Dr. Bob Carter

Yesterday’s AFR had an Opinion diatribe by notorious left wing economist John Quiggin, from which the following abstracts come: “While most media outlets give at least some space to these conspiracy theorists (sceptics), the central role has been played by The Australian newspaper. Not only its opinion columnists (with a handful of honourable exceptions) and its editorials, but even its news reporting is dominated by the idea that mainstream science is on the verge of being overturned by the efforts of a group of dedicated amateurs, publishing their findings not in the peer-reviewed literature but through blogs, think tanks and vanity presses”.

“The maintenance of this (conservative/sceptical) viewpoint also requires a high degree of insulation from reality. To provide this insulation, the conservative movement has developed a network of think tanks, experts and news sources that amount to an alternative reality in which the inconvenient truths like climate change can be ignored.” “Until conservatives adopt a reality-based approach to climate change, as they have done in Europe and the UK, they cannot be taken seriously as an alternative government.”

Deliciously (and probably by happenstance, though I guess at the last moment the headline could have been changed to deliberately aim at the Quiggin piece) today’s Australian contains the following superb riposte by Jan Veizer:

Climate change science isn’t settled
By Jan Veiser

Excerpts: MANY people think the science of climate change is settled. It isn’t. And the issue is not whether there has been an overall warming during the past century. There has, although it was not uniform and none was observed during the past decade. The geologic record provides us with abundant evidence for such perpetual natural climate variability, from icecaps reaching almost to the equator to none at all, even at the poles.

Water vapour, not carbon dioxide, is by far the most important greenhouse gas. Yet the models treat the global water cycle as just being there, relegating it to a passive agent in the climate system. Energy that is required to drive the water cycle and generate more water vapour must therefore come from somewhere else: the sun, man-made greenhouse gases, other factors or any combination of the above.

Clouds are an integral part of the sun-driven water cycle; however, formation of water droplets requires seeding and this is where solar amplification likely comes into play. Empirical and experimental results suggest that cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere may generate such initial seeds, particularly over the oceans. While the actual mechanisms are still debated, the correlations between cloudiness and cosmic ray flux already have been published.

The amplifying connection to the sun comes via its electromagnetic envelope, called the heliosphere, and a similar envelope around the Earth, the magnetosphere. These act as shields that screen the lethal cosmic rays from reaching our planet. A less active sun is not only colder but its heliospheric envelope shrinks, allowing more cosmic rays to reach our atmosphere and seed more clouds, and vice versa. Indeed, satellite data for the past decade shows a 25per cent shrinking of the heliosphere that is coincident with the halt, or even decline, in planetary temperature since 1998: a trend at odds with the ever rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Read this slam at the Stern clone Quiggin in detail here.