National Post: Defending the Insensible

I think that this guy's real intended audience is the scientifically illiterate business reader. You know the type: mid to upper management, very little scientific education or knowledge of the scientific process; the type that those of us with a bit of scientific knowledge hate to work for, because they wouldn't recognize a rational fact based argument if it bit their nose off. They are aiming for this specific audience because these managers have decision making power within organizations.

[rant]What we should probably recognize that these desperate neoconservative denialists will never be convinced of the reality of the danger of climate change until it is far too late, and perhaps not even then. I would hypothesize that if we could transport some of them to the future to see the impacts of climate change, they still wouldn't admit their error because it isn't in their short term self interest. These people have always existed in society; the only difference is that in the past they weren't given the prestige that they seem to have today. I would be charitable if I called him a sycophantic courtier in the court of big money. Or if I wasn't charitable, I would say he is a small step up from a mafia minion. [/rant]

[rational argument]As with so many fallacy filled arguments, it takes more work to refute them than to make them. So let me address the 5% argument. Firstly, we can categorize two types of carbon: carbon that has been stored deep underground, nearly permanently sequestered from the atmosphere (e.g. oil, coal); and carbon that is either in the atmosphere or temporarily stored in a form that will be returned to the atmosphere by processes such as decay (e.g. trees). In the absence of humans, the main way that sequestered carbon could reenter the atmosphere was by volcanic eruption. The amount of carbon produced by volcanoes is actually quite small relative to human emissions. In other words, humans are the dominant source of new carbon to the atmospheric system.[/rational argument]

The bottom line is that the disciples of scoffing at climatology haven't heard the news. Red Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank based in Washington, has been a leading voice behind first denial of global warming, and later denial of any human involvement. Now he has changed his tone, and adapted to the evidence presented by real science. It seems that some of those that were convinced by CEI and its replicas haven't heard the call to retreat.

News article:

-quote- ... he ceded grudgingly: 'I am happy, for the purposes of this discussion, to accept all the scientific arguments behind their proposals.'


...Ebell insists that neither he nor his colleagues dispute the fact of global warming as they once did. 'We try to react to the scientific research that comes out -- and we've adjusted our political rhetoric as well,' he says. The new line goes something like this: sure, we'll accept that global warming is occurring and humans bear some responsibility, but it's hard to predict exactly how bad a warmer world will be.


...'We've had a flat global mean temperature since 1998,' he notes. 'So what are we worried about?' Ebell is cherry-picking here -- 1998 was an exceptionally hot year, thanks to El Nino, but global average temperatures have risen steadily since 1900.

Meanwhile, many global-warming sceptics are suffering the indignity of having to deny they were ever deniers in the first place. Take Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute. In 2004, Green wrote a paper with notorious climate-change denier Timothy Ball arguing that the scientific models used to predict global warming were 'of dubious merit'. Now he insists he accepts the IPCC's baseline conclusions and says of his relationship with Ball: 'The fact we haven't worked together since then suggests we don't agree.' Sounds like the heat is getting to him.

-end quote- The Australian. Science and Nature. April 10, 2007. Bradford Plumer

I assume that this CO2 accountant can use the internet to find CO2 measurements. There are tables and even graphs, to make it easier. So, he sees a rapid increase from below 300 parts per million (0.03%) to over 380 parts per million (0.038%, which he acknowledges as 0.4% in the article, and then says

"Carbon dioxide makes up just 0.04% of the entire atmosphere, and most of that -- at least 95% -- is naturally occurring (decaying plants, forest fires, volcanoes, releases from the oceans). At most, 5% of the carbon dioxide in the air comes from human sources such as power plants, cars, oilsands, etc."

So the human part of the jump this century of 25 to 30% is called "at most 5%?" Assuming he knows nothing about 14C or land clearing, is there another wild explanation for all the CO2 generated, perhaps by killer trees? He must be able to find out how low the volcano output is, ... unless the figure came from Tommy Lee Jones in Volcano, or Pierce Brosnan in Dante's Peak. If Crichton is considered a well-known scientist, then these are too, I guess.