Clarifying and rebutting

This is in response to the Blog by Daniel MacIntyre A Friendly Discussion on Climate Change MacIntyre's quotes are indented and in colour.

Sorry, I'm going to have to call "Bullshit" on this one for a couple of reasons. First just a minor one about heat vs. radiation. The sun's surface is currently approximately 5780K. A cursory google readily provides us with a 4.5 billion year increase of 300K (science's best guess - they could, of course be wrong). This is an increase of about 5%. From the birth of the sun.

OK, that was sloppy language use on my part. I am trying to balance accuracy and accessibility and making mistakes as I do so. I should have said total solar irradiance (TSI) which is now about 30% greater than it was 4.5 billion years ago (and here). Taken from the "birth of the Sun" - "Very roughly, the total insolation change over the Sun's approximately 8 billion years on the main sequence will be from about 75% of current to about 135% of current."quoting Raimund Muscheler For the full explanation and range see his article.

However, he seems to also be suggesting that the increase is uniform. It's not. Scientists have shown that the sun's output changes in cycles. And we've been in a warm up phase.

Yes there are cycles, but those cycles occur against a background of steady increase as per the reference above.

It also has Earth's oceans boiling away several times afterward due to impacts from giant comets.

Totally boiled away? reference please ... particularly when

We had a decent number of ice ages since then - many of which have frozen or nearly frozen the earth's oceans solid.

The oceans were totally frozen? really? as with the comets, please provide geological dates and your reference please.

Of course multi-cellular life did not evolve until about 1.1 billion years ago and the early primitive prokaryotes and other life forms were pretty hardy, but even so the oceans totally boiling away in that time seems a bit extreme.

If we are looking at overall geological temperatures being colder in the ancient past, it could easily be postulated that average geological temperatures WERE colder back then.

No, they were hotter even though TSI was much lower. "In fact temperatures were probably very high, over 70 degrees C (158 degrees F), until some 2.7 billion years ago." Yes there were cycles, but again they occur against a background trend of cooling up until quite recently.

Today's climate is NOT based on a gradual, linear increase of solar radiation over 4 billion years.

Obviously, in fact the climate has been cooling despite that increase.

That would be equivalent to predicting tomorrows weather based on the trends from 50 million years ago.

Are you being deliberately obtuse or do you really not understand that there are overall long term trends as well as short term variation? For example, as I age my body is gradually but surely deteriorating even though during periods when I make an effort to exercise, eat well, etc. my general health improves. No matter how ardently I pursue good habits the background progressive deterioration will continue. The opposite occurs when I am ill, ie the short term rate of deterioration excedes the background rate.

If we choose to look at the time Dinosaurs came into being ... primary solar heating is negligible.

i) the point is the total change over time, not the incremental changes. For e.g. I can lose 100 ml of my blood and it will not affect me in any significant way. If I lose 100 ml/hr (about half a gallon/day) it will not be long before I am dead.

ii) "negligable" is contextual. On the scale of the Sun "negligable" can be huge from our perspective.

iii) the whole point was given within the context of your claim that the fact that Mars is warming was somehow evidence that anthropogenic climate change could not be a result of CO2 increases in the atmosphere. My response was that yes Mars is warming and has been all along because the the TSI is increasing, but over the same time (4 billion years) earth has been cooling.

My points stand and the incremental argument is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant.

This is a big sticking point with even mainstream climatologists. ... and never did - adequately predict cloud cover.

True up to a point. It is certainly true that cloud cover is one of the uncertainties involved in climate modeling hence the models all will offer a range of predictions based on different assumptions. Not simply predictions about cloud cover, but for other variables as well,. So this is covered by the models even if there is no precise prediction.

Note there is a difference between precise and accurate. To say that I will die some day is accurate, but not precise. To say that I died at 21:37:53 on Dec 12th 1924 is extremely precise, and completely inaccurate. Mr MacIntyre seems to be asking for precision, I favour accuracy.

Note also that a cloud cover density sufficient to compensate for climate change is enough to create a global catastrophe of a slightly different sort due to the collapse of the biosphere.

I was SO tempted to leave Hermann's "98% CO2" figure as it stood

As you should have ... Of course the original atmosphere was primarily helium and hydrogen, and the second atmosphere of about 4.5 billion years ago was almost completely CO2 just as Venus' current atmosphere is 96.5% CO2. As Venus never evolved life there has been no biosphere to remove the carbon.

(the actual temperature at the time we are looking at was 30K cooler - the difference between then and now is, of course, due to solar radiation increases).

As explained and documented above this is simply false.

Of course, The earth's primordial atmosphere was not likely 98% CO2. ... So how much CO2 WAS in the atmosphere? No one knows.

No one "knows" , but as explained and documented above we have a pretty good idea. Ninety eight? ninety six? ninety two? I'm not going to argue; anything remotely near the reasonable limits of uncertainty still supports my point.

The problem with this ... it has, in fact, been the other way around. Changes in temperature have historically led to increases in levels of carbon dioxide.

Why do you not reference any of your wild claims? Could it be that the reference for this particular piece of nonsense is actually the Sunday Telegraph oh, circa Nov 5th 2006? Either reference your claim with a valid scientific source, or acknowledge that is it total and utter, as you put it so nicely, "Bullshit".

Somehow Climate scientists have forgotten that correlation is NOT equivalent to causation and basic scientific principals like rigorous testing, the value of skepticism and the necessity of attempting to fully evaluate all alternatives until hard proof - not scientific consensus - removes all cause for doubt.

And what do you suppose caused this mysterious, simultaneous failure among scientists worldwide? Elvis? Aliens? A second shooter on the grassy knoll? A conspiracy of the Elders of Zion? The Illuminati?

Or could it be that they did not forget anything, that they pursued their work with all their usual standards and rigour in their research facilities all over the world, that there is no mysterious, coordinated failure?

Could it actually be that the problem is that a lone journalist with pretensions to competence publishing in a Fleet St tabloid might be wrong? Could that possibly be it?

Talk about "theories with problems" ... the "conspiracy of climatologists" beats anything I have heard yet.

On Skeptics and Deniers

Robert Mayer (comments section of this blog) raises the interesting question about the use of the term 'climate denier' to describe those who reject the evidence of climate change. His point is that it is disrespectful as it invokes the Holocaust deniers and one should use their preferred term 'skeptic'.

I in turn asked if he had made any objection to the frequent use of the term "believer" that the climate deniers use to refer to those who accept climate change. I hope he did, but regardless I think this is about both of these terms rather than one or the other.

First off, thanks to Mr Mayer as I had not thought this through very deeply, but once he raised it I asked myself when it is appropriate to use 'denier' and when to use 'skeptic' as they are near synonyms except i) a skeptic harbours doubts about what is true, whether the orthodoxy or some other concept, ii) for skeptic there is a sense of requiring strong or compelling evidence, and iii) in modernity 'denier' does evoke the Holocaust denier.

In looking at the definitions of both and various contexts in which they are used I would say that the term 'skeptic' is appropriate where there is reasoned and rational doubt, particularly when the doubter is not committed to any particular hypothesis, either the orthodoxy or another.

For example, while IQ tests are still widely used there is reasonable and rational doubt as to their efficacy or usefulness due to cultural biases, failure to recognize emotional intelligence, etc. Thus, while in a minority the doubters can reasonably be called skeptics as there is demonstrably rational and reasonable cause for their doubt.

A more interesting case involves religion, where the acceptance requires faith rather than relying on empirical, objective data, hence we use the term "believer".

Even though the acceptance is not necessarily reasonable or rational it is not therefore unreasonable or irrational to be religious because the whole construct of the divine unknown and the unknowable is that it does not necessarily manifest itself in ways that we can test or observe empirically. Thus a reasonable and rational person may be religious and is correctly known as a "believer"

Even so, it is possible to have reasonable and rational grounds for doubting a religion, and one who has such doubts may be called a skeptic. In this case there is no aspersion cast on either as one may reasonably and rationally be a believer, or one can have reasonable and rational cause to doubt i.e. be a skeptic.

In the religous example the skeptic is known as an agnostic while someone who is committed to denying the divine would be an atheist, ie a denier. The agnostic doubts, the atheist is certain, hence the difference.

We refer to those who reject the history of the Holocaust as 'deniers', why?

It would seem to me that it is because their doubt is neither reasonable nor rational. Their denial rests solely on their wish to believe that it was not so, on faith. In contrast to religious believers they rely on faith in a situation in which there is abundant empirical evidence and the framing of the whole notion of historical reality means that reason and rational thought are to be adduced from empirical evidence.

Given the staggering volume of empirical evidence that the Holocaust did indeed occur, and the absence of any credible evidence that it did not, it does not seem appropriate to legitimize these doubters with the perfectly honourable term 'skeptic'. Further, they are not in doubt about the Holocaust, they are firmly convinced that it did not occur. They are not skeptics, but rather champions of a competing, and in this instance absurd, hypothesis. Their use of faith as a reason for the rejection of the evidence without any competing reasonable or rational evidence for doubt quite justifiably earns them the title of 'deniers'.

It seems to me important that the basis of ones position is critical. If one accepts without evidence then one is a believer regardless of whether there is reasonable and rational evidence empirically supporting a hypothesis. Equally one is a denier if ones doubt is based solely on faith rather than on reasonable and rational doubt, particularly if one embraces a different hypothesis without doubt.

Turning to climate change, the label "believer" is clearly being used in an attempt to belittle those who accept climate change by suggesting there is no rational basis for their acceptance. There is in fact a staggering volume of empirical evidence for climate change.

This does not necessarily prove that climate change is "true", but nonetheless the evidence does exist, and further there are reasonable and rational reasons to accept it. As such to refer to those who accept it as "believers" is in fact a disrespectful slur.

As for the doubters, is their doubt based on reasonable and rational grounds? Or is it faith? and are they truly doubters? Or do they wholeheartedly embrace some other hypothesis?

While I can hardly claim to have done a comprehensive study of this group, everything I have seen of their "evidence" to date consists of misrepresentations, disingenuous and dishonest distortions of the evidence, egregious errors in logic, emotional appeals to embrace doubt because the consequences of acceptance are distasteful, caustic but nonetheless vacuous attacks on the empirical evidence, hypothesis' unsupported by any credible evidence or any evidence at all in many cases, and so on.

Further, they cannot really be called doubters as they champion the premise that there is no such thing as climate change, or that it is not anthropogenic. They are not skeptical, but rather zealots for a different hypothesis, in this case the orthodoxy of the old order, they are the rear guard for the old corrupt ideological regime.

There may well be reasonable and rational cause for doubt with respect to climate change. If and when I encounter individuals who substantiate their doubt with empirical evidence presented in a reasonable, rational, and honest fashion I will gladly and respectfully refer to them as skeptics.

I will continue to use 'denier' to refer to those who's doubt is based solely on an irrational and unreasonable faith, who zealously champion the premise that anthropogenic climate change is a fraud, and who not only do not require compelling evidence but actively reject it if it does not support their ideology .

As such I believe to date my use of the term 'denier' has been both fair and accurate.

Thanks for bringing this up, it has been interesting.

KAZ in Wonderland

Part 2 in my response to the Key-words blog:

MacIntyre posted the following: KAZ Kills Scientific American's "Global Warming Certainty..."

In response to this : Two More Pundits Whistle Past the Graveyard by John Rennie

Which was a response to this: Samuelson & The Nature Fallacy by Jonah Goldberg

Convoluted enough? OK, here we go ...

MacI * Let's start with the very tone ... arguments must be as terrifying as possible."

Maybe it amused the author to say this, but it's irrelevant.

MacI * Refusing to accept the example for the sake of argument: ... "

Rennie is quite clear in that he rejects the "what if" because it is meaningless and irrelevant to whether climate change is real or not. If MacIntyre feels he should have accepted it he has to show that it was in some way relevant.

That would be quite the rhetorical feat as Rennie is correct, the example is totally irrelevant, so MacIntyre wanders off into some even more irrelevant (if it were possible) comparisons to the Inquistion. As Alice said in Wonderland, "curiousor and curiousor."

Aside: It is fascinating how often the climate deniers cast themselves as Galilean heros oppressed by by a powerful, misguided old order. The irony is that actually they are the defenders of the old orthodoxy supported by the powerful corporate interests. At a different time it is they who would have called for Galileo's damnation for upsetting the old order.

Rennie: Specifically, in Goldberg's hypothetical world, if the global warming is purely natural, then it must be caused by solar activity, orbital perturbations or similar phenomena.

MacI * No. It could be from any number of other sources as yet undetermined, including a natural increase in CO2.

Actually Goldberg says "(i.e. from sunspots or some such)?", so Rennie is correct.

Rennie: Conversely, though, one of the following must also then be true about the huge quantities of CO2 that humans have introduced into the atmosphere.

The CO2 is simply not there (in which case industrial development in Goldberg's world is very different from that in ours).

Or the CO2 exists but does not have greenhouse effects (in which case the physics of Goldberg's world is very different from ours).

MacI: * Absolutely untrue, yet again. In fact, the pseudoscientific assumptions involved in this false dichotomy are pretty damning, as well. The natural system which has created a self-maintaining balance in the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, first of all, enforces its own level of CO2. It isn't some wild accident that we hit upon the level we already had, with the level changing wildly every time CO2 production changed throughout natural history. Instead, when CO2 production increases, its absorbtion into the ocean also increases. Water naturally aborbs CO2 and naturally expels O2. What's more, infinitesimal increases in CO2 presence in water cause the blue-green algae there to increase their activity, of course, which increases CO2 consumption.

The retort above takes NONE of that into account, as if we live in a zero sum game where all anthropogenic CO2 production increases must stay in the atmosphere and build up. That brings into question the basic knowledge of the author about the topic at hand.

Actually it brings into question MacIntyre's basic knowledge. The oceans absorb some of the CO2 if there is more added to the atmosphere, and releases some if CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. If you add CO2 or other greenhouse gasses to either the oceans or the atmosphere a portion of it will move to or remain in the atmosphere. Basic chemical equilibrium cf Grade 10 again.

Further, MacIntyre implies that the oceans are the principle regulator of historical CO2 levels. They have acted as a short term damper of wild perturbations, but the biosphere has been the principle agent removing carbon from the atmosphere and putting it into geological storage. Here again this is climate change 101 found in any introductory pamphlet.

However, MacIntyre does say "The natural system which has created a self-maintaining balance..." which is true. What he neglects to add is that those natural systems have been seriously degraded and no longer function at anywhere near the capacity they once did. Up until WWII only 6% of the world's forests had been destroyed, since it has risen to 1/3rd destroyed and a further 1/3rd seriously degraded. What remains is at serious risk from the twin assaults of continued human activity and climate change itself.

MacI: Not only do variations in CO2 production get damped naturally by the self-balancing nitrogen cycle, but the author also fails to address the possibility of variation within the cycle, itself. ANY kind of factor involved in the conversion of CO2 to O2 could be naturally changing, so that the balance level of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. If, for example, blue-green algae, which comprise nearly all of the important part of the cycle (rain forests, for example, consume more O2 than they produce, and create more CO2 than they consume) , could have some natural, long-term cycle of activity which is now on the decline, so that they would be striking a CO2 balance in the atmosphere that would increase even if humans didn't exist.

Here MacIntyre seems to conflate the oceans and the algae that inhabit them; sloppy to mix up biological and geophysical factors, but his comments about the capacity of the oceans to absorb CO2 makes slightly more sense in the light.

MacI: The levels of CO2 certainly have gone up and down in the past, before humans were part of the equasion.

No one claims they haven't, so what's your point? There have been any number of historical events such as meteor strikes and massive volcanic eruptions that disturbed the system and led to massive die offs ... that is part of the evidence we have for how catastrophic climate change can be.

Rennie: But if either of those is true, we humans have lost significant leverage on climate change. We can't change the sun's radiance or the Earth's orbit. Maybe we could throw more aerosols into the atmosphere to try to reflect away more solar radiation but we don't know much about how to calibrate the effects and there could be other environmental consequences of such an action that might be unwelcome

MacI: Wow...suddenly the author sounds almost like a scientist. A real scientist would say, of any claim that we can control the atmosphere and should take action to force its control, "this is a chaos system, and we don't have the science sufficient to make any more than the wildest guess at what effect our forced changes would have".

As with some of his points there is a half-truth lurking in there. We have a very clear idea of what our forced changes are doing to the atmosphere and real scientists acknowledge it - it's called climate change. The part that IS true is that we understand the system too poorly to have much idea of what the consequences of playing around with aerosols, cloud generation, and all the other Rube Goldberg schemes that techophiliacs are advocating. "More of what caused the problem" is never the solution.

MacI: And yet that's precisely what those claiming there is definitely anthropogenic climate change, and that we must violate the economic liberties of everyone in order to force eggs-in-one-basket "fixes" of it, are failing to do. They are claiming they CAN predict the effects of coerced change, and that they SHOULD take huge, active steps to "control" the atmosphere, as if they had the slightest idea of the consequences.

We have a very clear idea of the impact of reducing carbon emissions, it would slow, although not stop, climate change.

MacI: Indeed, perhaps our forced "environmental protections" up to now HAVE caused any increase in the global mean that is occurring. This would explain why it originated with surface temperatures, instead of oceanic and atmospheric temps as global warming would. Perhaps, as has been recently introduced into the climate discussion scientifically, our pollution was cooling the atmosphere via Global Dimming, and having forced cuts in "pollution" has caused an increase in the global mean.

It is true that in the short term dimming can mitigate the effects of CO2 increases, but it is disingenuous not to point out that in the medium term the dimming either ceases to be effective or must be so intense as to cause the collapse of natural systems, which in turn results in the collapse of the societies creating the pollutants supporting the dimming. At that point you get total social collapse AND climate change. Excuse me if I do not see that as desirable, or even remotely sane.

MacI: If we should consider forcing everyone to cut their society-beneficial increases in energy use "just in case", perhaps we should LIFT the economically damaging pollution controls which were imposed "just in case" in the past, which reduced the amount of head reflection in our atmosphere.

Why, one wonders, do all the solutions demanded happen to err on the side of socialist control of our choices? Why does the logic used suddenly flip on its head when the solution might INCREASE freedom instead of violate it?

Here is a fascinating case of reverse libertarianism. It is OK for one group to wreck everyones planet, but not OK for some to object. It's as if I go into a guys home and start stealing everything in sight, and then scream that he is infringing on my rights if he attempts in any way to stop me. He is interfering with my economic liberties!

Rennie: Not adjusting climate isn't really an option for us anymore; we're stuck with trying to moderate our influence and hope for the best.

MacI: If there's anything more arrogant...and ignorantly foolish...than glibly affecting the climate without thinking about it, that would be imagining we can intentionally do it and somehow make things better instead of worse.

So having discovered that beating your kids with iron rods is crippling them, it would be arrogant and foolish to stop? Rennie is not advocating more interference, he is explicitly calling for less. "Ignorantly foolish" should be reserved for suggesting that having learned that something is highly damaging you just keep doing it, as you are suggesting.

Rennie: Sullivan rushes for comfort into the arms of scientist skeptics like Richard Lindzen when he knows that Lindzen's position is very much at odds with the climatological consensus--the "objective, empirical judgment" he says we should heed.

MacI: Ah, but I know firsthand that it is NOT objective.

It is driven by Fear Equals Funding, which is an openly touted creedo in the halls of government-funded science.

When I was a consultant in DC, I had a friend who was head scientist on a major environmental project, one key to "proving" that global warming and ozone depletion were as you would claim.

Science does not "prove" anything, it merely gathers and interprets data, formulates hypothesis and then seeks to disprove them.

Ironically, HE did not believe in anthropogenic global warming, nor in most of the nonsense around ozone depletion. He said, in fact, that his project's results were invariably disproving them.

Yet the published results of his project either supported, or were neutral to, those two issues. Why? Because he said that if he did NOT massage the data to protect global warming and ozone depletion, he could not get the paper past peer review, no matter how sound his methodology. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" translates to "if you claim something that we don't like, we will pick it apart in any way possible, whereas if you want to publish something which supports our beliefs, we will simply make sure there are no gaping issues". Peer review becomes, as one would think it must naturally in a coercive system, a tool of censorship and agenda-control.

If true, then this was clearly wrong. Since you do not give details it is not possible to assess, but it may have happened. However I know from personal experience that you reject all kinds of crap science based on methodology and the author always claims it is because they broke from orthodoxy.

However, I can't help but feel there something odd here. It seems to me that it is surprising that at least some of the scientists you allege have not gone to the media with their experience. After all, there is both a number of ideologically motivated journalists eager to discredit climate change (see those cited at key-words blog for a partial list) and significant cash rewards for doing so (see links below). So why have none come forward with their tale of oppression? or if they have, why have the media so eager to discredit climate change not published their story?

And of course we now know that there has been massive, chronic interfernce in scientific work in an attempt by the Bush administration to suppress evidence of climate change.

I have to wonder how many OTHER scientists out there in the 700+ papers famously agreeing on global warming were written by people who simply didn't want their project punished for the real results. Certainly the pretense that it was 900+ papers in a row without a SINGLE one published against is bogus, as at least a whole series in the middle of it...those of his government project...would have been against, ruining the (already inevitably symptomatic of some censorship problem) perfection of the record.

So you would suspect a series of papers that all supported gravity because such a run is not believable? As noted, we only have your say so as to your friends competence. It may or may not be so.

Rennie: The irony of Sullivan stretching for scientific justification is that he himself draws a parallel with the the Iran "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco but doesn't take the lesson. Matt Stoller has had the pithiest response to that:

MacI: The retorts to this ignore the REAL parallel, the methodological and rational ones which do not require such a laughable appeal to authority as "our funding-driven, suspiciously PERFECT consensus is superior to your government-driven opposition":

I think you mean "government driven fixing of the results". See the above link - the interference with science has been overwhelmingly by the Bush administration to suppress evidence of climate change. Is there any chance that your friend was part of an agency that had the courage to not give in to the pressure.

MacI: Real logic NEVER says "we will ASSume this is true because of the scaryness of the outcome". That's neither scientific nor rational. The public sheep are more likely to assume you guilty in proportion to the seriousness of the accusation.

And where did you get that from? please cite who is saying this and where they say it.

An accused child molester, if he is hithero unknown to the public, is presumed guilty and subject to lynching-style outcry.

The Bush League, likewise, argued "IF Iraq had WMD, and IF they gave them to their mortal enemies in Al Qaeda, and IF Al Qaeda somehow got them into the states, then this would be horrible, therefore we must attack"

They banked on fear to overcome our correct opposition to coercion and any weighing of the odds.

Ahhh, you weren't talking about climate change. OK, I agree with you on this point, although it has nothing to do with the topic.

MacI: Scientists aren't supposed to be like that.

And yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

And yet, because our "scientific" community is driven by fund-questing more corrupting that profit motive, this kind of "it sounds so bad that we should violate people in order to give my project power" has become the standard means of acheiving success in many scientific fields.

Again ironic that you suggest that scientists supported climate change because they could get more funding that way, when in fact the exact opposite has been the case. The Bush administration has tried to support anything that questions climate change either directly or through foundations such as the American Enterprise Institute, and the oil industry has been throwing money hand over fist at anyone who will attack climate change. Apparently 30 pieces of silver now translates to $10,000 US. (Brits got a better deal, 10,000 pounds).

To their credit most scientists balked at prostituting themselves like this, except for a tiny handful of hacks who prefer to be referred to as "skeptics".

When I was consulting for NOAA, I asked one of the actual organization executives why their website on El Nino focused solely on its ostensible negative effects, ignoring completely the NET result of El Nino, which is lower property damage and life loss in the US (because it actually produces milder winters, here). His response was, literally, "Yeah, but you can't justify your budget by telling people something WON'T hurt them".

Likewise during my time with NASA, I was given exactly that explanation for the "impending asteroid impact" spin. It was necessary for funding, though of course everyone there knows it's so laughably unlikely that we should be more worried about bigfoot (a comparison seriously made).

I regularly heard actual scientists (and others working on their projects) in DC say "Fear Equals Funding". This is their creedo.

Sad if true. It was certainly not my experience in either the University system or working for a different government.

You can no more trust a publically funded scientist saying what will bring him the most money than you can trust a tobacco scientist with exactly the same motive.

Again the irony that it is the climate deniers who have been funded by both the oil industry and the Bush Administration. Your point is correct, you've just got the wrong group.

--
Words of the Sentient:

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. -- William Burroughs

And how is the world that I and my children must inhabit not my business? It, more than anything else, is my primary responsibility and business.

Anyway, in sum: as with the previous article there is nothing offered here that in any way contradicts or refutes climate change. There is mention of one anecdote that would be an unfortunate corruption of the scientific process, if true, but that hardly constitutes evidence.

For the most part this whole "KAZ" piece is a rant against the corruption of science, but which mistakenly assumes that the climate deniers are the downtrodden, when in fact it is they who have been corrupt and corrupted.

On the Holy Order of Climatedeniers

This is a partial response to a series of articles by climate change deniers.

This piece responds to the first point at Mr MacIntyre's blog which links an earlier post of his .

"Climate Change on Mars"

Let's begin by noting that since this is based on a media piece it is not possible to tell whether the egregious errors and misrepresentations are the fault of the journalist, the interviewee, or both.

Frankly this piece is so bad that it is difficult to imagine that it is supposed to be serious. There are numerous articles in The Onion with greater credibility and scientific rigour than this. Apparently it really was published though, in The National Post at http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=edae9952-3c3e-47ba-913f-7359a5c7f723&k=0 .

The big "reveal" in this piece, the "gotcha", is that Mars is warming, probably because "he sun's increased irradiance over the last century". Actually the sun has been getting steadily hotter over the 5 billion years of Earths existence and is now about 25% hotter than it was when life first evolved on Earth.

Well duh, that's like what? grade 10 physics class? Granted most of us slept through those classes, but even so, as "new information" it ranks right up there with learning that Paris Hilton is female.

I'll reiterate the basics. The sun has been getting hotter for billions of years, yet the Earth has not. The Earths atmosphere back then was 98% CO2, and if it was still so the Earths' surface temperature would be something like 100 C, somewhere between Venus and Mars.

The Earth has not been getting hotter because the biosphere, the living Earth, has been removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Over epochs huge amounts of carbon has been stored geologically as limestone, oil, coal, etc. So much in fact that the atmospheric concentration dropped to as low as 200 ppm.

It's all at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change or any basic "introduction to climate change" site or pamphlet.

Aside: why did the original author say "sun's increased irradiance over the last century" when in fact the sun has been getting hotter for billions of years? Probable answer: if the sun has been getting progressively hotter then this simplistic model predicts that the earth should have been getting progressively hotter over the same period, and of course it has not.

Following up on this I find that apparently what he is saying is that "but from an unusually high level of solar radiation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus , but even that does still not account for the fact that earth has not been progressively warming up for the past 5 billion years.

Simply being accurate and honest in presenting the model would have destroyed its credibiltiy, so the author apparently choose not to.

Mr MacIntyre notes: "which of course suggests that either we are causing the martian warming or some other factor is affecting both". Of course the primary source of all warming in the solar system is the sun; no one is suggesting that the CO2 itself is generating the heat. CO2 traps the suns heat, more CO2 leads to more trapping, but CO2 has never been suggested as the source of the heat.

This is all very basic and I am a little surprised that Mr McIntyre does not seem to know it. Perhaps it is not common knowledge to everyone on the street, but an inexcusable lapse in someone who presents himself as a credible critic of climate change.

The interview quotes Dr. Abdussamatov as saying "Ascribing 'greenhouse' effect properties to the Earth's atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated,". Interesting, and wholly false, but that is the advantage of a media interview vs publishing in a scientific journal.

If Dr Abdussamatov is able to demonstrate this he should publish immediately and give his basis for the statement. As no evidence or reasoning is presented in the interview it is not possible to refute it other than point to the massive volume of work that does substantiate it.

Now things get kind of scary and I confess to being confused as it just does not seem possible that anyone with any scientific credential could possibly make the statements attributed to Abdussamatov. Is he misquoted? translation problems? there is no way to know.

Regardless, he is alleged to have said "Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere only to give the absorbed heat away." ... and this is a scientist?

1) If the atmosphere actually acted this way then the earth would have a uniform cool temperature at ground level and progressively hotter as you increased elevation, like at mountain tops.

2) Who is suggesting that the mechanism for climate change is that the CO2 itself acts as a heat carrier? Since no one with any credibility (to my knowledge) has ever suggested it, his alleged debunking of it is totally irrelevant.

3) Am I really being asked to believe that an authority on solar radience does not understand that we are talking about trapping infrared radiative heat and not warm CO2 floating about?

This defies logic and I have to assume there is a gross misrepresentation of Abdussamatov. He may be wrong when commenting outside of his field, but I assume he is at least minimally competent with respect to his particular area of research.

The fact remains that this makes it difficult to comment on the rest of what Abdussamatov has to say. If he does not seem to understand the most basic mechanisms of climatic homeostasis how can we take his projections on global climate seriously?

He is alleged to predict a period of global cooling, and it is certainly true that climate change predicts that some regions of the earth will initially cool as the earths climate is disrupted. For example, it is expected that northern Europe will initially cool as melt from Greenland interferes with thermohaline circulation and hence disrupts the Gulf Stream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream#The_effect_of_global_warming .

Aside: It is interesting to note that the media seems incapable of presenting a piece in support of climate change without having the requisite "journalistic balance" by also interviewing a climate change denier. However, the Post seems to have been comfortable presenting this story without any attempt at balance by interviewing someone with actual expertise on the subject. An unfortunate decision as it might have spared them publishing this rather embarassing piece.

Aside: The problems with the Post article are so basic that anyone with minimal scientific training should be able to shred it. As Mr MacIntyre apparently has BS in Physics I am frankly surprised that he chose to include it on his site. By apparently accepting this as credible I cannot help but think it undermines anything else he might have to say.

Regardless, none of the actual information presented in this article is inconsistent with climate change and as a refutation it scores zero; it is disinegenuous, misguided, and irrelevant.

More to follow ...