Cont...

"Both HPG and Egan and Lagos work for energy industry clients and companies on energy policy. Ball is a Canadian climate change skeptic and was previously a "scientific advisor" to the oil industry-backed organization, Friends of Science. Ball is a member of the Board of Research Advisors of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Canadian free-market think tank which is predominantly funded by foundations and corporations.”

As Muller has demonstrated getting funding from industry isn't a definitive guarantee that certain positions will be taken, but again from a layperson's perspective it isn't a good look.

What really gets up the nose of a person like myself is any scientist from whatever side of the argument overstating their credentials. Since it is from these that we make our most serious judgement calls any exaggeration or embellishment cuts right to the heart of the trustworthiness of the scientific voice.

You quite rightly are very protective of those credentials and you yourself have vigorously questioned those of others including our Tim Flannery. In 2006 you sued one Dr. Daniel Johnson and the proprietors of a newspaper for questioning yours. In his Statement of Defence Dr. Johnson made a series of firm rebuttals to your claim.
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Johnson%20statement%20of%20defence.pdf

Particularly damning in my opinion was the 8 or so pages devoted to answering the charge from your Statement of Claim that “Ball had falsified his professional and academic credentials”.

I'm certainly not going to rehash them here but I do wish you had proceeded with the case because they raised serious questions that deserved answering in a court of law.

Have you addressed these matters elsewhere that is accessible by the ordinary reader like myself?

One question on them if I may, I note that in a letter to the Hon. Paul Martin, P.C., M.P. In 2003 you signed “Dr Tim Ball, Environmental Consultant, Victoria, British Columbia, 28 years Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg”. Are you disturbed that the OLO editor has de-capitalised you to “former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg”?

csteele

Go back and look at your own post. Basicaly its a case of throwing stones in a glass greenhouse. Hansen's career is on the line. He has to keep spinning the global warming line or he's dead. Ball has no such incentive. None of the sceptics do. There's hardly any money at all on the sceptics side, despite the extraordinary propaganda to the contrary that you see. Find a million which can be attributed, however loosely, to the sceptic cause and I'll find you $10 billion on the global warming side.

And the best you can find against Ball is that he was once connected with an oil company advisory board, or whatever it was. If we used that same criteria against the global warming side, they would all be disqualified on the spot. Many have connections with the likes of Greenpeace and all have accepted money, often many millions, to research global warming. They can't bite the hand that feeds them.

Tim Ball should be commended for his paper.

Sadly, warmist propagandists such as James Hansen still influence the Labor Govt's advisers and policy formulation. As a result, the Govt has been conned into adopting policies to convert from low-cost reliable coal-derived power to unreliable wind energy that costs at least twice as much and intermittent solar energy that costs at least six times as much, thus forcing electricity prices to sky-rocket, but having no impact on climate change.

Hypocritically, our PM is now trying to avoid the blame for the electricity price rises by blaming the States.

If only she would come to realise that electricity prices will keep rising thanks to her carbon dioxide tax and policy-driven measures to attain the renewable energy target (RET). There is simply no scientific nor economic justification for adopting such policies.

If the PM is serious about stopping further electricity price rises, she should abandon the RET altogether. The Coalition should do likewise if it is serious about adopting policy for the advancement of Australia

Dear Cumudgeon,

Thanks for taking up the cudgel. I have been busy so not had the chance to have some fun despite OLO being awash with GW articles recently, a good proportion of them coming from lawyers or economists.

You write;

“And the best you can find against Ball is that he was once connected with an oil company advisory board, or whatever it was.”. Not at all. You've read my post and that was not the gist of my message at all. In fact I said “As Muller has demonstrated getting funding from industry isn't a definitive guarantee that certain positions will be taken”.

I'm more concerned about judging opposing scientists via “the veracity we should be give to each based on their expertise or more specifically their qualifications and their areas of study.”

Dr Tim Ball, in his first sentence, basically calls Dr James Hansen despotic and you have the hide to claim I am throwing the stones?

To your contribution; “The problem has always been that there has never been any confirmation of the role of CO2 in the atmosphere. All we really know is that forecasts based on the action of CO2 have been unsuccessful. There is now a strong suspicion that its really the sun that drives climate.”

Bunkum.

Firstly there has never been any question that CO2 plays a role in warming this planet. If you want to deny the physics of CO2 then go ahead since as a journalist we understand it is not your area of expertise, however please don't expect us to follow.

James Hansen's 1981 paper in Nature is strong proof of just how well projections based on Physics stand up over time. It was a great piece of work especially given the information and computing power he had available to him at the time and has in no way been refuted.

Finally of course the sun drives climate, most notably via the Milankovitch Cycles which history shows will over ride quite high CO2 levels when the time comes. This negates nothing of Hansen's work.

Curmudgeon
You and your fellow travellers on this forum are not sceptics; you're deniers. You don't let any facts stand in the way of maintaining your position. Sceptics do change their position in light of evidence. So don't call yourself what you are clearly not.

Csteele; you have referred to Hansen’s 1981 paper as “brilliant”; it is not. In it Hansen develops the conventional greenhouse formula responsible for producing the 33C greenhouse temperature.

This formula ignores observational evidence about the relationship between atmospheric pressure and the lapse rate profile of the atmosphere.

In their 2nd paper Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tsheuschner show that by integrating the formulae for the physical processes which determine climate, what G&T call the Barometric Formulas such as Navier-Stokes, Coriolis and centrifugal accelerations, electromagnetic fields, ideal gas laws etc, the temperature profiles of idealized atmospheres can be calculated; G&T conclude that:

"In case of the adiabatic atmosphere the decrease of the temperature with height is described by a linear function with slope −g/Cp, where Cp depends weakly on the molecular mass……Since the measurable thermodynamic quantities of a voluminous medium, in particular the specific heat and the thermodynamic transport coefficients, naturally include the contribution from radiative interactions, we cannot expect that a change of concentration of a trace gas has any measurable effect."

CO2 is a trace gas.

A couple of points; firstly G&T’s work, peer reviewed and unrebutted does not exclude a greenhouse effect; it merely establishes its minor role.

2ndly and ancillary to point 1, CO2 does have a heat-trapping capacity but due to Hottel’s principles, domination of H2O in the emissivity spectrum and Beers Law that capacity is limited to levels below the current atmospheric concentration of CO2.

Finally not one of Hansen’s predictions about temperature have been verified; see:

http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/evans-david/hansen-1988-a-b-c-scenarios.gif

Hansen is not brilliant, he is an activist who is prepared to exaggerate, scarify and fudge the facts to support his cause.