Comment to Act’s Dump the ETS release.
There is no evidence that CO2 drives climate or that industrialisation is warming the world.
Incorrect, the case for this has been built up since 1859, and the science has been tested against all of the best available evidence since then. Go look at the history. A statement like this betrays a complete ignorance of the facts.
When I started out as an environmentalist the fear was global cooling.
Well, that was a bit of a temporary fad with a few people that gained popular support in the 1970s. The scientists behind this notion - Kukla etc, never said that they expected the next ice age to happen very soon. They just said that it might happen tomorrow, or in >1,000 years.
Ice-core samples show that CO2 levels lag temperature by 800 years
Correct. CO2 and temperatures exist in a feedback system, so increased temperatures increase CO2 and increased CO2 increases temperatures. Either variable can be forced and it affects the feedback system. This is part of the reason why the Ice Cores strongly support the CO2 climate forcing hypothesis.
And the increase in temperature in the past 150 years has been at the Earth’s surface - not the troposphere, as the theory of CO2-induced temperature change predicts.
There’s a good essay on the AIP site about simple models of climate. It explains why it is that global warming means increased temperatures on the surface, and decreased temperatures in the troposphere. In a single sentence, the heat radiated from the surface is trapped at lower levels of the atmosphere because there is more CO2 there.
The only thing going for the man-made global warming theory is the computer models - but they’re just a direct result of the assumptions fed into them. Their predictions are the result of what’s fed in, and the evidence doesn’t back the models’ predictions.
This is a common argument against the Climate Change models, however it is an absurd rejection of the scientific process. F=mv² or E=mc² are also both models of reality, but you don’t question those. A “hypothesis”, “Model” and “Formula” are basically the same thing, we just use the term “Model” when it turns into a dynamic system. There is a huge amount of work that has gone into refining the first model calculated by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 - a pen and pencil effort of several months - to take more real world factors into account.
You cannot simply claim that there being a model represents a problem; you must explain what part of the model is at fault.
The science is weak.
Clearly, you have not read enough of it.