Lexi,

Sorry about that. Someone made the suggestion and you do share a fondness for a particular author and an identity as a Catholic in conjunction with a hostility toward Catholic belief so I thought he might be on to something. Thanks for responding.

Eclipse Now,

“If you truly doubt what Co2 does and want to SEE the absorption spectra of Co2 with your own eyes then watch this, 90 seconds in. The whole 10 minutes are worth watching, but go to about 1:30 if you're in hurry. If you can make *this* just go away I'd be impressed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Un69RMNSw

The good thing about these types of things is that you can listen to them in the background and then flick over if something is going to be visual. I watched/listened to it all. Typing this response will be much more of an incursion into my time then watching/listening to that video. You might like to know how the video looks/sounds to someone who doesn’t share your passion and wants to get to the bottom of it. Perhaps you can pull me up on some of this stuff from your knowledge.

It stated that “Making predictions is hard especially about the future.”

I don’t know when else predictions would be made for but I’m sure I don’t express everything perfectly either so I won’t be too critical of that. The argument he leads into is that we just do our best to predict. This would sound objective but unfortunately he uses rhetorical terminology like “climate deniers” and plays a movie where someone says “I think all you scientists are crackpots. Nothing is going to happen.” Immediately followed by something happening. This creates the unfortunate appearance that the video is not an objective look at things.

CONT

Then a heat camera on one end of a tube films a flame. Carbon dioxide is introduced to the tube and the heat camera no longer picks up the flame. What is the temperature of the CO2 being introduced? My expectation is that gases stored in containers at room temperature then expanding rapidly due to release will cool. Any gas that was very cool (and didn’t ignite from the flame) would surely interfere with the heat of the flame reaching the camera if a layer of cold gas was briefly inserted. Nothing is said about that. No attempt is made to measure the temperature of the CO2 or to ensure that it reaches room temperature. That doesn’t mean that CO2 doesn’t absorb heat. It just means that it is a particularly poor illustration.

The video then shows some predictions that were correct. Whether they support a greenhouse effect or just a good understanding of what happens to arctic areas (perhaps from the historical record) based on an already observed trend of increased temperature it is hard to tell.

It gives a graph of Hansen from 1988 and compares it with the GISS Station Temperatures. The fit between 1960 and 2005(?) looks good. But considering he obviously could have accessed the data between 1960 and 1988 a substantial portion of that graph obviously would fit well. In 1988 he gave three scenarios ranging from high to low emissions (Graphs A, B and C). The narrator indicates that the B graph is considered the most likely. Given the rhetorical approach generally and that we had just looked at Hansen’s 1981 paper where he also had 3 graphs I couldn’t help wondering about the basis for the graphs in the 1988 presentation. This was explicit in the 1981 paper that was shown. Graph A was based on business as usual. Graph B was based on Coal being phased out from 2020. Graph C was based on Coal being phased out from 2000.
CONT

I can’t really tell whether the actual temperature graph is heading toward the B or C. Can you? Anyway I don’t believe that massive actions have been taken like a global phasing out of Coal in 2000. (Correct me if I’m wrong). Therefore if the current temperatures are indistinguishable from his predictions for that scenario (?) wouldn’t that be good grounds for a wait and see if the planet is heading for doom before taking a risk with people's livelihood by introducing a new tax?

It argues that Hansen’s model is good with volcanoes and assumes that confirms all his greenhouse assumptions. More particularly it states that there is an almost perfect fit with Hansen’s predicted dip in temperature based on a hypothetical mid 1990s volcano and the temperatures after the 1991 volcano. This is described as a “resounding affirmation”. For some reason they don’t superimpose the two dips – the obvious way to enable a comparison. However visually it looks like the magnitude of Hansen’s dip is at least twice that of the volcano and looks to be about three times the size. Doubling an effect to my way of thinking has pluses and minuses. It adds weight to being able to predict an effect if the direction concurs but there would be real consequences if predictions exceed magnitude twofold (or threefold).

It cites 3 sets of predictions (1990, 1995 and 2001)(As the predictions come later the graphs are less steep as if there is a bias toward too steep graphs that has to keep being addressed). The top of the 1990 graph for 1995 is 0.7(degrees Celsius? Degrees Farenheit?) It then compares this with actual data and notes a similarity. The actual graph hits 4.5 in 2005. This is close to the 1995 and 2001 predictions. It appears to be either fluctuating downward or trending downward at that time. It is not apparent which. The video was uploaded on June 26, 2009 so it would be nice if the producer took it forward a few years so we could see how that eventuated.
CONT

Dear Pelly,

Well said.

Dear Eclipse,

You too.

Dear Belly,

Thanks for that.

Dear mjpb,

Correction: I am not hostile to Catholic belief.
I am a Catholic. What I disapprove of is the
misuse of power by ambitious, powerful, and
ruthless men in the church who are the antithesis
to Christ's teachings. Big difference.

Dear Eclipse,

The following website may be of interest:

http://newmatilda.com/2011/08/04/finally-climate-policies-explained

The candle illustration is a simplified way of showing what spectrometers and light prisms do when they measure Co2. Science has known how Co2 absorbs different spectra of energy for a hundred years.

<<But considering he obviously could have accessed the data between 1960 and 1988 a substantial portion of that graph obviously would fit well.>>
They develop a climate model with all the variables, and then test them against past history to see how accurately they are running. They take the model back to 1960 with given pollution, fossil fuel consumption, etc from historical records, and much like a computer game in fast forward let the model run forward for a half century or so. This picks up variables and errors and so the models have become increasingly sophisticated.

Graph C is interesting. The Association for Peak oil and GAS geologists I read are like a new consensus of old-timer geologists counting how much oil, coal, and gas is left. They keep raising the fact that the WORST case IPCC scenarios just might not be possible — there might not be enough coal for the WORST cases! That doesn't mean global warming goes away, it's still real science and still a real problem. But it does mean that there's a race on between needing to replace our energy systems because they're dirty and replacing them because there's not enough!

<<wait and see if the planet is heading for doom before taking a risk with people's livelihood by introducing a new tax?>>
Fair point, but what about documented health costs to your wallet? They burn coal and it causes lung and throat cancer and other respiratory problems.

Not only that, energy infrastructure takes *decades* to replace. NSW will run out of coal in 30 years if we increase consumption 3% p.a.
Sydney Morning Herald article
http://tinyurl.com/3ye9ax

There's a summary of models here with some different examples to just temperatures.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm

There's some VERY technical stuff here. This is their "Models Category" tag so you can just keep browsing this back as far as you like and read everything they say about models. Realclimate is by real climatologists, but I sometimes find it unreadable with my humanities background.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/climate-modelling/

(This has, after all, always been about what I can *read*. I never pretended I was a climatologist and that his was always about what I can comprehend from the papers, not from my own technical working. I'm an easy target myself, but this is about what I perceive to be the Cherry-Picking Straw-Man attacks of people like Dr Evans who don't even respond to the empirical data submitted by Professor Brooks in reply).

Then there's the wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_modelling

Hopefully these will give you more information. The SkepticalScience link at the top looks like it addresses some of your questions.

PS: I really *want* global warming to disappear as a concern. Then we could liquefy all that coal to help us deal with peak oil and give us a bit more time to rebuild everything.