Via Glenn, another scientist dares to state the obvious:
Much of the global warming debate has focused on reducing CO2 emissions because it is thought that the greenhouse gas produced mostly from fossil fuels is warming the planet. But Steward, who once believed CO2 caused global warming, is trying to fight that with a mountain of studies and scientific evidence that suggest CO2 is not the cause for warming. What’s more, he says CO2 levels are so low that more, not less, is needed to sustain and expand plant growth.Trying to debunk theories that higher CO2 levels cause warming, he cites studies that show CO2 levels following temperature spikes, prompting him to back other scientists who say that global warming is caused by solar activity.
What’s really amazing about the whole emissions regulation scheme is that it’s all based on such a speculative and unproven assumption. There’s actually very little evidence that CO2 has ever driven temperatures, as recent studies demonstrate the cause/effect relationship goes strongly the other way. The Earth has had Ice Ages at CO2 levels ten times higher than today; at most it’s a small positive feedback.
This is why the recent revelations of severe problems with the hoaxy stick are so relevant: the main justification for this belief is that since modern temperatures are supposedly incredibly unusual, only the unusual rise in CO2 levels can explain it. The obvious problems with “A happened at time X, and B also happened at time X, therefore A caused B” reasoning aside, this theory falls apart if the Medieval Warm Period was comparably warm. Hence the hokey stick.
Don’t expect these or Steward’s pro-plant-growth arguments to sway any of the AGW crowd or slow their political agenda. A fair portion of the environmental movement doesn’t care if CO2 causes warming or not; they’re Gaian jihadists who believe pretty much anything Man does to disturb nature is a sacrilege. CO2 is just a convenient mask, a domino for their crusade against industry.
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If we’re lucky, someday we’ll get to read about this whole episode in a sidebar titled “Correlation Does Not Imply Causation” in Chapter 4 of a sixth grade science book.
More likely it will either be flushed down the memory hole or claimed to be just around the next corner.
Remember acid rain? It was going to kill us all by the year 2000.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Heh, watching this page, the google ad on the side was for CROC, the Carbon Regulatory Offset Committee or something.
“When you think it’s Global Warming, think it’s a CROC. ”
Probably the most unfortunate acronym. Is it a hoax? Apparently its a Greenpeace thing.
The only reason CO2 was fingered as the AGW Bogeyman is because it was associated with industrial activity, and that alone was all the “scientists” with a political agenda needed to know when they decided to promote AGW as a “crisis.”
I have repeatedly, REPEATEDLY, REPEATEDLY pointed out on this blog and other places that this fundamental assumption in the computer models has never been proven.
In a nutshell the supposed CO2 link to AGW is quite literally the same kind of hand-waving in a scientific “experiment” that sophomore chemistry students do to make their experimental “results” match the textbook.
I won’t call it a conspiracy because I do believe that a lot of the “consensus” is from good scientists who simply ACCEPT the fraudulent assumptions about CO2, but there MUST be good solid intelligent scientists who UNDERSTAND that CO2 has never been shown to have the ability to warm the atmosphere that AGW proponents claim it does, and who yet go along with it to get grants and not rock the boat.
Those “scientists” are truly proving the warning that great evil can occur when good men sit idly by and allow evil to go unchallenged.
This whole episode will, one day, be taught in classrooms as an example of how good, decent, caring scientists can inadvertently feed a frenzy that can engulf us all.
I know very little about the science underlying this debate, but I am wondering what the data is for the statement:
The Earth has had Ice Ages at CO2 levels ten times higher than today.
I didn’t see any data to support this in the links. What is the source of this?
There’s the Ordovician-Silurian ice age, for starters. CO2 levels were about 4500 PPM then. It was caused by a continent moving over a pole (hey…). There’s also the Huronian, which had even higher levels.
Somehow those little facts never made it into Al Gore’s movie.
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