Quote:
Originally Posted by echinosum
Indeed, so why don't you look at the science then? This emails controversy is only in a small corner affecting only an unclear argument about the natural variability in the climate. It doesn't even matter very much, the science doesn't rely on it. The science showing that CO2 warms the atmosphere goes back 150 years and is really very simple and well-established, before emails even existed, so it has nothing to do with the climate-gate emails. The climatic feedbacks are more complicated - but that's the argument about whether it will be 2 degrees or 6 degrees.
I don't really care whether you have been duped by some PR or not, I don't rest my argument on that point. I rest my argument on the well-established un-email-affected science, which you have not addressed. Once you get the hang of how CO2 warms the atmosphere (much in the same way as putting a jumper on warms you, in fact), and the magnitude of the effect, and how strongly established in science it is, it becomes apparent that "there is no AGW" is really a very extraordinary claim, it requires some rather amazing things to be true, that somehow the climate can cancel out the effect. |
The original argument was that the hockey stick proved AGW, that has now been discredited as being produced by cherry picking the data used so as to produce the required curve.
As for the E-Mails It's not what part they are about, it's what lengths they are prepared to go to to prevent anybody from checking their work, even to the illegal act of deleting data that has been requested under the FOI. If they are so afraid of having the worked checked then it's obviously been arrived at by dubious means, or massaged to give the results they want, and their willingness to debase science for political purposes.
Also The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change.
Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control.
William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, has stated that. “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a
doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.
Something like 80% of NOAA's weather reporting stations do not conform to the specifications laid down for them. mainly due to the proximity of building to the sensor units. As well as the change to digital sensors in the late 70's early 80's they changed over from whitewash to a white bitumen paint for the enclosures which has been demonstrated to raise the recorded temp. by about 0.25deg C, that in itself is half of the supposed dangerous rise in the average temperature, but there is no mention, that I've managed to find, that this has been taken into account.