By Richard Courtney on Climate Depot

UN IPCC scientist Richard Courtney responds to global warming activists lament on the “fixation on carbon dioxide.” [See: Climate Activists Shock Admission: ‘Climate change campaigners should not have fixated on carbon dioxide’—‘only responsible for about half of the problem’ - September 18, 2009 - ‘If climate negotiations 20 years ago concentrated on low-hanging fruits, the fight against global warming would have been more successful’]

Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK based atmospheric science consultant, is featured on page 224 of the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of More Than 700 Dissenting Scientists Over Man-Made Global Warming.

Courtney’s September 21, 2009 comments reproduced below from UK Telegraph.

I was amused by this article from [UK Telegraph’s] Geoffrey Lean. It seems to be a desperate attempt at a fall-back position because it is now obvious there will be inevitable failure of the coming CoP15 at Copenhagen.

This statement in the article gave me an especial laugh:

“Take black carbon, which gives soot its colour. It is now accepted to be the second biggest contributor to climate change, responsible for between 10 and 25 per cent of it. Formed through incomplete combustion of wood, vegetation and fossil fuels, it lands a unique double whammy.”

Lean says controlling “black carbon” emissions is “low hanging fruit”. But the IPCC ignored all my several peer review comments which called for correct inclusion of soot/aerosol (i.e. those I copy below and several others).

My peer review comments for IPCC AR4 which called for correct inclusion of soot/aerosol including the following three that together demonstrate the IPCC has deliberately played down “black carbon” effects in its attempts to overstate carbon dioxide effects.

It seems CO2 control is failing so the ‘soot’ fall-back position is being adopted by those who like to pretend people effect global climate: we don’t.
Read more here.

This MODIS/Terra image from September 10, 2005, supports recent research (Richter, et al., 2005) that shows China’s air pollution problems are increasing. Unlike CO2 which is a harmless gas that is a plant fertilizer, this is real pollution and has local climate and health effects.