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Saturday, July 23, 2011

He Said, They Said

There was a climate change lecture at Colorado State University the other day.
  • Fred Singer said that worrying about climate change is a "psychosis."
  • William Gray said only that man-made climate change is "bunk" and "hokum."
  • Steve Goddard said that it was "suspicious" that the room where Singer spoke was not set up to display charts.
  • "Suspicious" is a good word for some of the charts Fred Singer has displayed in the past.
Scott Denning of CSU, who said there is nearly unanimous agreement among scientists in his department that human-emitted carbon dioxide will warm the planet, gave some interesting numbers I hadn't seen before:
  • the reduction in solar irradiance during the Little Ice Age was about 1 W/m2
  • the reduction during a Big Ice Age is about 7.5 W/m2
“So, the Earth’s climate is demonstrably sensitive to heat of a few watts per square meter that persist over a long period of time,” he said.
  • Anthony Watts denied that Colorado State University exists.

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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:54 AM

    I think Watts actually said was that there was clearly no good evidence that CSU exists and just showing him buildings and students and academics proved nothing and was part of the Marxist plot...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve Bloom4:08 PM

    Those insolation figures are apples and oranges, although the conclusion is unaffected. The LIA number refers to an actual decrease in irradiance, while the ice age number would be for NH high latitude summers (=> reduced melting) due to Milankovitch cycles and involved no change in irradiance. Note that the LIA figure is somewhat speculative since it's hard to disentangle volcanic and solar forcing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. David Appell4:35 PM

    Thanks Steve. Why is it hard to disentangle volcanoes and solar for the LIA? And were there a lot of volcanoes during the LIA (besides Tambora)?

    ReplyDelete