Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Who's that behind the comment?


Awhile back, I commented on one of the great debunkings; when Bob Carter of "the globe has been cooling off for 10 years" fame teamed up with John McLean and Chris DeFreitas (editor at the heart of the Van Storch editorial controversy) to write a paper that got widely touted as yet another "nail in the coffin" of global warming, when it was nothing of the sort.

McLean, DeFreitas, Carter paper update


Well, a team put together a response, and rebutted it well. It's written up here:

McLean debunked at last

which has a link to the actual paper (preprint PDF).

What really got me (and many others) about this paper was what Bob Carter said about it:

“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century.”

and he also said this:

“The close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions. The available data indicate that future global temperatures will continue to change primarily in response to ENSO cycling, volcanic activity and solar changes.”

“Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, ETS (emission trading scheme) will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”

Comments like that got wide play on the erroneous side of the discussion (that's the side that claims global warming is a hoax/isn't happening/is a global conspiracy/ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.)

Is anyone on that side going to note that what was said at the time was a) erroneous, b) misleading, and c) dangerous to our collective human future?

I doubt it strongly.

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