What a joke.

This coming from a guy who has been caught out lying about his credentials and was completely unheard of until he started taking money from oil industry investors.

Denialists don't seem to be too fussy about the integrity of their sources. They'll accept the word of anyone who says what they want to hear.

Dear Leo Lane,

I quoted this to you;

"The global temperature rose 0.2°C between the middle 1960s and 1980, yielding a warming of 0.4°C in the past century. This temperature increase is consistent with the calculated effect due to measured increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide."

You replied with;

“What csteele has read is a dishonest beat up of Hansen’s paper, and taken it as fact.”

That 'dishonest beatup' was taken from the summary of Hansen's actual paper as published in the journal Science.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1981/1981_Hansen_etal.pdf

I am happy to concede that the editor, rather than Hansen and his co-authors, may well have written it to introduce the paper but to impugn that one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals is a “AGW fraud backer” and would indulge in a 'dishonest beatup” is ludicrous in the extreme. If your conspiracy theories run this deep I'm not sure there is much use in engaging with you.

Retract and I will endeavour to address the other quotes.

Dear Don Aitken,

You wrote;

“You are offering (as Hansen was) correlation as though it were causation.”

It is not a 'casual hypothesis' but rather strongly grounded calculations of positive and negative forcings on the climate, particularly from the increased concentrations of CO2.

If you examine Fig 5 on page 963 of the journal you will see modelling for a climate sensitivity of 2.8C for a doubling of CO2. Once forcing from volcanic aerosols and sun variance are included there is indeed strong correlation to the observed temperatures but he has only gone there to explain why “The time history of the warming obviously does not follow the course of the CO2 increase”. The base calculations of warming from increased GHG's are his concern, the other two are what he refers to as 'noise'.

“It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980's.”

Indeed it did.

Dear Rhrosty

You wrote;

“Is it man-made or just part of the natural cycle? Does that really matter? Either way, there are things we can and should do to ameliorate against its effect,”

In a way you have hit the nail on the head. If Ghia decides its time to let the earth slip into another Ice Age I'm selfish enough to say bugger that and stand shoulder to shoulder with the next bloke shovelling coal into a furnace as fast as I could. If someone claimed it was our destiny and tried to stop me I would pause only long enough to deliver the flat side up along side of their head.

We have had a rather blessed 10,000 years of relatively stable climatic conditions that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. Call me selfish I for one am pretty keen for them to continue for myself and for my species.

We are getting some pretty strong indications from some solid science that we are tipping the balance the other way. On this occasion the people getting in our way of us doing things to ameliorate against its effect are those claiming it is all just a scam, often with vested interests.

I'm just swinging a shovel here.

for csteele:

I wrote about a 'causal hypothesis', not a casual one!

You haven't answered my objection, and have added another weakness. Yes, he argues that the correlation is strong, but that's all it is. It's not my job to provide an alternative hypothesis. His job is to disentangle CO2 from natural variability. He doesn't do it, or even try.

And you say that he was proved right as warming did increase by the end of the 20th century. And indeed it did, but after 1998 warming went down and then up and then down again, and then up, and so on, and the line that he thought would continue to the present has faltered. There's got to be something else than CO2 out there, hasn't there. Do you know what it is? Is there only one factor, or are there many? How would you go about deciding?

How about you retract your baseless statement:” to impugn that one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals is a “AGW fraud backer” and would indulge in a 'dishonest beatup” is ludicrous in the extreme”, csteele?

The reason you cannot reply to the quotes, is that I have given you the reason, from the paper itself, as to why it is nonsense to assert that Hansen was right.

The last 14 years has seen a continuous rise in the proportion of the trace element CO2 in the atmosphere, and no rise in global temperature. The warming up to 1998 released the CO2 into the atmosphere. The CO2 has caused no warming, so there is not even a correlation now, never mind the causation that never was.

Do you realise how stupid your statement about “world’s most prestigious” sounds?

The Royal Society was the world’s most prestigious until it was subverted to publishing untrue statements about AGW.

As the Hon. Nigel Calder, who was editor of New Scientist, and has followed the AGW scam from its inception says: ”Many eminent folk from science, politics, industry, finance, the media and the arts are taken in by man-made climate catastrophe. (In London, for example, from the Royal Society to the National Theatre.) Sadly for them, in the past ten years they’ve crowded with their warmist badges into a Hall of Shame, like bankers before the crash.”

http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-ray-action/

I do not expect that you have the prestige to make it into the Hall of Shame, csteele, but your assertions would get you there, if only you had the prestige.

By the way, I had to obtain the quotes from secondary sources. Hansens’s 1981 paper is disabled, on the NASA website. I wonder why?

Possibly to cover the fraud backers who make assertions that he was right.

For Anthony:

>> If the Greenhouse is still operating on Venus and sunlight in the form of UV is penetrating the atmosphere and heating the surface but IR is being prevented from leaving the surface by the ~96%CO2 concentration in the Venusian atmosphere then why isn't Hansen right about a runaway effect, not on Earth, but on Venus?

... please sort this out for the poor deluded fools who are trying to make sense of this. <<

I do understand why wannabe fools such as yourself, cohenite, might have difficulty. Like I said, stick to your day job.

The high albedo of Venus is due to its sulphuric acid clouds. Consider an albedo of say 30%; then the adsorbed solar radiation early in its history would have been about 330 W/m2 (which is just barely in excess of the mandatory ‘runaway threshold’ of about 310 W/m2 for Venus’ surface gravity). Therefore, if we neglected (we don't) the effects of clouds, higher surface albedo, sub-saturation, etc., Venus could exist in a hot and steamy but ‘non-runaway’ state with a liquid ocean (the high water vapour content of the upper atmosphere would still allow an enhanced rate of photo-dissociation and escape of water into space). Venus probably succumbed to a ‘runaway’ state since even with the present solar constant, the absorbed solar radiation without sulphuric acid clouds would be about 460 W/m2, well in excess of the ‘runaway threshold’.

'Part-time' lawyers (when they're not blogging or hosting the likes of wannabe 'Lords') pretending to be climatologists should leave planetary atmospheric physics well alone – or undertake a real undergraduate course in the principles of planetary climate.