Are your two comments factual or opinion? Can you provide links to specifically show that your refutations of the article have substance?
Ok, so why tax us Dwayne? Why tax something that won't make a lick of difference to global temperatures, Dwayne? If the warming (and cooling) isn't caused by human activity, then WHY TAX US? Why further impoverish the vast majority? Why enrich a few? The earth's climate is cyclical. Always has been, and always will be. There's no positive feedback loop. There's no hotspot in the troposphere. Its carbon dioxide, not carbon. Its been hotter with less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than present times. Its been cooler with more carbon dioxide. WHY WHY WHY DWAYNE?
Hold on a bit - I don't remember ever even mentioning the word tax. I was simply responding to some ridiculous statements about the science that I couldn't let stand without challenge (and will eventually get around to providing references for, but I'm feeling far too lazy right at the moment to do anything serious). Of course there is a positive feedback loop though, care to provide a reference for that particular statement? And yes, it's carbon dioxide, not carbon that's the issue. I just couldn't be bothered at the time responding to all of the incorrect statements. Volcanic ash is a very different beast to carbon dioxide as far as climate goes. Ash will fall out of the sky in a relatively short timeframe and actually provides a cooling effect not warming, whereas carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a much longer time and has a warming effect.
Ok, firstly, earth's climate is cyclical. I think that is accepted by all, no? Secondly, the climate alarmists strongly believe that man-made carbon dioxide (used interchangably but incorrectly, with carbon) is the cause. Thirdly, by taxing emissions, alarmists believe they can stop or reverse global warming. Or is it climate change? Or global climate disruption? Anyway, four points matter. Pure and simple. 1. The greenhouse signature is missing. Weather balloons have scanned the skies for years but can find no sign of the telltale "hot- spot" warming pattern that greenhouse gases would leave. There's not even a hint. Something else caused the warming. 2. The strongest evidence was the ice cores, but newer, more detailed, data turned the theory inside out. Instead of carbon pushing up temperatures, for the last half-a-million years temperatures have gone up before carbon dioxide levels. On average 800 years before. This totally threw what we thought was cause-and-effect out the window. Something else caused the warming. 3. Temperatures are not rising. Satellites circling the planet twice a day show that the world has not warmed since 2001. How many more years of NO global warming will it take? While temperatures have been flat, CO2 has been rising, BUT something else has changed the trend. The computer models don't know what it is. 4. Carbon dioxide is already doing almost all the warming it can do. Adding twice the CO2 doesn't make twice the difference. The first CO2 molecules did a lot, but extra ones have less and less effect. In fact, carbon dioxide levels were ten times as high in the past but the world still slipped into an ice age. Carbon dioxide today is a bit-part player. References: 1. Sources: (A) Predicted changes 1958-1999. Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1, 2006, CCSP, Chapter 1, p 25, based on Santer et al. 2000; (B) Same document, recorded change/decade, Hadley Centre weather balloons 1979-1999, p. 116 , fig. 5.7E, from Thorne et al., 2005.For an accessible account of the whole issue: http://www.sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf 2. Source: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center http://cdiac.ornl.gov 3. Sources: Mauna Loa; GISS; UAH. Temperature variation is measured from the 1979 average. 4. Source: Lindzen and Choi 2009. Thanks to JoNova. I need a drink. If this is going to start into a debate on the merits of the 'science' behind climate change, then god help us. I'm all for limiting our impact on the environment. What I'm against; as a scientist, a doctor, a father, and human; is the idea that limiting carbon dioxide emissions, and/or charging those who emit, will cool the globe or cease warming. This is a blatant money grab. A scam. Silver up near $US41.... nice... Have a great rest of your weekend Dwayne.
I guess that depends on what you mean by cyclical. That is can change and has changed in the past? Of course. That it necessarily oscillates between 2 or more states? I'm not so sure about that. Agreed. I would nitpick over your use of the term alarmist, but I don't really care that much about it. Sticks and stones and all that. Uhhh, no. I think you'll find that most climate change proponents believe that global warming is a risk, and the sensible thing to do to avoid the risk is to lower CO2 emissions to the point where they can be handled by the natural processes and hence stabilise and reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Taxing emissions is one possible policy response to achieve those ends, government imposed regulations are another, an ETS another, and doing nothing yet another (though the likelihood of this particular policy achieving the result is vanishingly small). Personally I don't give a crap what the term is - politics is all about framing the issue and marketing these days - on both sides, but "a rose by any other name" etc. The bottom line is that it's talking about an increase in average global temperatures. This claim has been hotly disputed. For example, see this article. http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/08/10/dr-david-evans-born-again-alarmist/ I'll freely admit that past temperature variations have not been caused by CO2. They are believed to have been caused by milankovich cycles - variations in the earth's orbit which trigger a slow warming which then causes CO2 levels to rise and amplify the warming in a positive feedback. CO2 levels seem to account for the vast majority of the temperature rise even though they didn't trigger the initial change. It is also interesting to note that the warming was a slow process that lasted thousands of years - nothing like the short timescale we are talking about for the current warming. see also http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/ Initial interpretation of the satellite data showed cooling over recent years (note that satellite data only goes back to about 1979 or 1980, can't remember which right now), however that interpretation failed to correct for decaying satellite orbits and have been shown to be incorrect by more recent papers. The most current data sets show warming in line with the climate models. see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/et-tu-lt/ It is true that absorption is basically insensitive to CO2 levels (because it is overwhelmed by water vapour) in part of the spectrum, however not all. In other parts of the spectrum CO2 can still make a difference, and it doesn't take a massive change to trigger changes in temperature. see this article for a good discussion of the issue https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2010/1/carbon-dioxide-and-the-climate/1 As for the world slipping into an ice age in the past, you'll also notice that CO2 levels dropped with the temperature and that these cooling periods took up to 100,000 years... Always do - likewise Edit to add: Funny you should talk about JoNova, and your point 1 was (from memory) from David Evans who was quoted on JoNova a few days ago as having said "Let's be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much." Which is it? Your man from point 1 seems to contradict your point 4...
Take a look at the scale on the image on that page and you'll notice 0 degrees is an orangey colour rather than neutral green. Hey presto, hotspot!
