Reply To: Cap and Trade

[Brian H]

HermannH wrote: …
If I remember correctly climate research wasn’t the major weapon that Maggy used in her clashes with the coal miners. Maggy was a trained chemist. This science background allowed her to see that perhaps there was a nugget of truth behind the concerns of climate researchers at the time.

But how about this ‘grassroots’ movement: Philip Morris wanted to discredit an EPA report that found that second hand smoke is harmful. The advice they got was to create the impression of a grassroots movement that fought against government over-regulation. They also got the advice to throw in a few other issues to make it look more authentic http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2:

AGW

By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens’ group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, “to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors”; to “link the tobacco issue with other more ‘politically correct’ products”; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with “broader questions about government research and regulations” – such as “global warming”, “nuclear waste disposal” and “biotechnology”….

TASSC’s headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to “refute the criticisms against cigarettes”. An undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a “Seitz symposium” with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would speak to “40-60 regulators”.

The same Seitz that circulated the above mentioned Oregon Petition:

Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the “review” that followed Seitz’s letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson’s organisation – the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine – and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson’s 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.

If you read the article in its entirety you may understand why I alternate between laughing and cringing every time I see you mentioning that politics and money rule in the AGW movement.

I will repeat the question I asked above; perhaps you will care to have a go at answering it:

“Examine again that geological image above ( http://www.biocab.org/Climate_Geologic_Timescale.html ) For literally hundreds of millions, indeed billions, of years CO2 and temperature went their separate ways. What changed when human CO2 release commenced? “

I did look at the graph and I cannot explain it, and neither can you. I do not know what other factors were dominant for the respective time periods. Perhaps some climatologists have explanations for some of the periods.

When human CO2 release commenced the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere started to increase. The extra amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is about half of what was released in the last 200 years the rest ended up in the oceans. This has already led to increased ocean acidification: http://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=13314

Perhaps you show me the courtesy and read the links that I provided and comment on them. And I do hope your response is relevant and not just a one-liner.

I’ve seen most of that material before. It is irrelevant, in the sense that NOTHING changed when humans started emitting CO2. As the paper referenced above notes, there is NO statistical correlation between the patterns of human CO2 emission and the pattern of changes, and an EXTREMELY significant relation to oceanic changes PRECEDING the CO2 changes.

The point of the geological graphs is that they demolish any concept that CO2 “drives” temperature. It is unrelated, except insofar as oceanic temperature increases or reduces CO2 stores.

“A correlation (Chapter 5) between the annual increase of the CO2 concentration in the
atmosphere and the mean annual global temperature anomalies was demonstrated and human
emissions were found to be insignificant … too
insignificant to be measured due to the large natural variations. “

-cont-