Parade of tropes from an ex-journalist.
1) Dangers overblown and policies to remedy climate change doing more harm than good.
- What policies? Where? When? Nothing of significance is being done to cut CO2 emissions whatsoever and the empirical evidence (observations of annual increase) prove it.
2) Models are consistently wrong.
- Shyster BS. They address the primary energetics of the system. The processes they miss do not nullify the basic conclusions. No amount of dicking around with cloud albedo will save us. The atmosphere is grey even on Venus which has 100% cloud cover. As long as the atmosphere remains grey, CO2 will do its job of accumulating heat energy. The biggest failure of climate models has been lack of sophisticated representation of land and sea ice. And it is only recently that coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models are being used. This is due to the advent of faster computers so this clown's yapping about 30 years means jack.
3) Climate sensitivity is low.
- Oh my, so that means that we can spew as much CO2 as we please. What a retard/liar. Even if the sensitivity is taken as some ridiculous value, say 1 C/CO2 doubling, we still have enough warming to release CH4 from the cryosphere reservoirs. As I posted elsewhere, climate sensitivity is some contrived relation that cannot be derived from the underlying governing equations and means different things on different timescales and under different boundary conditions. We have radiative transfer calculations based on fundamental physics and laboratory data that tell us enough about what spewing CO2 does. Believing in magical mitigating factors that always act in concert to mitigate CO2 release is anti-scientific superstitious nonsense. There is clearly no constraint the ocean-atmosphere system that would impose such a balance. Enough empirical evidence and physics theory development has occurred for us to know this. So don't even try to hide behind model deficiencies. (As an example of the absurdity of this magical thinking, consider trying to impose processes in the climate GCMs that would act in this magical way. One can't even get started since it is like whacking a mole. If you try to offset a local temperature anomaly with enhanced albedo from clouds you get a cooling overshoot that drives a circulation that together with the cooling reduces the cloud formation in this region.)
4) Climate science "establishment" has a vested interest in alarm.
- Drivel for the ignorant. Atmospheric science post-doctoral fellows doing most of the research (professors are like supervisors and not the backbone of science work) can in no way be described as any sort of establishment. They are typically on soft money and have no job security. The whims of some fucktard Prime Minister as our previous dear leader in Canada, Harper, can rob them of their jobs and their futures but cutting off the research funding. An establishment by definition is financially secure and is able to control government policy to its own benefit. To claim that post-docs can do this is grotesque nonsense in the extreme. Politicians pay lip service to climate change if they believe in it. They call it a hoax if they do not believe in it. It is obvious that politicians are not bending to accommodate climate scientists at all. If climate science was an establishment the politicians would be dancing to its tune. So f*ck off, Ridley you lying sack of sh*t.
5) Global greening.
- This was the subject of my post on another thread. I have seen no evidence that the satellite products used to derive the alleged greening trend were calibrated by ground level studies. This includes accounting for changes in the optical depth of trace pollutants and aerosols. So this whole story is nowhere near finished and some seriously dicey modeling is done to leap form spectral measurements by orbiting instruments and actual physical changes at the surface. At the very least there should have been an attempt to correlate this data with precipitation trends since we know that vegetation is super-sensitive to rainfall. Precipitation trends are not frozen in perpetuity. We could be experiencing an initial surge of rain fall in the weak warming limit to be followed by drought when the warming crosses some amplitude threshold.
- The mid-latitude measurements are also misleading because vast swaths of formerly cleared for farming real estate has been left to overgrow with forest. This is true in Ontario and in Ukraine. Grassland to trees is a dramatic change in green pigmentation coverage.
Here I got tired of listening to this codswallop.