From a letter to the editor of the Oz on Monday:







Oh, but it's not political! It's about the science!! And anyway,  they were lied to for their own good, 'cos otherwise they wouldn't get it, don't you know.


Or something.

Darwin wrote on Nov 10^th, 2009 at 7:46pm:

The letter in full:





KEVIN Rudd’s hysterical outburst against the sceptics and deniers ("Rudd dares Turnbull on ETS”, 7-8/11) cuts no ice with me. Many of today’s sceptics and deniers started out as agnostics ready to be convinced. But what did they get? They got bullied. They got hectored. They got abused. And they got lied to.

The fraud of the hockey stick and the air-brushing of the medieval warm period from the record turned many an agnostic into a sceptic and many a sceptic into a denier.

Then we had Peter Garrett’s fatuous warning of a six- metre rise in sea level and the bodgied photos of the polar bears. On top of that, we have the silencing of scientists who don’t go along with the scam and we have seen peer review corrupted to the point that the words “peer review” are synonymous with scientific incest.

Kevin Rudd would be better employed in telling us what is in the Copenhagen draft treaty about which he is so coy. Why should we have to rely on Britain’s Lord Monckton to tell us what out politicians have in store for us?
Frank Pulsford, Aspley, Qld

Ding Ding Ding, Soren was already counted out, but jumped back in the ring, and started to demand they have a thumb wrestlr to decide the championship, as he could not cope with the earlier bouts criteria.

Hmm, make a point, have that point clearly challenged, have evidence provided to show why the point was in eroor, so the next move of any good denialist, is ignore the facts presented, that nullify his previous point, and go onto the next facile argument.

Is it any wonder denialists are held in contempt by thinking people.

Sprintcyclist wrote on Nov 10^th, 2009 at 11:22pm:



Eating too much hydrogen, you reckon?

Soren wrote on Nov 10^th, 2009 at 5:04pm:


Good,  I'm glad that you understand so far, at least partially. I like your style. What I have presented first was the evidence, but not the causal relationship.

For your point 2, you obviously didn't have my full attention. What I said was that there was a very good causal relationship between the sun's output and temperature, at least for about the last 6000 years. The sun's output is what largely determines the global temperature - but it's complicated by changes in the Earth's atmospheric composition.  The departure from the good correlation has been in recent times, and also prior to 10,000 years before present. I didn't really explain Milankovich cycles, but I can do at some future stage.

Point 3 -  A minor point- For measurements, substitute concentration. You are right in saying that not all CO2 comes from human activity. Nobody is claiming that.

This is going to be fun. At last we have a denialist who appears to understand logic.

I think the next logical step will be to look at the carbon balance.

At this stage, just relax. I will be making my points in subsequent posts.

We are currently burning an immense quantity of fossil fuels. I'll expand on that statement in subsequent posts, but to illustrate my point, I have a picture of a coal train below. They are a very common sight in my part of the world. The photograph shows about 1/8 of the entire train.

The rollingstock on QR varies, but typically we're looking at 104 tonnes of coal per wagon, with typically 94 wagons (sometimes 86)  with approximately 10,000 tonnes of coal.  Typically sub-butuminous coal contains 40% carbon, so we're looking at about 4000 tonnes of carbon per coal train, or 14,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Although all our carbon emissions are not in the form of coal, this is a useful exercise to visualise the total annual emissions to atmosphere.

Currently, we are emitting 7.1 **8.8 Gigatonnes of carbon to the atmosphere each year as a result of human activities. Please challenge that figure if you like.

There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. You can do this calculation for yourself.

Just imagine the contents of one of these coal trains being burnt (all 94 wagons) - vaporised to the atmosphere.

At our current rate of global CO2 emissions, that happens every 1.7 **1.3 seconds.

I'll go on to look at the carbon balance and carbon cycle in subsequent posts.  

**edited in line with latest figures.

Sprintcyclist wrote on Nov 10^th, 2009 at 11:22pm:


Sprint mate - let's just talk about the facts.  I'm not too keen on Kevin07 either, or politicians in general, except for our local independent MLA who is a lovely person and very genuine.  

If you think that the sun is enlarging, I'm not going to argue with your perception.  Just keep an eye on it for us, will you, and let us know if it grows any bigger today?     Make sure you wear good Aussie Standard shades though.

muso wrote on Nov 11^th, 2009 at 8:21am:



Thank Muso for the scary figures and the pic. And thanks for letting us know the number of seconds in a year. Frightening.

And that we burn the equivalent of a whole coal train every 1.7 seconds. But as always, context is everything. How much diffrence does all that CO2 make to the atmosphere? Very little.

There is a fixation on CO2 because it can be easily linked to human activity and that human activiy can be measured after a fashion. But we know very, very little about all the other, natural contributors to the weather or how they all interact. So they are ignored in preference to modelling the variable that we understand. (That is not enough to elevate it into  cause, mind you.)  

As I asked earlier, apart from Mozz who is game enough to say that we understand all the stuff that goes into making our climate and how they all interact and work and come up with a lovely day? Unlike Pilate, I was waiting for the anwer but it never came.

Also, I could not help noticing that you did not touch on axion Numero Uno in my post: that establishing the causal relationship between CO2 levels and climate justice (warming/cooling/changing) is the first step in ay further discussion about man-made global waddayacallit

We seem to have glided over that one, too. Am I inviting a thumb wrestle by noticing this? Was this all settled, ding-dong-wise,  while I ducked out for a leak?










Love the graphs, too. The colour are pretty.