I got Roy Spencer going about the absorptive and radiative characteristics of carbon dioxide.
Naturally, Roy decided it important to lay down some stuff about some other arguments from our side that are not based on good science.
Criticism of a well-funded fanatic movement like warmer crazies must always founded in a good understanding of the physics.
Thanks Roy. I do believe it important to know how things are.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
spencer and i are just colleagues of a sort–he is saaaamart, and i am dddduuuumb.
is that a relationship?
Did you leave this observation on Dr. Spenser’s site? I have not deleted his site from my reading list but I find jonova and WUWT superior in educating non-scientists who want to understand this problem. IMHO Dr. Spenser’s site is not meant to educate the layman.
Dr. Spencer’s post should have been a home run. Instead it was an infield fly.
From his list of CO2/GHE myths:
“7. WARMING CAUSES CO2 TO RISE, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND The rate of rise in atmospheric CO2 is currently 2 ppm/yr, a rate which is 100 times as fast as any time in the 300,000 year Vostok ice core record. And we know our consumption of fossil fuels is emitting CO2 200 times as fast! So, where is the 100x as fast rise in today’s temperature causing this CO2 rise? C’mon people, think. But not to worry…CO2 is the elixir of life…let’s embrace more of it!” (emphasis mine)
Please tell me he let Kevin Trenberth write this paragraph for him. Please…?
To begin with, CO2 levels & rate of rise do not track human emissions of CO2 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658, et alii multis), and where he got the idea that our fossil fuel-related CO2 emissions are 200x what Nature puts out on her own I have no idea — a quick Google shows that’s just patently false. (That was the only way to read the statement and have it make any sense to me; that we put out 200x what we did “once upon a time” is totally irrelevant to the question, since only total emissions — anthropogenic + natural — actually matter to any of the climate equations.)
Dr. Spencer also apparently forgot that that same ice core he cites in terms of rate of CO2 rise provides context and timing for those self-same changes: they LAGGED temperature changes on the order of ~1.3ka (+/-1ka). (Manfred Mudelsee; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0277-3791(00)00167-0) Thus, a more honest (and less condescending) question based upon the data from that ice core might have been “Where is(are) the event(s) from ~1,300 years ago (+/-1,000 years) that could possibly have driven the current prodigious rise in CO2?” instead of trying to sarcastically disprove an instantanueous connection that exactly NO ONE EVER has postulated.
(Not saying that I know the answer to the question, but whatever caused the Roman Warm Period fits the timing suggested by the Mudelsee paper, the temperature rise was especially fast, it rose out of a period colder than the LIA to levels quite a bit warmer than we see now, and the period of above-average warmth lasted for centuries…)
When obvious fallacy combined with blatant condescension runs up against significant contradictory evidence (http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html#CO2Lags), it results in one of “our” best anti-CAGW experts becoming just as easy to dismiss out of hand as one of “their” pro-CAGW shills. For this reason, I hope that he will eventually re-examine this point, and flesh it out with a better explanation of whatever it was he was really trying to say.