My Jaw Dropped Open...
JeremyBoak, Director, Center for Oil Shale Technology and Research, Colorado School of Mines says...
"That CO2 at a few hundred ppm in the atmosphere can in fact substantially alter the climate is well documented physics, because of its very high absorbance of certain wavelengths. That the complex feedback of atmospheric composition and temperature is governed by numerous factors is also well accepted."
and...
"We currently return that carbon to the atmosphere at one billion times the rate at which it was deposited over tens to hundreds of millions of years. As a geologist I have seen the calculations, and they are both rational and scientific."
and...
"It is not unreasonable to conclude that the increase of about 100 ppm in atmospheric CO2 cannot reasonably be achieved under current conditions without both anthropogenic and natural forcings. An increase of 5 ppm per year, as reported by Mr. Southard is a remarkably large increase, given that every decade it increases the CO2 content by 15-20%."
My jaw dropped open. Complete twaddle - and from a geologist at a School of Mines, no less. The scientific method is not his strong point, apparently.
Firstly, the idea that a few hundred ppm of CO2 can substantially alter the climate is not settled science. To the contrary, the radiative transfer theory is highly controversial. And crucially (although presumably this is not considered relevant by Jeremy Boak's flavour of scientific practice) it is a hypothesis that has not been borne out by the facts. Since 1850, when good instrumental temperature measurements began, the world mean surface atmospheric temperature has increased at an average rate of only 0.4degC per HUNDRED YEARS - and for the last 15 years it has not increased at all. So all the predictions of alarming global warming have come to naught. Science bows to good data if the data contradicts an unproven hypothesis. And not the other way round, as any good scientist should know.
Secondly, to say that we are returning CO2 to the atmosphere at "one billion times the rate at which it was deposited" is just scurrilous emotive nonsense worthy only of the worst kind of pathological environmentalist. It does not inform the debate one jot, which should be about when fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil, uranium, etc.) are going to run out (the answer being several hundred years).
Thirdly, if he had bothered to check Mr Southard's figure of 5ppm per year increase he would have found it is completely wrong. The actual increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 40 years has been almost completely linear at a rate of 1.5ppm per year. So at that rate over the next 88 years to the year 2100, there will be an additional 117 parts per MILLION of CO2 in the atmosphere. Excellent for plants. Completely non-toxic to humans. And historians will be laughing out loud at the gullibility of (some of) their ancestors.
