Replies

In post 177, palmer follows suit with the stinging remark about my work, "Sure, his physics is weak". palmer owes everyone an explanation. His remark appears to be a parroting of Gavin Schmidt's unsupported accusation, which is fully rebutted on my blog.

Yes and no. I admit the remark was flippant and I should support it. But then I bashed the physics on both sides in this "debate". My comment was meant to be very general in that physicists tend to argue in static terms rather than be forced to model complex dynamic systems. Your own work, with all due respect, has the same weakness. You admit there is a complex ocean circulation that controls the uptake and release of CO2, you prove its existence, and you have strong arguments that it is the dominant flow of CO2. But you don't model it to show quantitative proof. Hence your arguments, while strong, are qualitative.

In the same way, as you state: "[i]n a stronger CO2 greenhouse climate it is hypothesized that the hydrologic cycle will intensify". Numerous physicists on the AGW side take this to mean warming will occur based on an average increase in water vapor. This is an unsupportable conclusion since an average water vapor can not be predicted or even measured. Anyone making a water vapor claim without making detailed models of weather is not going to obtain accurate quantitative results. To give one small example, tropical convection that is concentrated (localized) will produce negative feedback (a cooler climate) and weaker convection will warm the climate, all other things being equal. There is absolutely no way to determine cumulative feedback effect without models. Numerous claims are made to the contrary (e.g. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/08/climate-feedbacks/) but they are rather spurious and look like a lot of cherry picking of positive feedbacks while ignoring negative ones.

A quick note about this forum, it is political, not scientific, so expect a lot of quick flippant answers like mine and not a lot of deep analysis. But we appreciate you coming here and giving us yours. And one quick question: what do you think of (admittedly very crude) measurements showing rises in oceanic CO2 (e.g. http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ftp/cdiac140/cdiac140.pdf) table 8?

Thanks for your comments and replies.

You ask too much of The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide. That paper is not an attempt to model the climate, nor do I accept that doing so is my burden. Also my paper is far from qualitative. As you missed my “main point” in your post 177, (see post 171), my paper reveals for the first time an entirely quantitative relationship in the Vostok data between CO2 and temperature.

I submit to you that for a scientific model to advance from a conjecture to a hypothesis, it must fit all the data. This means that the GCMs produced by others, not me, must reproduce the response of at least natural CO2 to temperature, or the model is invalidated (falsified). How this can be accomplished by inserting a slug of CO2, as the AGW folks do, is far from evident. Among the consequences of my discovery is that the GCMs must treat CO2 just as it should water vapor: both must be “feedbacks” (as that word is used by climatologists).

Treating CO2 as a feedback upsets the isolated conclusions about forcings given by the IPCC in Climate Change 2001. See for example Figure 3, p. 8, Figure 9, p. 37, and the related discussion. That CO2 is a feedback appears to destroy the IPCC Report.

Please continue your explanation covering your new charge that my arguments are qualitative. Is it the consequences of the quantitative results, such as discussed in the preceding paragraphs?

I agree with your concern that water vapor is dominating. The increase in CO2 that is the basis of the AGW flap is negligible when water vapor is included. However I do not agree with you that “average water vapor can not be predicted or even measured.” The proof is trivial. The trick is to measure accurately enough so that the GCM has predictive power (to a layman, the prediction must be better than guesswork). Water vapor measurement is quite difficult, but we are making progress through satellites. Most likely, the measurement will ultimately be made by a proxy, such as cloud cover. Without measurement by proxy, even responsible climatologists would make no progress.

As to my appearance here, your moderator and host kindly brought me into the fray. I did not inject science here, but I’m happy to see the science spread. That is quite essential in the new political science of Global Warming. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a fraud.

I have not had an opportunity to review your citation about a rise in oceanic CO2. I wonder if that is CO2(aqueous) or a rise in total DIC? Since global warming is a fact, the oceans must be warming, and the amount of CO2(aqueous) should be decreasing according to the solubility relationship, all other things being equal. But as usual, all other things are never equal. ACO2 is accumulating, and it has to go somewhere.