In post #697 from Future Currents he shows the well known combination of ice core data and twentieth century Mauna Loa CO2 data. Let's leave aside the question of the corrections needed to be able to combine the core and Mauna Loa samples on the same chart, and assume these were done competently. The chart, because of the very long time it covers, shows Twentieth Century change in CO2 as a vertical line. Because the y-axis starts at 150 ppm instead of zero it appears that CO2 has doubled, it has actually only going up by 40%. It is only a trace component so small increase of 100 ppm is a large percentage increase. We can estimate how much CO2 we put into the air. Though the increase we observe is greater than this estimate, it seems likely that a good bit of this increase is due to Man made CO2.
What we want to know is not whether we are putting CO2 into the air, we are of course, but is the CO2 put into the air going to make our planet's temperature rise to dangerous levels. Unfortunately the chart can't answer that question. And even more unfortunate than that, neither can any model developed so far.
^"Actually it is ONLY going up by 40%" Well good thing that the earth's most important greenhouse gas has ONLY gone up by MERE 40%. That's hardly anything.
Do you know Bill Happer?
Over the course of their investigation, Greenpeace posed as the representative of a Middle Eastern oil and gas company and an Indonesian coal company. In the guise of a Beirut-based business consultant they asked William Happer , the Cyrus Fogg Brackett professor of physics at Princeton University, to write a report touting the benefits of rising carbon emissions, according to email exchanges between the professor and the fake company.
In both cases, the professors discussed ways to obscure the funding for the reports, at the request of the fake companies. In Happer’s case, the CO2 Coalition which was to receive the fee suggested he reach out to a secretive funding channel called Donors Trust, in response to a request from the fake Greenpeace entity to keep the source of funds secret. Not disclosing funding in this way is not unlawful under US law.
Also, in an email exchange with the fake business representative, Happer acknowledges that his report would probably not pass peer-review with a scientific journal – the gold-standard process for quality scientific publication whereby work is assessed by anonymous expert reviewers. “I could submit the article to a peer-reviewed journal, but that might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and to the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly as your client would also like,” he wrote.
He suggested an alternative process whereby the article could be passed around handpicked reviewers. “Purists might object that the process did not qualify as a peer review,” he said. “I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”
Greenpeace said its investigation demonstrated how, unbeknownst to the public, the fossil fuel industry could inject paid-for views about climate change into the international debate, confusing the public and blocking prospects for strong action to avoid dangerous warming.
“Our research reveals that professors at prestigious universities can be sponsored by foreign fossil fuel companies to write reports that sow doubt about climate change and that this sponsorship will then be kept secret,” said John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace UK. “Down the years, how many scientific reports that sowed public doubt on climate change were actually funded by oil, coal and gas companies? This investigation shows how they do it, now we need to know when and where they did it.”
Such practices are receiving greater scrutiny in academic circles after it emerged that Dr Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who rejects mainstream climate science, was financed almost entirely by fossil fuel companies and lobby groups and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers. The Smithsonian
launched an investigation.
In Happer’s case, the physicist declined any personal remuneration for his work but wanted his fee donated to the CO2 Coalition. Happer wrote in an email that his fee was $250 an hour and that it would require four days of work – a total of $8,000. “Depending on how extensive a document you have in mind, the time required or cost could be more or less, but I hope this gives you some idea of what I would expect if we were to proceed on some mutually agreeable course,” he wrote.
Greenpeace argues its investigation offered a rare glimpse into the practice of clandestine industry funding of reports casting doubts about the threat of climate change. The campaign group argues that obscuring funding in this way dupes the public into thinking the reports are produced by the scholars independently with no financial interests at stake.
Happer, who served as an energy adviser for former president George HW Bush, has long argued that rising carbon emissions are a net benefit for humanity.
He returned to the point in his email exchanges with the fake entity, saying: “The Paris climate talks are based on the premise that CO2 itself is a pollutant. This is completely false. More CO2 will benefit the world.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environm...e-exposes-sceptics-cast-doubt-climate-science
