carbon dioxide

Australian Big Coal has had the chutzpah to put up a video boasting of their contribution to the climate scam. At the start of the video they tell us what thirty pieces of silver are worth these days:

Here's how the scam (really) works:

As reported on CFACT, attendees to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico were fooled into signing a petition to ban water.

And, Oh Yes, also to reduce the U.S. GDP by 6%.

I have been asked, do I really think there is something 'religious' about all this. And my answer is Yes. But unlike many climate realists, I do not think this is limited to a few nutty eco-religionists. The "eco" part of it is just a subset - a big subset right now, for sure, but just a subset - of a malign influence in human affairs that goes back at least as far as the French revolution.

The idea, in a nutshell, is that "There must be a group to hate". From Robespierre to Marx, to Lenin and Stalin, to modern feminism and racial identity theory, this key, evil idea is resurrected after each failure and produces a new round of misery and death, but in the resurrection it comes with a new 'talking point'. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, economic and class warfare was exposed for the hateful nonsense it is, and freedom-loving people insisting on democracy and the right to own property. So the 'believers' quietly ceased talking economics and concentrated on their other irons in the fire: the evils of the male half of humanity, and on the evils of whites as compared with everyone else on Earth. Meanwhile they had dreamed up a new one: evil human industrial activity harming all the other living creatures.

From The Australian August 18:

THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate. ...

Kurt Lambeck, immediate past president of the academy and a professor at the Australian National University's research school of earth sciences, initiated work on the document to clear up common misconceptions. ...

He said the fundamental principles of climatology, such as the role of carbon dioxide in global warming, were beyond dispute. But scientists were still arguing about the complex Earth systems feedback mechanisms, such as the possible cooling effect of clouds.

"If temperatures go up, there is going to be more evaporation, and that will produce more clouds," Professor Lambeck said. "That could produce a negative feedback, but to quantify that is a very difficult thing.

"How do we put that cloud cover into the models? That's where uncertainty comes in, but that's not going to change the basic outcomes."

Really?

A change of just 1% in cloud cover would account for all of twentieth century warming (Plimer's Heaven and Earth p 112). (And that's the claimed warming, including the uncheckable 'adjustments' made by people who have now lost the raw data - but that's another question.)

Jeremy Grantham has put out a report claiming to be "everything you need to know about global warming in five minutes". Thank you Jeremy for summarising the global warming case so succinctly. It should make it much easier for readers to see where the truth lies. Here are my comments on your case, please feel free to post any response you wish.

1) The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, after at least several hundred thousand years of remaining within a constant range, started to rise with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It has increased by almost 40% and is rising each year. This is certain and straightforward.

True. It is also a fact, proved by literally hundreds of careful scientific experiments, and also by every operator of a commercial greenhouse, that almost every plant on Earth grows better—30% better for a 300ppm increase is a conservative average—with more CO2. There are six billion people on Earth, and the increase in CO2 you mention has fed about a billion of them with the same cropland under cultivation. I think you had something else in mind when you mentioned the CO2 increase, but it had better be really important if  you intend us to put it ahead of the lives of billions.

Two years ago, Wattsupwiththat demolished a crackpot story published on CBS (here and here). As stated in the second article, CBS wrongly attributed the story to Associated Press and then killed it without publishing a retraction.

At some time since, that story has been restored on the CBS site, and here is today's screenshot with a bit of surrounding material to prove the date of the screenshot:

In my last post I took apart the frivolous claim by scientists at the Hadley Centre, the University of Edinburgh, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, that global warming was increasing the salinity of the oceans. They claimed, remember, that they had 'studied' 100 scientific papers:

The panel assessed more than 100 recent peer-reviewed scientific papers and found that the overwhelming majority had detected clear evidence of human influence on the climate.

Apparently they forgot to 'study' this one by NASA's Earth Observatory: 

Researchers Link Ice Age Climate Change Records to Ocean Salinity

October 4, 2006

Sudden decreases in temperature over Greenland and tropical rainfall patterns during the last Ice Age have been linked for the first time to rapid changes in the salinity of the North Atlantic Ocean, according to research published Oct. 5, 2006, in the journal Nature. The results provide further evidence that ocean circulation and chemistry respond to changes in climate.

I attended the Brisbane leg of Lord Monckton's Australian tour last week. The Irish Club was packed. I tried to estimate capacity and got up to around 400, but as the talk started crowds poured in and a standing crowd filled the space between the seats and the back wall. While the crowd swelled, Lord Monckton took the opportunity to introduce himself to attendees.

This video from http://co2science.org. If you want solid evidence that cutting CO2 is an attack on the planet, their site is the best place I know of on the internet.