Peacock: Called “asbestos”.

Ian Plimer:  whereas asbestos minerals are amphibole minerals.

Matt Peacock:  Amphibole like crocidolite and amosite, but chrysotile is part of the family called “asbestos”.  Is it not?

Ian Plimer:  I am sorry.  You are demonstrating mass ignorance.  You are out of your depth.  I invite you to come to some elementary first year mineralogy lectures and you will learn—

Matt Peacock:  And isn’t chrysotile...

Ian Plimer:  the difference between amphiboles and—

Matt Peacock:  Well, another simple question: is chrysotile a carcinogen?

Ian Plimer:  The literature is quite varied on this now.  There’s been a lot more work done.

Matt Peacock:  You told me it wasn’t.  You told me it wasn’t, three years ago.  Do you still have that view?

Ian Plimer:  I’m sorry, I’m sorry you are letting your ideology run loose.

Matt Peacock:  Well, let me quote this letter that you wrote me three years ago.

Ian Plimer:  Let me just say that the mineralogy and the epidemiological work has been done since then and it is now quite equivocal as to what chrysotile does.  Three or four years ago we had a different view.

Matt Peacock:  Professor, in 2008 you wrote to me that ... excuse me, can I ask you this question?  In 2008 you wrote to me and you said chrysotile is not a carcinogen.  Do you still stand by that view?

Ian Plimer:  The literature now has changed.  There has been some more work done.  Now there happened to be three years of scientific work done between 2008 and 2010—

Matt Peacock:  And in 2008 the WHO (World Health Organisation) said it was a carcinogen, so did medical authorities throughout the world, but you said it wasn’t.

Ian Plimer:  No, I’m sorry.  It was equivocal.  It is probably less equivocal now.  And, again, you are allowing ideology to actually overrun your logic—

Matt Peacock:  And you're saying in 2008, Professor, that asbestos was not viewed as a carcinogen?

Ian Plimer:  Well, I’m sure that has a huge amount to do with climate change.

Matt Peacock:  But, Professor, it goes to your credibility does it not?

Ian Plimer:  It certainly goes to your credibility when you are trying to—

Matt Peacock:  How could a geologist such as yourself say that chrysotile is not a carcinogen?

Ian Plimer:  you are trying to claim that mineral chrysotile is an asbestos mineral when you know full well that it isn’t.  And it is no wonder that people have lost faith in the ABC because you know very well—

Matt Peacock:  And the entire industry in Canada, the town of Asbestos that mines chrysotile, they’ve all got it wrong?

Ian Plimer:  You know very well that crocidolite is an amphibole.  You know very well because you could very simply call up Mindat.  You could call up any website on mineralogy and you could be shown to be quite misleading and deceptive.

Matt Peacock:  Final question, Professor.

Ian Plimer:  I don’t know why you want to spend your time totally and absolutely out of your depth and you are only reporting what (inaudible) ABC.

Matt Peacock:  A final question, with respect Professor, have you ever taken any money from the coal industry or the asbestos industry or their lobbyists?

Ian Plimer:  Not at all.  But have you, sir, ever taken any money from the taxpayer?  And that is what you are doing to paint an ideological picture which in most cases can be regarded as misleading and deceptive.

Matt Peacock:  Thanks for your time, Professor.  The University of Adelaide’s Professor Ian Plimer.

UPDATE (21 December):  according to mattpeacock.net:

Matt began his career in 1973 as a trainee with Australia’s first TV current affairs program, “This Day Tonight”, before joining the ABC Radio National’s Science Unit, where he produced a pioneering radio series on the asbestos industry.  [...]
More recently he authored a book on the former Australian asbestos manufacturer James Hardie, “Killer Company” (HarperCollins, 2009), which is soon to become a dramatic mini-series.
Matt has contributed articles for a range of newspapers, magazines and books and is Adjunct Professor of Journalism with Sydney’s University of Technology (UTS).

Awarmists Admit No Recent Warming

Power Stations Cool the Planet*

China’s emissions,

awarmists say, are cooling

the globe on the whole.

It it obvious

what we must do for the Earth:

we should burn more coal.

*  see “Global warming lull down to China’s coal growth”, by the BBC’s Richard Black:

The lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 was mainly caused by a sharp rise in China’s coal use, a study suggests.  [...]
But the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that smog from the extra coal acted to mask greenhouse warming.  [...]
Although burning the coal produced more warming carbon dioxide, it also put more tiny sulphate aerosol particles into the atmosphere which cool the planet by reflecting solar energy back into space.

From what the awarmist aerosols say, there are only two conclusions from their latest concession: either there has been no warming forced by anthropogenic carbon dioxide for a decade, meaning (by their own terms) that coal-burning power stations are not responsible for global warming, wherefore they should not be scrapped by our Government or there was no warming for a decade because of emissions from power stations, meaning that coal-burning power stations prevent global warming, wherefore they should not be scrapped by our Government.  Either way, we have no need of a tax on carbon dioxide.  See also “Sic et Non:  Unsettled Science”.
All this doubt from the believers constitutes another example of what we might call the Gaia Paradox:  those (like the very silly Prof. Tim Flannery or many of the Greens) who believe most in the goddess Gaia—the planet as one, divine, living being—are the very people who assign to her the least power to look after herself.

UPDATE I:  See Luboš Motl’s “Did Chinese coal cause the cooling since 1998?” at The Reference Frame:

So [Kaufmann et al.] wrote a paper that explains everything.  And because crackpot papers that explain everything and indirectly confirm the consensus of ideologues and brainwashed simpletons are politically correct (especially if the authors are surfer dudes), this stuff was instantly published by Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, a journal that does [its] best to reject all papers from genuine scientists such as Richard Lindzen.

UPDATE II:  See as well “Global Warming?  Little Ice Age?  The Only Certainty Is that We’re Paying for the Hysteria of Our Politicians”, by Christopher Booker, in The Daily Mail:

Whatever happens now, whether it [be] hot or cold, whether we get heatwaves or record snowfalls, floods or droughts, sooner or later we hear those familiar little voices piping up to tell us that the blame for all these ‘extreme weather events’ still lies on ‘disruption’ to the climate caused by the sinful activities of mankind.

They’re all at it—from the environmental activists of Greenpeace, the WWF and their allies in the BBC and the Met Office, to those thousands of scientists across the world who have received billions in funding from governments investing in climate change research and prevention—all still battling to keep in being the greatest scare story in the history of the world.

The truth is that it becomes ever more obvious that none of them really has a clue as to what is responsible for the changes in our climate.  They can’t even tell us what global temperatures will be next month or next year, let alone what they will be in 100 years’ time, as they like to pretend their computer models can predict.†  But the really terrifying thing about all this is that our politicians have become so locked into the scare story that there is not yet the slightest sign they are prepared to notice the reality now crowding in on them on every side—that global warming is by no means a certainty.

†  this, unfortunately, is a fallacious but common argument.  Of one thousand healthy young people, for example, epidemiologists cannot guess with much likelihood of success which of them will die in the next year; but, with a fair degree of certainty, they can predict what proportion of the thousand will die from coronary disease and various cancers over the course of decades.  Climate models, so far, have been practically worthless, mainly because climate is chaotic and non-linear with far too many unknown variables; but the lack of predictive utility is not proven by their inability to make accurate short-term forecasts.

UPDATE III (8 July):  See Warren Meyer’s “Return of ‘the Plug’.”

UPDATE IV (18 July):

Or Maybe Not

Just out, a new paper
(from Not A Space Agency)
asks, “What would they know?”

Vernier et al.
write, “Don’t blame the Chinese, but
the odd volcano.”^‡

‡  I paraphrase.  See “New NASA paper contradicts Kaufmann et al., saying it’s volcanoes, not China Coal”, by Anthony Watts at WUWT.

“Why Carbon Is Innocent”

In “Why carbon is innocent”, Peter Ravenscroft summarises the case for exculpating carbon dioxide from the base accusations of defamatory misanthracists:

Consensus in the natural sciences is unavoidably a set of fashion statements, but anthropogenic greenhouse warming (AGW), one of the newer sets, is inspired nonsense.  Its foundation mythology is based, I contend, on a very poor grasp of basic chemistry, geology, geophysics, oceanography and logic.  Few of the current crop of climate scientists have any real familiarity with those vastly complex fields—not their fault, just reality—the field is too big for the human mind.  I do not claim to understand climate change either, just to have seen some of the problems and some possible alternatives.  [...]
Sure, the climate is changing, it always does, see the geological record.  This is the peak of an interglacial, merely one of the most unstable times in geological history, barring incoming large meteorites, gamma ray bursts and magnetic field reversals.  The geomagnetic field of this planet has declined by a third in the last 400 years, we have lowered water tables in many regions and we have cut down a large proportion of the Earth’s trees, one of the main continental air-conditioning systems.  Why would the climate not change?  It is likely that the continental surface and the lower atmosphere are warming and that we are in part responsible.  But there is no evidence whatever that anthropogenic greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are the cause of that climate change.  A vast amount of generally ignored satellite and other hard data now shows, very clearly, that our industrial and other carbon dioxide outputs are of minute importance in that change, if any and also that the far larger natural production of carbon dioxide (CO₂) is not occurring anywhere near where the planet is actually warming.  Other things, as yet unknown or little understood, are driving the change.  So apart from the important gain of getting people to conserve scarce resources, the war on carbon is a total waste of effort.
We do not yet remotely understand what caused the ice ages, the main climatic shifts in the last 2 million years, though geologists and others have been trying to do so seriously for over 200 years.  The more strident carbonists are incensed that geologists have the audacity to participate in this debate and to look skeptical about their views, but it is they who are the newcomers here.  The climate change debate started as an attempt to explain the ice ages and still requires them to be explained.  All carbonists are very welcome of course and maybe they will solve the puzzle, but they do seem a little time-shallow as yet.  Until we understand what drives the ice ages, we will not understand climate change.
The main problem for the AGW model is that where real surface warming happening geographically does not remotely match where humans are generating CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.  Or for that matter, where nature is generating far vaster anomalous amounts of CO₂ either.  Since trace gases disperse in the atmosphere, an inescapable consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, AGW requires the atmospheric heating it postulates to happen above and just downwind of the sources of the gas.  The real pattern is complex and it shifts by the week, but the most intense surface warming on average is in eastern Siberia, in and around the Antarctic Peninsula and in the Congo-Angola region, three places with about the lowest concentrations of both human-generated and naturally- generated CO₂ on the planet.

Download “Why carbon is innocent” (a PDF of 1.2 MB).  (Thanks to Climate Realists.)