Dear Fred,
Post 1 of 2.
Thank you for a comprehensive rundown on why the oft repeated claim that “the science is settled” is false.

I respectfully suggest that you take your own advice regarding the making of unsubstantiated claims. You state that we are “already observing ample evidence that the world is on the threshold of profound and potentially catastrophic warming.” Please be advised that notwithstanding the many tens of billions of dollars that have been spent on climate change research over the past few years and despite the many “consensus” based alarmist claims to the contrary, it remains a verifiable fact that there is not one single peer reviewed research paper which provides empirical evidence that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 have caused or will cause catastrophic global warming. Empirical evidence is based on scientific observation of the real world.

One event that you missed was a recent (20 Sept.) press release issued by the French Academy of Science. In their press release the Academie says “On greenhouse gas emissions, including CO2 emitted by human activities, if there is a consensus on their direct impact, the role of indirect effects is still controversial.”

The “direct impact” of a mooted doubling of CO2 would be a moderate increase in temperature of around 0.8°C, spread over the next century. Climate scientists who observe what actually happens in the real world have recently discovered a number of “indirect effects” that cool the earth and approximately halve this temperature increase to 0.4°C. In contrast climate scientists who observe what happens on their computer screens purport that the “indirect effects” magnify this “direct impact” by a factor of four to over eight, giving virtual temperature increases in the range 3°C to over 6°C.

For example, all of the variants of global circulation models that feed into the IPCC to inform their advice to the world’s governments suffer from the same severe structural flaw, insofar as they underestimate changes in evaporation by a factor of around four.
Please see Post 2 of 2

Post 2 of 2
This is a severe flaw because evaporation has three times the cooling power of the radiation affected by greenhouse gases. Evaporation cools the earth’s surface by around three times as much (78 Watts per square metre) as net outgoing greenhouse gas absorbable long wave radiation (26 W/sqm). Evaporation cools not just the surface, but also planet earth because the latent heat transferred from the surface, mainly the oceans (86%), to the atmosphere is released above most of the greenhouse gases, where it can easily radiate into space, but only a small percentage can penetrate the lower greenhouse gases and re-warm the earth’s surface.

This discovery was made by Wentz et al and published in their paper “How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring?” by Frank J. Wentz, Lucrezia Ricciardulli, Kyle Hilburn & Carl Mears (May 2007). Wentz et al were published in the Journal of Science, Volume 317, pp 233-235, 13 July 2007 and were published online on 31 May 2007. Over the past three years the discovery made by Wentz et al. has been very thoroughly checked by the alarmists and found to be irrefutable.

In regards to your final paragraph, the even more rational response would be to do nothing and enjoy the manifest benefits of increased CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a potent fertiliser and up until recently a free fertiliser at that. It is madness and morally reprehensible for the well-fed Western democracies, to take actions that intend to limit, capture and bury a free fertiliser like CO2 and thus deny the billions of undernourished people in the developing world a free 20 to 50 per cent increase in food production as well as increased rainfall in a world that is experiencing water shortages as populations increase. It is of course not just food crops that benefit from increased atmospheric CO2 and higher rainfall, but native vegetation as well.

Interesting Mr Pearce. What I find also interesting is what the IPCC actually says about uncertainty in its 4th Assessment Report (to compare apples with apples, if you like - what you say and what the IPCC says):

http://tinyurl.com/IPCC-uncertainty

and

http://tinyurl.com/IPCC-Table-2-11

Now, we know the understanding of everything is impossible, but you make it sound that the scientists that contribute to the IPCC reports and indeed the IPCC itself, are a bunch of dumb nuts. Given that there is some discrepancy between what you say, what they say, I did a search and came up with this;

http://tinyurl.com/Fred-Pearce

It’s a pity that main-stream-media columnists don't show the due diligence that they so expect from others.

Much good sense in this article. But why oh why the nod to the political establishment at the end? Not only is there not 'ample evidence' as you suggest, there is no evidence. No evidence at all of anything extraordinary happening to our climate system other than an appreciable rise in a trace gas called CO2 to levels not seen for quite a while (but nothing like the thousands of ppm which have occurred in the distant past without ending world - quite the reverse, they boosted plant growth). There is also no evidence at all that CO2 drives climate in any detectable fashion, let alone catastrophically. I commend the words of Hans Schreuder to you: 'In every 85,800 molecules of air, 33 are CO2. Of those, humans just produce one. That the UN IPCC and Al Gore claim that 1 molecule of CO2 in 85,800 molecules of air catastrophically warms the planet is nonsense. That the UN IPCC and Al Gore claim that 1 molecule of human CO2 causes catastrophic warming while the remaining 32 molecules of Nature’s identical CO2 do not is insanity. '

When the Oracle said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens he was astonished. "The only reason I can think of," he said, "is that I *know* I know nothing, whereas others do not."

Perhaps the 'climate science' establishment is finally acquiring the wisdom of Socrates.

I think I learned in High School that science was never "settled" but always open to argument.

It does seem evident that we are profligate with our fuel resources, the global citizenry watches guiltily as the wells run dry. However is it true that the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere/ocean is endangering us? This is one point dealt with by paleoclimatologist Prof Bob Carter in his book "Climate: The Counter Consensus", Stacey International 2010. Links http://www.bobcarter.info/