Backing his belief is the social construction of science as the handmaiden of economic progress.

Basically I think he’s a marine geologist who has roamed out of his patch and in doing so is far too ready to think he has mastered someone else’s patch. So we were assured that the Great Barrier Reef was fine and would always be fine.

This makes the reef specialists some kind of dills.

Someone asked him about Plimer’s book. Carter recommended it without reservation, which is a worry. Sceptics don’t seem to be very sceptical of each other.

His main line was that there is a lot of natural variability and the AGW signal is not strong enough to distinguish above the noise. He also quoted various incidents of abrupt climate change (Younger Dryas etc). But he’s very definite about what will NOT happen. Expect just about anything except warming, is what he said.

And except sea level rise. The ice is growing in Antarctica balancing anything that might be happening in the Arctic. So don’t worry!

in rough terms, that’s about right. It’s because the bands of absorption within CO2 bonds become saturated through the atmospheric column as short-wave radiation is absorbed and re-transmitted as long wave (e.g., infra-red). This actually means that most of the absorption occurs in the upepr atmosphere. So the relationship you see in Archibald’s graph with increasing CO2 is right but the scale because of misapplied climate sensitivity is wrong. This can be played around with in the MODTRANS model. The number that you heard from Bob Carter was 0.1C per Watt per metre squared and CO2 doubling is about 4 Wm-2, equivalent to the 0.4C that I quoted. That number came from Idso and before that (tho’ I haven’t confirmed this) from Lindzen I suspect (the 1991 paper)). Lindzen’s numbers have no experimental data to back them up, whereas Tyndall’s (19th century) do. That means there is an internally consistent “science” amongst the sceptics that has no origin in experiment and verification. The base is conjecture. The rejoinder from that mob is that all of AGW is similarly conjecture. Not so – the physics are well understood and climate sensitivity is very uncertain but much higher than applied by the skeptics (palaeoclimate supports this for reasons I outlined above).

The trick is, if you’re Carter, you can say the increase is 0.1C per Wm-2 and sound very authoritative, and there is likely no-one in the audience who can gainsay this. If they do and jump up in a room full of farmers and say “There’s a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that totally disproves this assertion,” how will that travel do you reckon?

My memory is that Carter gave the forcing effect of CO2 as a very small value, it may have been 0.1C, so with the water vapour multiplier effect doubling CO2 meant stuff all and trebling it virtually the same.

So blaming coal for global warming was seen as just plain nuts.

I have a question as to whether the decreasing warming effect as CO2 increases conforms strictly to a log curve, or is it a natural phenomenon that is best described by a log formula in the range we are dealing with?

My suspicion comes from the way we used a log formula to allocate grants to school libraries back in the 1970s. For larger schools you could have fewer books per child still giving you a larger collection. Using the average price of a book you could take a bulk grant and divide it up equitably in individual grants to over 1000 schools in a few hours work using a mathematical formula and the computers available at the time.

It was magic and everyone thought it was scientific, but we knew that it only worked in a satisfactory way across the range of schools we were dealing with, once we introduced the concept of a “minimum collection” for schools with an enrolment of less than 100 (because the formula gave small schools next to nothing).

We found an essentially arbitrary formula with the right shape that gave us an outcome that made sense to the professionals working in the field.

Not sure all that makes sense, and no sweat if it doesn’t. But the basic question is whether we have an absolute law here or just a reasonably convenient way of modelling what is observed in nature.

An implication is whether climate sensitivity from 280ppm to 560ppm has the same value as it would if you were going from say 1000ppm to 2000ppm.

“Lavoisier was tried, convicted, and guillotined on 8 May in Paris, at the age of 50.”

Wonder if that society of superannuated old farts have considered the outcome for their eponymous hero? Subconsciously perhaps?

Have you looked at a list of members of that “society”?

A more choice selection of stiff-legged old farts would be hard to find…

I checked out your CO2 graph, one of the prize pieces of evidence. It was put together by David Archibald who used the online MODTRANS teaching program for calculating changes in forcing due to CO2. Apparently, according to David (Archer?), Archibald ran the model with a climate sensitivity of about 0.4C for CO2 doubling. So he got the results based on his priors.

David complains about Archibald’s misuse of his model being used for deception here.
The model itself is here.
Archibald’s paper is here. Interestingly, for a scientific paper, it contains some delightful assertions:

My reward for this work, as it is for every member of the Lavoisier Society, will be in Heaven, for the Forces of Darkness control the science journals, government departments, public institutes and universities. They reward each other for concocting ever more fantastic apocalyptic visions. It is as if all the biology journals were edited by creationists

If the contention of a sensitivity of 0.4C for doubling were true, then pretty much all the past climate change would have to explained by albedo changes, caused by ice changes (can be fast), water vapour, cloud feedbacks and CO2-vegetation feedbacks (slow). Palaeoclimate would look very different if that was the case. No scientist has ever been able to reliably show that these alone could explain past climate. CO2 absorbs radiation in the lab, so why not in the atmosphere? Also the natural greenhouse effect would have to depend solely on water vapour and clouds, otherwise the Earth would be -18C. The sceptical Lindzen estimated that these comprised 98% of the natural greenhouse effect in 1991 and the other gases presumably 2%. This is not supported by experiment and observation, and the operating estimate is 9-25% of natural greenhouse is due to CO2. Change it, and climate will change.

The problem with all of the skeptic arguments going around is that they cannot be used to build an internally consistent picture of climate, past present and future.