At 12:15 AM 4/12/2007, you wrote:
>Merely that consideration of the source is part and parcel >of the assessment of new information. > >The possibility that climate change scientists are a bunch of loons >pushing political barrows doesn't disqualify the possibility that >Christopher Monckton is also a loon pushing a political barrow. Mark, Let's try this once more. Did you actually read the paper? There's a very short summary here by David Evans, who used to be a believer and even made his living at it http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Evans-CO2DoesNotCauseGW.pdf I really couldn't care less who the authors of certain papers are. Many scientists who have made valuable contributions have had weird beliefs about all sorts of things. Just look at the data. So one more time, what's wrong with the data, Mark? For those not up on this, there is considerable effort in climate science to find a "fingerprint" which can definitely point to the extra CO2 caused by human fossil fuel burning as being the cause of the rather mild apparent warming to distinguish it from the other possible causes which we know exist because of the historical record. As you might expect, this is difficult. There are computer models called Global (or General) Circulation Models which attempt to take the physical properties of the air and ocean, the incoming solar energy, the outgoing long wave radiation, the effect of rotation of the earth and many, many other physical variables in to account. Last I heard there were 23 or so major models. That alone should tell you something. The models handle condensation and evaporation of water rather poorly and aren't really designed as climate prediction tools but are designed to hopefully help in separating out the effects of changes in individual physical variables and the effects of these on other variables. Monckton didn't do any original research in his paper. He merely took the IPCC agreed on computer modelling results, the real world measurements of the atmosphere from radiosonde direct temperature measurements and the satellite microwave sounding unit(MSU) temperature measurements and compared them. He's drawn his conclusions from that. The IPCC has apparently come to a different conclusion from the same data - the real world doesn't seem to agree with our computer models so the real world data must have problems. This is a possibility but there are 2 independent means of atmospheric temperature measurement being used with many datapoints over relatively long time periods and it would seem to require rather strange systematic errors to eliminate the computer predicted fingerprint. If the radiosonde data has large error bands capable of encompassing the computer prediction the Hadley Centre did a very poor experimental design at least. If the measurements had backed the computer predictions I bet you would have heard about this long and loud and there would be no discussion about measurement error bands. The again, maybe the computer models are wrong and the effect of extra CO2 is much less than the modellers build in to the models and just maybe the water vapour and other feedbacks are negative instead of strongly positive. Mike Borgelt Instruments - manufacturers of quality soaring instruments phone Int'l + 61 746 355784 fax Int'l + 61 746 358796 cellphone Int'l + 61 428 355784 Int'l + 61 429 355784 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: www.borgeltinstruments.com _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
