The Age is carrying a rather nice smack down of “Lord” Christopher Monckton, who is peddling his climate change denialist crap in Australia at the moment. An excerpt:
Monckton is a mathematician. Baloney. He has a Cambridge degree in Classics, ie Latin and Ancient Greek, and a diploma in journalism (whatever that means) from Cardiff. He can blather mathsy stuff in TV interviews, but that doesn’t mean he’s a mathematician. I know every song the Rolling Stones ever wrote, but that doesn’t make me Mick Jagger.
Monckton was a science adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Wrong. Thatcher has a science degree herself; she hardly needed a science adviser who didn’t. Monckton was hired in 1982 as a low-level drone in her policy unit, working on public housing and the like.
Read the rest at the Age. The cartoon is particularly nice.
Isn’t amazing how many ‘influential’ persons who don’t have Scientific qualifications are prepared to dive into subjects such as Climate Change which is extremely complex. It is undoubtedly occurring but too many non-entities are having their threepence worth.
I personally would like to hear a credible Scientific explanation of how the earth managed to cool, when all the fossil fuels of the past and present fomerly existed as atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Then of course we have the heating and cooling cycles through the millenia. I don’t believe for one minute that we can rely on the Scientific estimates of their chronology and durations to decide where we are at this momentous stage of our History.
My Mathematics has long faded into nothingness but I seem to remember that in all calculations such as those involved in the mathematics of climate change where errors are involved, the errors are cumulative. Would some erudite Mathematician please comment on what this might contribute to the climate change arguments.
As carbon was sequestered (oil, coal, limestone, etc) the greenhouse effect would be reduced, resulting in cooling temperatures until some equilibrium was reached between sequestration and release. At various times for various reasons that balance would be altered. The cause of the present rapid alteration is us.
What other sort of estimate should we use? Science, while imperfect, is still the only way we really have of knowing anything. The chronology and durations are well established within known error bounds.
Organic matter must be produced before anything can be sequestered. As an Organic Chemist I can only wonder how such Organic matter could have been produces under the accepted conditions which we reasonably presume existed in earth’s early History.
As for the cyclic hot and cold periods which we know existed but can not specifically relate to chronological periods; having emerged from an ice age, unless we know where we presently stand, we should at least question whether we have reached the top of the heating cycle. How much then does our emissions contribute to global warming ??
How did the organic matter get there? Plants, animals and chemical processes over 400+ million years (depending on which you are talking about), and we now release it far faster than it was put there or can be put there – thus increasing CO2 concentrations.
Yes, there are many factors involved in climate variability. The climate models take those various factors into account. Our CO2 emissions are an upwards trend. The usual variability is still there around that trend.
My question simply asks an unanswerable question . surely conditions were such that the organic matter sequestered could nt have been produced under the conditions we know existed and if the world is in a warming cycle, how much of the obvious warming taking place are we responsible for ??.
Actually what you’re putting forward is more an incoherent argument based on assertions without merit.
The formation of the organic matter (oil, gas, limestone) is well understood and is entirely plausible within the conditions and time frames we know are available. It’s also irrelevant to the fact we are releasing trapped carbon into the atmosphere where it is having an adverse effect.
As for the second part, yes, we are in a warming phase with a number of factors (some cyclical). Anthropogenic CO2 is definitely one such factor.
Oh… Putting PhD at the end of your name doesn’t stop you looking clueless.
Keep fighting the good fight against these dickheads Mike. You have a regular readership I can assure you!