23 thoughts on ““I Am An Intellectual Blasphemer””

  1. An excellent summary of the situation. I might just have to buy the book. I’m also going to pass this link along. Thanks!

  2. He starts out saying that “there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins”.

    And then he goes on about solar and orbital causes for contemporary climate change.

    Of course he is demonstratively, factually, wrong on both counts, but there would also appear to be a logical disconnect.

    Self-aggrandizement, martyr complexes, and general toolishiness know no ideological boundaries.

  3. >Self-aggrandizement, martyr complexes, and >general toolishiness know no ideological >boundaries.

    No, no they really don’t.

    Heheh, ain’t it a b**** when old friends keep switching sides on ya?

    PS refusing to acknowledge actual, documented solar changes doesn

  4. Good news about the nuke plants though. Now if we can just start clear cutting the old growth forests and replanting, maybe we’ll start getting someplace, carbon wise. Not to mention dropping house construction costs in the process. We should also move the speed limit up and start a huge emergency road building program to stop carbon producing traffic jams.

    AGW: It’s not just for socialists any more.

    Heh heh.

  7. Cockburn comes across as someone utterly impervious to objectively demonstrated facts. This is great; it serves to discredit everything else he’s said too.

  8. Brian D,

    One small problem with your statement. A lot of that increase in CO2 occurred during a time of global *cooling*. Using your logic, we really should be in an ice age by now.

    The most you can say is that the increase in CO2 is made by man. You have NO basis for a statement that the increase in CO2 is responsible for the minimal amount of warming we’ve seen so far.

    Oh, and before you slam someone for not paying attention to facts, I notice you’re silent about the role the Sun plays in climate change. Its output, and therefore its power to warm the planet, ain’t constant, y’know.

  9. Brian D,

    One small problem with your statement. A lot of that increase in CO2 occurred during a time of global *cooling*. Using your logic, we really should be in an ice age by now.

    The most you can say is that the increase in CO2 is made by man. You have NO basis for a statement that the increase in CO2 is responsible for the minimal amount of warming we’ve seen so far.

    Oh, and before you slam someone for not paying attention to facts, I notice you’re silent about the role the Sun plays in climate change. Its output, and therefore its power to warm the planet, ain’t constant, y’know.

  10. Oops, I read the advisory on how to leave a comment, and I *still* double-posted. ^_^;;

    Sorry, Rand.

  11. It still means that Mr. Cockburn is claiming something that he really shouldn’t be, if he wants to be the voice of reason in this debate.

    And Hale, at a glance, it appears that there hasn’t been any global cooling since about 1910 which is before most of the human CO2 emissions (this chart doesn’t show CO2 released from deforestation).

  12. Carbon credits = Indulgences.

    Keep an eye out for the next Martin Luther. Maybe someone will tack a demand list to Al Gore’s plane door.

  13. It’s funny, practically every time Rand posts something about global warming, it’s completely counterfactual.

  15. > The most you can say is that the increase in CO2 is made by man.

    Actually, we haven’t seen the evidence for that.

    We’ve seen increased CO2 levels and a change in the isotope mix.

    However, we know that bio processes often prefer certain isotopes over other ones. If they happen to prefer the “not fossil” isotopes, we’d see a change towards a greater percentage of “fossil” isotope in the atmosphere no matter what was going on.

    Meanwhile, the increase in total CO2 can be driven by an increase in “not fossil” CO2.

    Do we know what correlates with CO2 changes in the past? How about that sun thingie?

  16. For the really long term, see Secret To Earth’s ‘Big Chill’ Found In Underground Water:

    Since the late 1990s, Asish Basu, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester, has been sampling water and sediments from two of the world’s largest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra of the Indian subcontinent, to understand a period in Earth’s history called the Great Cool-Down. Forty million years ago, the global climate changed from the steamy world of the dinosaurs to the cooler world of today, largely because the amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, dropped significantly. Scientists have speculated that the cause of this cooling and the decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide was the result of the rise of the Himalayan mountains as the Indian and Asian continental plates pushed into one another. They believe the erosion of the new mountains increased the rate of removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere since the process of weathering silicate rocks such as those in the Himalayas absorbs carbon dioxide. This erosion may have depleted the atmosphere of a potent greenhouse gas and triggered the Great Cool-Down.

    This planet was well on its way to another Snowball Earth episode until we came along.

  17. It’s wonderful to see the American dumbf*ck in their native environment here, flailing around with concepts that are well beyond the understanding of their simpleton minds. Keep up the good work, guys, this is great stuff!

  18. No, it’s established beyond any reasonable doubt that the current CO2 increase is driven by fossil fuel combustion. We know how much fossil fuels are being burned (since governments tax the stuff!), and so have a very good handle on how much CO2 is being produced. The total CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion has exceeded the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere for over a century. Were we not burning fossil fuels, CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be declining right now (as the pulse of CO2 previously emitted equilibrated with the ocean surface waters and the terrestrial biosphere).

    The carbon isotope evidence simply confirms this picture (by also ruling out CO2 release from the oceans as the source of the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere.)

  20. Alan,

    Based on that chart, it appears a global war, with manufacturing industries working building carbon spewing vehicles that will only be destroyed, can set back global warming by nearly 4 decades. Perhaps instead of Kyoto, AGW scaremongers should have supported the GWOT.

  21. Of course, Paul knows he can’t win against such stunning intellectual sophistication, but he feels obligated to try anyways, because above all, he really does understand the methods by which temporary truths are thus derived.

  22. Alan Henderson, it’s a noisy trend where not every year is higher than the previous one, but if you look at say 9 years before 1998 and after it, the average of the years after it are higher than the years before it.
    You can’t say from looking at the graph that “global warming stopped in 1998”. Rather that 1998 was a very hot year compared to the surrounding ones. Actually, from the top ten hottest years in that graph, 6 are from after 1998.

    Of course, that it stopped in 1998 is just another disinformation meme.

    There is a way to look at what kinds of trends could be useful in long term climate data here:
    http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/05/the_significance_of_5_year_tre.php

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