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:
The threat of climate change is an increasingly important environmental issue for the globe. Because the economic questions involved have received relatively little attention, I have been writing a nontechnical book for people who would like to see how market-based approaches could be used to formulate policy on climate change. When I showed an early draft to colleagues, their response was that I had left out the arguments of skeptics about climate change, and I accordingly addressed this at length.
But one of the difficulties I found in examining the views of climate skeptics is that they are scattered widely in blogs, talks, and pamphlets. Then, I saw an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2012, by a group of sixteen scientists, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” This is useful because it contains many of the standard criticisms in a succinct statement. The basic message of the article is that the globe is not warming, that dissident voices are being suppressed, and that delaying policies to slow climate change for fifty years will have no serious economic or environment consequences.
