"He may be wrong, but that's true of all of us. His opinion on Global Warming is based on evidence and reason, not willful blindness."
You must have different definitions of evidence and reason to most people. Comments like...
"Global warming is hardly established; it's a conjecture (i.e., a notion of a research direction), not even a hypothesis at this point. Science requires the ability to falsify a hypothesis, and it's hard to imagine how one would definitively falsify notions of global warming on the timescale of a human lifetime. So global warming is hardly science at this point."
...are not reasoned, they are wrong. The same objection is raised against evolution, and it is wrong for the same reason. Scientific hypotheses do not have to predict the future to be tested, they have to predict the unknown. Developing your model against one set of data and using it to accurately predict another is validation of the hypothesis, anticipating an effect that is later observed is validation of the hypothesis. This incidentally, also answers another comment of his.
"computer models are great; look at the great visual effects they can produce now in movies. Conclusion: you can get whatever you want from a computer model, depending on what you put in."
That's reason is it? Computer models can produce dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, so Global Warming is hooey. Guess what, special effect guys can make fake dinosaur bones too, guess the world really is only 6000 years old. yes, climatologists tune climate models with known data, gee whizz, did you think they started with the cloud of gas and dust that collapsed to make the sun and continued from there? They also test those models by making them produce data they weren't tuned against and seeing how well they do. Great as movie effects are, I have never seen them produce anything other than what was put in.
"The critical point is whether any such change arises from man's actions. If one likens the composition of the atmosphere to the population of the US, CO2 would correspond to approximately 150,000 people (out of 300 million). Anthropogenic CO2 would correspond to about 4500 people (3% of 0.054% on a molar or partial pressure basis). Water vapor (which has a whacking great oscillator strength in the infrared and microwave regions) would correspond to about 5-10 million."
Wow, and from a professor of Chemistry too. Water vapor has an atmospheric residency of days, release a gigaton into the atmosphere and you get a week of global warming, CO2 has a residency of many tens of years. Water vapor is not a forcing, it's a feedback, it's residency is too short for it's level in the atmosphere to be anything other than predominantly based on temperature.
CO2 is (Holocene average) only about 350ppm in the atmosphere, but without that 350ppm, the Earth would be 30 degrees colder. Guevara's 150,000 are responsible for a hell of a lot of heat retention, but for some "reason" the anthropogenic 4500 are as innocent as lambs.
"A case in point: last year NOAA predicted a "very active" hurricane year, with four to six category 3 or higher storms, yada yada. Outcome: bupkis. Oops."
Prediction (2006): 12 to 15 named storms, 7 to 9 hurricanes and 3 to 4 major hurricanes.
Outcome (2006): 10 named storms, 5 hurricanes, 2 major hurricanes.
Prediction (2007): 13 to 17 named storms, 7 to 10 hurricanes and 3 to 5 major hurricanes.
Outcome (2007): 15 tropical storms, 6 hurricanes, and 2 major hurricanes.
"Here's the news: no one really believes in global warming. No one."
"Global warming advocacy is an opportunity for galloping narcissists to attract attention"
"Anthropogenic global warming is an exercise in psychology, not science."
"global warming is a fad. Nothing more."
The evidence, it overwhelms me.
The same, very old, arguments are on show here. It's the sun stupid, there's a 700 year lag, correlation isn't causation, computer models say what you tell 'em, even "global cooling" is trotted out for fuck's sake[*].
When we hear, yet again, that evolution breaks the second law, Darwin recanted on his deathbed, that tornadoes don't assemble 747s, or that mutations can't create information we groan and shake our heads, or point and laugh. Because these are cut-n-paste arguments used to prop up an a priori conclusion.
[* Jay "remembers" when global cooling was going to kill us all? Goody, perhaps he can post references to where climate scientists said this?]
