Timothy Birdnow

Been a while since I did an Arguing with Idiots post but I got into it one a climate discussion board on Facebook and thought it worth reproducing here.

Here goes:

Rocky Rex

Total nonsense. In my case, I have a Physics degree (which included some geology as a side requirement), I taught science for years, and I wrote a few Earth Science textbooks for UK schools. I've read a great many climate science papers. So .......

The first scientific paper hinting at what we now call the greenhouse effect was published in 1824. An experiment showing CO2 was a key greenhouse gas was demonstrated at a scientific event by Mrs Eunice Foote in 1856.

Svante Arrhenius published the first calculation of global warming from human emissions of CO2 in 1897. He'd started off investigating how changes in CO2 could be connected to ice ages.

88 years ago an engineer, who had worked on this in his spare time, produced a key paper in climate science:

"The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature" - Callendar, 1938

This was the first confirmation of actual temperature change using a lot of data from a sizable number of recording stations.

Climate research comes from geology, geophysics, geochemistry, palaeontology, oceanography, atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric physics, meteorology, glaciology, etc etc etc.

Hundreds of thousands of scientific papers, over decade after decade, from research in dozens of countries, since the 19th century. It's not some fringe thing from a handful of scientists.

The current scientific understanding of climate change is accepted by every professional association of research scientists on Earth - in every field of science. Over 200 academies.

These associations represent the global scientific community of around 9 million research scientists. For example..... . The Geological Society of London (the UK's expert association of professional geologists since 1807) says:

" ....the current speed of human-induced CO2 change and warming is nearly without precedent in the entire geological record, with the only known exception being the instantaneous, meteorite-induced event that caused the extinction of non-bird-like dinosaurs 66 million years ago"

The quote is from para 1 of this report........ https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/.../Geological%20Society%20of...

I reply:

Rocky Rex and all those orgnizations receive funding from the federal government, or from NGO's and universities all of which have a vested interest in this. Yes, it's a theory that goes back to Arrheneius, but that doesn't mean it's true. Geocentrism went back into the time of the ancient Greeks too and was finally overturned in the Middle Ages. The fact of the matter is there are plenty of papers and alternative explanations for the warming. The drop in planetary albedo, for instance, explains much of the warming. So does land use changes and the urban heat island effect. IF you are an honest researcher and are who you claim to be you know the argument is far more complex than the simplistic case made by the warmists. That you won't admit that suggests you are either a fraud or a partisan unwilling to look at alternative theories.

Some readers didn't like that reply:

Steve Snider

Tim Birdnow Easy to cast shade, but harder to post proof. Got any....proof?

Tim

Read the climategate e-mails if you want some proof. Look up the real genesis of this movement (it began as GLOBAL COOLING and the same people switched gears immediately when it was obvious the Earth was warming and not cooling). Proof is easy to come by if you bother to look.

Steve Snider

Tim Birdnow Not how it works. If you make a claim, it's only rational for you to back it up.

Incidentally, the 'climategate' nonsense was nearly 10 years ago, and yes, I did read it. Long, boring, and context matters.

There was NEVER a consensus on global cooling. I actually read the Time and Newsweek magazines at the time, and:

They were NOT from scientists who studied the environment;

They were NOT published in scientific journals;

They were quickly debunked by actual scientists.

You are correct that evidence is available, but actual science is a continual study.

I reply:

Steve Snider First it is you and yours who are making the extraordinary claims and demanding we change our entire society and way of life so it is up to YOU to prove your claim, not me mine. And I did provide you with the proof; we know that there was and remains a cabal of people in authority in these agencies who are pushing this and they abuse anyone who doesn't conform. Google Joanna Simpson; she was the first female climatologist at NASA. She said after she retired that she feared coming out as a skeptic because she knew she'd lose her job. Look at Judith Curry. For that matter look at what was done to Roy Spencer, a lukewarmer as opposed to a skeptic. They drove him out of NASA. Spencer then published a paper that disagreed with the alarmist view at Remote Sensing and your oh-so-principled champions went after the journal editor, forcing him to spike the paper and quit his job, solely because he published a peer reviewed paper that disagreed with some points of the dominant view.

I don't care if the Climategate e-mails were ten years ago or not; the same people are there, or their hand-picked successors.

And if you read the Climategate e-mails you know you are lying. I've read them and they are not out of context and they are in fact extremely damaging to your cause. In fact what happened to Spencer was something they were strategizing well before it happened.

You guys are tampering with peer review, bullying journal editors, threatening young scientists with dismissal and being blackballed if they don't stand with the dominant theory, abusing anyone who dares challenge your intellectual godhood. But science isn't about consensus but about challenging the orthodoxy, and frankly your theory has more holes in it than swiss cheese. But you never address the actual science of it because it's against you. Where is the tropical tropospheric hot spot? Why hasn't the Earth's albedo increased? Why are islands growing more than they are shrinking? Why did we have not one but TWO pauses in temperature anomalies?

Of course most young scientists now have been raised with this as an article of faith and don't even consider the possibility that it is wrong, and if they do they know they would be destroying their careers if they said anything.

You guys are rather like the Catholic Church resisting Galileo "and yet it still moves".

This has been a generation-long War of the Worlds scare and little more. It could only have happened in our modern era with instant communications and the control of the dissemination of information by people who want to fundamentally transform human civilization. A hundred years ago this theory would have been considered and rejected as nothing but computer models that do not comport with reality.

BTW your claim that Global Cooling only came from a Newsweek article is total bullshit. https://www.researchgate.net/.../347966094_The_1970s...

I was around at that time and it went way beyond just a magazine article. I've seen lists of papers claiming we were entering a cooling phase, although you can't find them online anymore because they are an embarrassment to the authors as well as to you alarmists. A great many of the names who signed on with global warming were stumping for global cooling first. Their argument was that aerosols were leading to an increased planetary albedo and thus were going to trigger an ice age. Perpetual alarmists.

Obama's science adviser John Holdren was one such. https://www.masterresource.org/.../john-holdren-on.../ And we have things like this https://web.archive.org/.../name/CHILLING_POSSIBILITIES where Science News claims there was a consensus over global cooling. NASA endorsed this theory. https://realclimatescience.com/.../screenhunter_127-feb...

You guys lie about this or are simply ignorant, willfully so. The reality is it was a big deal. The only reason they didn't call a consensus was because they didn't have an agency whose purpose was to promote it aka the IPCC. That is why the IPCC was formed in the first place; they didn't want a repeat of the Global Cooling scare.

It was a nice try though.

end

We'll see if this guy comes back but I doubt it; he would have to do actual research and find a solid way to rebut me, which he is going to find hard to do. I've long noticed that the Gang Green changes the subect whenever you nail them, launching a new line of attack - like all liberals. They use sleight-of-hand to distract people from the subject at hand. It works too by and large. But not with me.

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