Random Warming Walk

Item: On July 8th, Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, author of Heaven And Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science (2009), interviewed by James Delingpole in the Spectator (U.K.):

The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology.

I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.

I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.

Item: On July 13th, the abstract of a multi-author paper published in Nature Geoscience under the title "Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum warming" (footnotes omitted):

The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 Myr ago) represents a possible analogue for the future and thus may provide insight into climate system sensitivity and feedbacks. The key feature of this event is the release of a large mass of 13C-depleted carbon into the carbon reservoirs at the Earth's surface, although the source remains an open issue. Concurrently, global surface temperatures rose by 5-9 °C within a few thousand years. Here we use published palaeorecords of deep-sea carbonate dissolution, and stable carbon isotope composition, along with a carbon cycle model to constrain the initial carbon pulse to a magnitude of 3,000 Pg C or less, with an isotopic composition lighter than -50permil. As a result, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased during the main event by less than about 70% compared with pre-event levels. At accepted values for the climate sensitivity to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, this rise in CO2 can explain only between 1 and 3.5 °C of the warming inferred from proxy records. We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.

Item: On July 13th:


source: Icecap via Deroy Murdock



Item: On July 17th, Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004, appeared in an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune:

[Tripp] was the subject of is listed as one of 450 IPCC "lead authors" who reviewed reports from 800 contributing writers whose work in turn, was reviewed by more than 2,500 experts worldwide. (Tripp, a metallurgical engineer, is the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.)

At Thursday’s [Utah Farm Bureau] convention, Tripp found a receptive audience among the 250 people attending the conference. He said there is so much of a natural variability in weather it makes it difficult to come to a scientifically valid conclusion that global warming is man made. "It well may be, but we’re not scientifically there yet."

Tripp also criticized modeling schemes to evaluate global warming, but stopped short of commenting on climate modeling used by the IPCC, saying "I don’t have the expertise."

Item: On July 15th:


source: Doug Hoffman at The Resilient Earth

Hoffman also says:

The absorption frequencies of CO2 are already saturated, meaning that the atmosphere already captures close to 100% of the radiation at those frequencies. Consequently, as the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the rise in temperature for a given increase in CO2 becomes smaller. This sorely limits the amount of warming further increases in CO2 can engender.

Item: On July 17th, speaking in Shanghai, America's Secretary of Commerce was quoted in the Wall Street Journal:

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said something amazing--U.S. consumers should pay for part of Chinese greenhouse-gas emissions. From Reuters:

It’s important that those who consume the products being made all around the world to the benefit of America -- and it’s our own consumption activity that’s causing the emission of greenhouse gases, then quite frankly Americans need to pay for that.

Questions: On July 11th, asked by Australian Senator Stephen Fielding to Australian climate change minister Penny Wong, reprinted in the Telegraph (U.K.) (hyperlinks added):

How, since temperatures have been dropping, can [increased] CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?

(via James Lewis at Pajamas Media, Watts Up With That?, Reuters)