Monthly Archives: February 2012

I say earth has been rangebound at 288 ± 0.5 K for as long as people have seriously been trying to measure it (say, since 1850). I further say the great fuss over graphed “anomalies” of a statistical monthly base ± 0.01 °C increments is obsessing over trivia – the earth warms about 4 °C from January to July and cools as much back to January each and every year. So what?

In the words of Nordhaus et al that would make me a “global warming skeptic” although I would call that a misstatement.

I will go on record as saying global warming is an annual fact – there’s absolutely no denying earth warms almost 4 °C every year (annual global cooling is a fact too, July to January every year).

What am I then, that I am so often in contention with warming worriers?

Well, I am highly skeptical of claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. I do calculations like this using the IPCC’s most alarming numbers only to find that all the CO₂ emissions from the United States’ entire coal-fired power generating fleet to end of century can only possibly add one-sixth of one degree at most to global mean temperature.

Do I care if the globe averages 288.15 K rather than 288 K in 90 years time? Not at all. It just doesn’t qualify as “catastrophic” to me, how about you?

It certainly does not justify crashing the global economy and radically disrupting the global energy supply when no human will be able to tell the difference without a sophisticated temperature sensing network and a great deal of number crunching.

So, CAGW skeptic? Yes I am, proudly so, in fact.

I’m also a PlayStation® climatology skeptic – climate models are process models helping us understand what we see, they are categorically not predictive models and have no known prognostic ability.

Global warming skeptic? Nah, this soggy ball of dirt and snow does that every year, fortunately – imagine how inhospitable it would become after just a couple of years of the July to January trend.

Nonetheless, here’s William D. Nordhaus telling you how wrong I and other skeptics are: Continue reading →