I've found increasingly the believers in AGW are becoming irate, defensive and even more insulting. People who believe strongly in something which turns out to be false often become very angry and tend to transfer their bitter disappointment and shame into anger against those reasonable and sane people who tried to dissuade them from following what turned out to be a false prophet.

So it is with Bugs.

Angry and bitter that his pet apocalyptic vision has turned out to be just another street corner end of the world prognosis, albeit with a lot more money, prestige and carte blanche, Bugsy turns on those who told him so.

And like a lot of anonymous trolls he gets personal.

I read somewhere that AGW is like the Garden of Eden myth; and I think a lot of its followers have become child-like in their unquestioning belief in this theological treatise. It's like a religion where otherwise intelligent people revert to a child-like belief and accept declaratory pronouncements as gospel.

It must be shattering to have your belief threatened especially if you are also making a good living and have your sense of superiority wrapped up in the whole psychological mess as well.

So Bugs I want you to know that I feel your pain and disappointment that the world isn't going to blow up; at least not from human CO2.

Have you thought about retraining into another potential apocalypse field, say asteroid strikes? That would appear to have legs wouldn't it? We know the pesky rocks strike Earth regularly whereas the Earth has never blown up due to CO2.

Why don't you set up a new movement and call yourselves the Tunguskans? I reckon that would be a winner and then you can leave the weather to the real experts who can look at and understand an almanac.

Whereas you guys started out that way, eh cohenite.

I think you should leave the silly narratives to spindoc, he does it better.

Oh, and BTW I would suggest you look up what 'logarithmic' means. The IPCC actually says and has already taken into account what you are saying.

So you are saying that YOU believe exactly what you saying is the 'claptrap'! AHAHAHAHAHA

If it wasn't so sad it would be funny.
Actually, it is funny.

Dear GrahamY,

You wrote;

“Interesting to see that this article has attracted a swarm of neo-denialists - these are people who believe that CO2 is warming the earth but refuse to accept the IPCC predictions. You distinguish them from denialists, who are people who never accepted the IPCC predictions, despite believing that CO2 warms the earth.”

Sorry mate but I really struggled to nut my way through this. Are you taking the piss?

Further may I address your chastisement of Bugsy questioning Mr Forbe's graph. You claimed “He's graphed temperature movements against carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

No he had not. What Forbes did instead was take the oil company BP's figures for selected emission groups and which carried the following disclaimer;

“The carbon emissions above reflect only those through consumption of oil, gas and coal, and are based on standard global average conversion factors. This does not allow for any carbon that is sequestered, for other sources of carbon emissions, or for emissions of other greenhouse gases. Our data is therefore not comparable to official national emissions data.”

Perhaps reflecting on your own advice - “If you're going to get into these arguments and suggest other people have no idea what they're talking about you should be sure you do.” might be appropriate.

Dear Bugsy,

Perfectly reasonable question my friend and one others here do not seem to understand. This was a pretty sloppy article by someone trotting out some rehashed anti-AGW themes and the graph was a good indication of just that.

That being said I have yet to find a geologist who fully supports the notion of AWG. It just doesn't seem to be in their makeup. I think it must have something to do with the timescales they have been trained in. However Mr Forbes does also seem to have some direct financial associations with the mining industry and other associations with groups like the very much discredited Heartland Institute.
http://www.desmogblog.com/carbon-sense-coalition

To his credit though he does include a link to the dataset he used for his very 'interesting' graph.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/files/download-noaa-co2-emissions-020714.xlsx

It is worth going back to the first graph in the article to point out its true value. Firstly, as more than one poster has pointed out the fact that in the early part of the curve CO2 emissions were actually predicted to be cooling the atmosphere. This should have been an immediate indication that the graph was bogus.

This immediately raises the issue of the ability of the author of this piece, and indeed anyone relying on this graph, to detect bogus information. If they are not able to do so, then how much of the rest of what they write is also bogus?

A second issue raised by one poster is the use of a 6th order polynomial to fit the 'data'. This is a less obvious major error, because many people (Mr Cox among them) are fairly ignorant of statistical procedures. Curve fitting is done with appropriate equations that describe the system and from which constants can be extracted that have real meaning. 6th order polynomials do not do this, as they have no relationship to anything in the real world. Anyone fitting a 6th order polynomial has no idea of what they are doing, and their conclusions will be useless.

On the basis of that first graph alone, I am confident in dismissing this article as a collection of bogus dribble. There might be something correct in at he article (after all a stopped clock is right twice a day), but I couldn't be bothered ploughing through to find it.

Abbott is out of step, the carbon price is the only advancement toward the reduction of co2, His tree planting gets no accolades what so ever.
We are already inundated with bush fires. When and if the carbon price is lifted, there will be no change, goods will not be any cheaper. Electricity will not reduce, Power is market driven and subject to change every five minutes. The cost of power is upward because of the service fees not power generation. Generation is in decline because of solar and wind, so Abbott is so far off the mark, caused by his mouth.

Dear Argonomist,

I agree that the graph is bogus but possibly not the way you do.

Mr Forbes is perfectly within his rights to produce a graph attempting to show the relationship between human produced fossil fuel emissions and temperature changes. Further, as this is a ratio he can really set the zero mark where ever he pleases and he did just that.

The bogus nature comes from the fact that it is erroneously labelled 'NOAA-Global temperature impact of CO2 emissions'. While it does include some data from that organisation this is not a graph from NOAA.

So the question becomes was this by design or oversight? If it was the former the claims regarding the author's honesty should be judged in that light. If it were the latter, which I am inclined to suspect, then it speaks to the author's familiarity, or lack thereof, of scientific convention, which is also quite damning.

It should be noted that in his original piece on the c3headlines site Mr Forbes does explain the make-up of his graph;

“Using a combination of the NOAA annual global temperature dataset and two sources of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, it can be determined how each new tonne of CO2 emissions is "accelerating" temperatures, or not.”
http://www.c3headlines.com/2014/02/noaa-climate-impact-cumulative-co2-emissions-since-1880-nil-those-stubborn-facts.html

The fact that this failed to make the article here was unfortunate, as was permitting the graph to remain thus titled when reproduced on OLO. If I were a representative of NOAA I don't think I would be at all comfortable with the graph as published, even given the very faint 'www.c3headlines.com' in the title block.

It is a given that OLO normally shows solid rigour in this regard. Mistakes do happen but I think this one needs to be rectified as soon as practicable.