@ RStuart & Co,

I watched your vid, all the way through, twice: Sorry to break the news to you but there is a problem with your favoured snowball Earth thesis. To confirm the correlation between CO2 and temperature you *need* a snow Earth. Not just a cold Earth , nor even a slushy Earth, but a thick crusted, frozen snowball Earth.How else can explain that with such heavy concentrations of CO2 ( 6000-7000 ppm) it took “millions of years” to return Earth to warm times.

Monckton’s case on the other hand only needs a cool Earth and high concentrations of CO2.

However, the case for a snowball Earth is far from (to use a word close to the heart of warmists) the *consensus* position: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

1) “Some scholars suggest that the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth was in fact no different from any other glaciation in Earth's history, and that efforts to find a single cause are likely to end in failure”

And most telling of all, since we know how much reliance your wamists place on *models*:

2) “There have been difficulties in recreating a Snowball Earth with global climate models.” –ouch! that must smart.

( please ignore this bit: “The geological community generally accepts this hypothesis because it best explains sedimentary deposits generally regarded as of glacial origin at tropical paleolatitudes” Since we know from climate change debates that geologist are not real scientists!)

@SPQR: I watched your vid, all the way through, twice

Did you? That must of been painful. I'm impressed. As GrahamY says, he is a supercilious chap and that must make him had to watch if you disagree with him. He sometimes gives impression of a man who loves pulling the wings off flies. His preferred targets such as Monckton and creationists are very low hanging fruit, their wings are 1/2 off to start with.

@SPQR: To confirm the correlation between CO2 and temperature you *need* a snow Earth.

Perhaps you can supply a similar link explaining why we *need* a snowball earth to confirm the correlation. I don't get it.

@SPQR: geologist are not real scientists!

Eh? Of course they are real scientists. They understand geology. If their consensus is the only way rock X can arrive position Y is via mechanism Z, then I am inclined to believe them. Who else am I going to put my trust in? No one else has studies the problem as long and as hard as they have. Its when they start talking outside of their area that they become layman, just like the rest of us.

Hi SPQR,
“It is no mere coincidence that regions of the world with the most undernourished are also the regions with the fastest population growth.”
This is such an old argument, I'm amazed you haven't heard it a hundred times before.
When a parent loses a child, the very first reaction is to have another child. This has been demonstrated so many times, where have you been? The very fastest way to stop people from having more children is simply to drop the infant mortality level to below 4%.
When children stop dying, parents stop trying to replace them.
Every country on the planet that has an infant mortality rate of less than 4% is also (or has been) experiencing negative growth rate (excluding immigration). Australia of course is trying to change that, by paying people to have children.
As an early Arab OPEC minister put it, about life before oil: “we were very poor. It was common practice for families to have 6 or 7 children, in the hope that one might survive”.
What do you suggest we do about the 850 million children suffering from malnutrition, SPQR?
Of course, if you were in that situation, you wouldn't fall into that trap, would you?
You're obviously one of those fortunate people that, had you been born into a black family,
you'd still be white.

@RStuart,

<< Perhaps you can supply a similar link explaining why we *need* a snowball earth to confirm the correlation. I don't get it.

Well, RStuart, this is how I see it:

Monckton (and others) contend that there is only a weak link between CO2 and global temperature increases, since there have been periods (like the Cambrian) when the Earth concurrently held substantial surface ice and relative high concentrations of CO2.

You and your youtube mate , have countered, that, at the time the Earth was actually frozen over, akin to a ice ball. And it took some time (“25 millions years”, in fact!) for the greenhouse effect to erode the thick crust of ice. Just as it takes the heater in the alpine cabin, in the vid, some time to heat things up.

However, we have been led to believe by warmists –who tell us every other day – that the greenhouse effect has a short time fuse. Even with today’s comparatively sparse levels of CO2 [385 ppm] over the comparatively short 100-200 years span since industrialisation, anthropogenic CO2 has been ,apparently!, able to force the Himalayan glaciers to retreat by hundreds of metres, undermine the Greenland iceshelf , and “eat off chunks of the Antarctic the size of Maine”.

Having digested all that, it is a little hard to believe that a whopping 6000-7000ppm of CO2 ,aided and abetted by a younger tectonically active/hotter earth, took millions of years to erode the Cambrian ice skin --even if it was a thick planet wide crust

However, it gets even more incredible when we learn that the latest evidence coming in seems to point to the Cambrian ice being substantially less than an all Earth enveloping ice sheet (i.e. there was NO, repeat NO, planet wide ice sheet reflecting the heat!)

I can only surmise one of the two things :
1) Cambrian CO2 was a darn side more wimpy that modern CO2 ,or
2) There is something wrong with your AGW hypothesis.

rstuart, that is actually a less accurate summary of the Wikipedia entry. The entry lays a fair part of the blame on fertilisation of the oceans, not by CO2 but by erosion. But that is just Wikipedia's version, and on climate science Wikipedia is not particularly good. Others argue that the fertilisation came from sulphur emissions.

I understand the proposed mechanism for how ocean circulation might break down, but it's not particularly convincing argument in this case. If anoxic episodes are caused by higher temperatures caused by CO2 how do you explain the fact that the oceans weren't anoxic for most of pre-history.

Go and check the graph again http://www.ambitgambit.com/2011/05/30/so-you-think-carbon-pollution-is-bad-now/. See how miniscule CO2 concentrations are now, take into consideration its logarithmic function in terms of IR radation, and come back with a straight face and tell me that higher CO2 from these depressed levels is going to lead to a mass extinction.

Grim, I'll see your science qualifications and raise you. I've gone looking for your hero Peter Hadfield's qualifications. Can't find any reference. Perhaps you can fill in the gap for me.

While I find these latest comments fascinating (I am not biogeochemist, atmospheric physicist, palaeo-oceanogographer etc. like some here) may I humbly suggest you all get back to topic.

Or, start a general discussion thread and go holters-bolters there.

If you do, check out "Principles of Planetary Climate" - it may help sheath your swords :)