Friday, 2 January 2009

Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh

Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh, a Bailey Professor of Energy Conversion in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State University, who has published over 45 peer reviewed studies

List cites a freerepublic post that still has a copy of an original news article that is no longer available:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1422147/posts

It starts off badly with "man’s addition to the carbon-dioxide flux in the atmosphere, by fossil-fuel combustion, is essentially irrelevant"

Arguments Condensed:

Notes:

  • uses the phrase "so-called greenhouse gas". I see this phrase a lot. What does it mean? Are they casting their luck whether co2 is a greenhouse gas? Perhaps they are suggesting the possibility that "greenhouse gases" don't even exist. What is up with this frequently used phrase?
  • This author actually puts forward their own explaination for the warming: "And behind that again is the alternative warming concept, most generally known as the Arctic Ocean Model, which is considered by many to be the real driver for the temperature oscillations and has been for the last million years or so.".

Dr. Robert E. Davis

Dr. Robert E. Davis, a Professor at University of Virginia, a former UN
IPCC contributor and past president of the Association of American Geographers,
and past-chair of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on
Biometeorology and Aerobiology


List cites:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=051205D

Arguments Condensed:
  • Warm records are meaningless because the records are too short
  • Can't see global warming in last 150 years of PDO record...
  • PDO unreleated to global warming

Notes:

  • He says: "The unprecedented great Pacific climate shift of the late 1970s linked to global warming was, in fact, precedented and unrelated to global warming". I guess he's therfore ruling out the PDO as an explaination for the recent (post 70s) warming?

Alan Titchmarch

Horticulturalist Alan Titchmarch, a prominent naturalist who hosts the popular "The Nature of Britain" program on the BBC, received the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest award – the Victoria Medal of Honor – for outstanding services to horticulture.

Links to the following news article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/06/nosplit/bvtvtitchmarsh06.xml

edit: the correct spelling is Titchmarsh I believe.

Arguments condensed:

  • Climate's changed before
  • Why no warming during the industrial revolution?
  • We’ll lose some species, but we’ll gain others.
  • Accepts manmade global warming and acting on it.

Notes:

  • In the news article he says: "Why didn’t we have global warming during the Industrial Revolution? In those days you couldn’t have seen across the street for all the carbon emissions and the crap coming out of the chimneys."
  • Also says: "I’m sure we are contributing to global warming, and we must do all we can to reduce that"

Friday, 19 December 2008

Hans Schreuder

Analytical chemist Hans Schreuder who publishes the UK based website
ILoveMyCarbonDioxide.com


list cites said website:
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/about.html

Arguments condensed:
  • co2 concentration is small
  • the greenhouse effect doesn't exist
  • greenhouse effect violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics...

Notes:

  • This is amazingly crazy stuff. Is it just one big joke?
  • "Atmospheric "greenhouse forcing" does not warm the planet, never has and never will. In fact, the very idea that there is a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere is absurd."
  • Simply noting the "co2 concentration is small" argument doesn't pay justice to the extraordinary effort made in giving it, the amazing 173x2860 gif and all: http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/graph.html This and other effort on the site suggest it isn't a joke and the author is actually being serious.
  • Some arguments are given on these pages: http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/theory.html
  • http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/FAQ.html
  • http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/carbondioxide.html
  • links to "Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics" and "Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics", and says " I salute all scientists who agree with these papers and will gladly publicise all papers on this subject"...

mwhaha! it's FALSE I tells you!!11 (Quotes):

  • "The settled science that a greenhouse warms up due to re-radiated light (energy), as set out by Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), Arrhenius (1896), NASA (2008), et al., is false."
  • "Yet carbon dioxide’s re-radiation of infrared energy warming up planet earth is the preposterous theory hailed by not only the alarmists, but accepted and elaborated by most skeptics as well, with mathematical theorems that do little more than calculate the number of fairies that can dance on a pinhead."

Joseph Conklin

Meteorologist Joseph Conklin launched a skeptical website called Climatepolice.com

list cites:
http://climatepolice.wordpress.com/2007/08/10/global-warming-movement-falling-apart/

Arguments condensed

Notes

"This conclusion agrees with a previous study suggesting that no new warming has occurred (Lindzen, 2006) since 1998. It also agrees with a report (Gray, 2006) predicting that global temperatures will begin decreasing." link

Dr. Jeffrey A. Glassman

Applied Physicist and Engineer Dr. Jeffrey A. Glassman wrote an October 24, 2006
paper entitled "The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide."


list cites: http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html

Arguments Condensed

Notes:

Here is a quote from the "The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide":

"According to at least one report, climatologists are at a loss to
explain the source of the CO2:
Where did the carbon dioxide come from? “This is one of the grand
unsolved puzzles in climate research,” said Thomas Stocker, a climate modeler at
the Physics Institute of the University of Bern. Schoen [1999].

Moreover and to the contrary, climatologists dismiss the oceans as the source."

Here is the article with the Thomas Stocker quote. It continues:

“This is one of the grand unsolved puzzles in climate research,” said Thomas
Stocker, a climate modeler at the Physics Institute of the University of
Bern. "About 50% of the 80-ppm glacial-to-interglacial increase
can be explained by a change in the solubility of carbon dioxide.
Warmer ocean water carries less carbon dioxide than colder
water.
However, there are complicated biochemical processes in the ocean, such
as pH, the depth of the dissolution level for calcium carbonate, and the net primary
productivity of the marine carbon cycle that are also playing a role."


So the claim that "Moreover and to the contrary, climatologists dismiss the oceans as the source" doesn't seem justified.

The "Aquital" continues:

"Gavin A. Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, New York; and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York, New York.) and his blog group at RealClimate believe …
The oceans cannot be a source of carbon to the atmosphere, because we observe them to be a sink of carbon from the atmosphere."

This article is titled How much of the recent CO2 increase is due to human activities?

I have emphaised the word "recent". The article is pointing out that recent co2 rise cannot be due to an ocean source, not that the oceans weren't a source of co2 during glacial warming periods.

There's a whole mess of confusion after that where the "Aquital" makes the same mistake between different statements from the IPCC.

It gets worse, I'll probably come back to this one there are probably quite a few arguments left to record.

Quotes:

"What they did next was revise their own embryonic global climate models, previously called GCMs, converting them into greenhouse gas, catastrophe models. The revised GCMs were less able to replicate global climate, but by manual adjustments could show manmade CO2 causing global warming within a few degrees and a fraction!"

"Back to Engelbeen, his first argument silently rests on the well-mixed hypothesis. His data appear to be Mauna Loa measurements, and not necessarily global data. The IPCC reports that investigators calibrated the other sites to match the Mauna Loa measurements. Mauna Loa as you suggest has influences of the volcano, but also of El NiƱo, and apparently the investigators calibrated or adjusted these effects out of their data. Meanwhile MLO sits in the wandering, variable plume of the Eastern Equatorial Pacific outgassing. And al the time, Earth is warming (an essential tenet to the AGW conjecture), causing the natural outgassing to increase (which the IPCC nowhere computes"

Frank Britton

Chemist Frank Britton rejected man-made climate fears in 2007.

list cites a news article, but the article seems to be gone:
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/opinions/ci_6489861

unable to find other references so far.

Arguments condensed
  • co2 concentration is small
  • Most co2 comes from ants and termites
  • co2 is not a "particularly effective" greenhouse gas
  • political conspiracy
  • scientific conspiracy
  • Humans have no measurable control over global temperatures

Notes

  • Think he's thinking of methane with the termites and ants argument.
  • The conspiracy arguments are that politicians and scientists know it's wrong but either for financial or ideological gain they push it nevertheless.

Quotes:

"Out of the wide spectrum of radiation received from the sun, CO2 only absorbs energy from
three very narrow levels"