In praise of Carbon

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:57:53 GMT  <== Science/Technology ==> 

John Brignell at Number Watch - some facts about the element of life, Carbon, and the "benign gas" that we breathe out and that plants recycle, using solar energy, into oxygen and food: carbon dioxide. Algore's religious crusade has turned these wonders into demons, for one and only one purpose, to enslave the masses and steal their money. [root]

There is no scientific theory linking carbon dioxide to the "runaway" global warming that is the basis of the calamitous predictions. The contribution of the gas to the making of a comfortable planet by the greenhouse effect is well understood, modest and self-limiting. It is only turned into a terror by computer models. These are worthless; depending as they do on extensive guesswork about the ill-understood mechanisms and interactions involved in climate, and involving so many tunable parameters and feedback factors that they could produce any desired result by appropriate tweaking. A quarter of a century ago, before science came under firm bureaucratic control, such models would have been laughed out of court.

The putative experimental evidence is equally dubious. It all sounds very impressive and scary, but on close examination tends to dissolve like the morning mist in the light of the sun. It is only recently that a small troupe of volunteers with few resources has begun a serious audit of the claims. The much vaunted "high-quality" sensor network turns out to be ramshackle almost beyond belief; the processing of the data involves inapplicable methods, glaring errors and unexplained adjustments, which all mysteriously turn out to exaggerate the desired effect. There is a morbid and obsessive secrecy among the practitioners that is quite contrary to the open nature of the scientific method, which prompts the question "What have they got to hide?" Details of publicly funded "research" are kept, quite illegally, from the public who fund it; and only the claimed results, inevitably apocalyptic, are exposed. Such data that have been wrested with great difficulty from their creators almost invariably turn out to be subject to serious dubiety.

Carbon has been framed for purely political purposes.

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