They will have to cut them all down to fit in the 300,000 wind turbines.
Iām not the one who destroyed the power station.
Might have been nature taking revenge for all those fried birds.
What a refreshing break from all that serious discussion.
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You mean?
In the United States, approximately 9 billion chickens are killed for their flesh each year, and 305 million hens are used for their eggs. The vast majority of these animals spend their lives in total confinementāfrom the moment they hatch until the day they are killed .
Cos youāre starting to sound all lefty greeny, and welcome buddy, so thereās some stats to throw at the nasty people. Here we do one million a day for our nuggets, just FYI.
But not a lot of Golden Eagles are served up by KFC.
Great examples, any of them out for a month?
Confirmed conservationist, congrats. Be prepared for all sorts of bizarre criticism from angry old rusted ons. Canāt just be the pretty creatures though mate.
So, onto part 4 in our ongoing tour of Mr Macraeās little document, as contributed by @Bomber1408 and review requested by @JohnRain and @hambo.
(You guys OWE me for this! 
)
Today weāre finally up to the Discussion section, for our sins.
Macrae starts off this section with about a dozen or so paragraphs laying out his thesis, then goes on to iterate through a further 12 tenuously-related and increasingly incoherent points which he claims are āevidenceā. Hooo boy. We will look at the first (and less mouth-foamy) part today. Iām going to quote it as a whole and address it line by line, because to be honest this is where he starts REALLY Gish-galloping and I want to point out as many of his little tactics and evasions of the truth and dishonesties here as I can. What Iām really trying to hammer home in these little dissections of Mr Macrae is how incredibly hard you have to try to do any sort of comprehensive analysis and come to the conclusions he has. The amount of evidence you have to wilfully ignore, the amount of science you have to gloss over or pretend doesnāt exist, the incredible determination you must possess to simply wish away proof after proof after proof after critique after refutation after proof that youāre wrong. Itās understandable if someone who HASNāT read about the science in any depth, or who doesnāt have a scientific background, doesnāt know what to believe about climate change - especially with the universally poor coverage of the issue in most media. But the guys who sit around and trawl through hundreds of articles and spend years on this and obviously have all the energy in the world to spend on it - they lose all benefit of the doubt, in my book. And Iām trying to really demonstrate why.
For those unfamiliar, by the way, the Gish Gallop is a well-known debating tactic named after
a well-known creationist (who I believe is now in jail for tax fraud) used by crooks and liars, and is common enough that it has itās own wikipedia page.
During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4] In practice, each point raised by the āGish galloperā takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponentās time and may cast doubt on the opponentās debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
Okay, here we goā¦
Discussion:
Scientists who support the catastrophic human-made global warming (CAGW) hypothesis say that based on physics at the molecular scale, they KNOW that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and more CO2 will cause warming. Two questions: How much warming, and what are the scale-up effects?
Ok, with you so far.
How much global warming?
Christy & McNider (2017) and Lewis & Curry (2018) proved that climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 is too low to cause dangerous warming ā see Section #11.
There is no mention of either of these references in section 11. However, I did find what I think is them in section 9. Iāll address them there.
(Red flag, if the article youāre reading has stupid basic mistakes like this one, odds-on the actual science is slapdash too)
Furthermore, atmospheric CO2 changes LAG temperature changes at all measured time scales, including ~9 months in the modern data record and much longer in the ice core record. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that increasing atmospheric CO2 causes some mild warming, but full-earth-scale data prove that this CO2 warming effect is drowned out by the much larger impact of temperature on CO2.
Conclusion: Temperature drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. Climate is NOT highly sensitive to increasing CO2. Increasing CO2 will NOT cause dangerous global warming.
Thereās a lot going unmentioned here (and in part 3 we already covered how the rate-of-change method of temperature analysis that Macrae chose - without any explanation as to why - tends to drown long-term trends in short-term noise).
First of all, weāve got a COMPLETE reliance on Christ/McNider and on Lewis/Curry (which we will get to in due course). Thatās all. He cherry picks exactly two articles (and one is just a damn blogpost!) by sympathetic authors, and just casually assumes thatās enough. No. If youāre doing real science you have to engage with the counterarguments, you have to do an honest, comprehensive survey of the current state of the field of knowledge. These two papers are just more of Macraeās attempt to slap makeup on the rotting corpse of his shoddy propaganda in the hope someone in the pub will be dumb enough and drunk enough to take it home for the night.
Second. The earth is, unfortunately, still warming. Macrae is so busy saying āco2 causes warming not the other way around!ā that he conveniently forgets that, if co2 doesnāt cause warming, then suddenly he has NO explanation in his model for all the warming that is very plainly happening (even according to Macraeās own graphs, later in this article!). Reminds me a bit of the people who think the theory of evolution is too complicated to be real but who donāt believe in god, and so decide aliens created life. They never seem to really consider the question of where the ALIENS came from.
Third, gross oversimplification. He persists as portraying (on the back of some pretty dodgy maths, as discussed in part 2) that co2 levels are near-entirely driven by local temperatures and that there is no causual relationship the other way. This is false. We know of a HUGE number of climate feedbacks - that;s what makes modelling this stuff so hard. CO2 causes warming which causes icemelt which makes the earth darker which reflects less solar energy back into space. CO2 causes warming which melts permafrost which contains frozen peat which then continues to rot and release methane, which causes warming. CO2 causes warming which kills drought- and temperature-sensitive vegetation (which releases more CO2 as it rots) and therefore CO2 levels rise even more because the vegetation is no longer absorbing it. CO2 causes warming which causes humans to burn fossil fuels to run airconditioners all summer which causes more CO2 to be released. And by the way, itās not as if this is new or obscure science. If I do a quick search on sciencedirect.com (the one-stop show for ALL your peer-reviewed scientific needs!) for āclimate feedbackā, even when restricting myself to original research articles and not review articles or encyclopedia entries etc, I get around fifty thousand papers, of which probably around half are relevant based on the titles on the first few pages (thereās lots of stuff on economic feedback of climate policies, and feedback from focus groups about climate issues etcā¦). If I can find these 25 thousand papers, Macrae could too. But he prefers to rely on his two faithful articles instead, and not mention forcing at all.
Fourth, misrepresentation of whatās happening in the real world and in the climate record. We are in a unique position right now, in geological timescales, because most of the time in earthās history, Macrae would have been correct here. Temperature would have been the big driver of CO2, and the temperature largely stable and even stuff like ice ages would have come on over periods of tens of thousands of years. What makes our time special is that itās one of the few times in earthās history that there is an enormous amount of EXTRA co2 pouring into the atmosphere. Normally co2, temperature, and the biosphere come to some sort of rough equilibrium. However, every so often an external factor puts its finger on the scale. That factor might be drastically changed solar activity changing the temperature directly. Or that factor might be forced by CO2 increases happening outside the usual temperature/co2/biosphere cycle. This has happened in the past, caused by sufficiently large and long-lasting volcanic activity. It is happening now, due to us digging up carbon-based fuels and burning them and releasing co2. And again, this is not new or obscure science. The sciencedirect.com test in this case gives us OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND āclimate forcingā peer-reviewed articles, fifteen thousand just in the past 18 months! Now, Iām not sure ANYONE can keep up with reading all that stuff, but maybe he could have read one, or two? And even if he doesnāt accept their findings, maybe say why and justify his choice, rather than pretending the whole issue does not exist?
(Feedbacks, by the way, are why climate scientists often talk about ārunawayā climate change. Thatās the point when the human-emitted co2 has triggered enough feedback loops that human action can no longer prevent the warming process continuing and accelerating. Emissions from melting permafrost etc would be enough to drive warming even if humanity decarbonised overnight. Far as I know, there is no long-term (beyond 2100) forecasts of how hot the earth could get in a runaway scenario, but more than 8 degrees of warming is a fairly base level of assumption. I think a lot of climate scientists donāt like to think about this too much, the implications are too damn depressing)
What are the scale-up effects?
Earth is not molecular-scale, and there are complex CO2 interactions between the oceans, the land, the biosphere and the atmosphere. Some of these important interactions are described in #1 to #7 above.
āSomeā are not. ONE is.
Warming tropical oceanic temperatures cause evaporation of seawater, tropical water vapour increases (and water vapour is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2),
Yes it is, (and Iāll point out this is another climate feedback - more co2 = more warming = more evaporation = more water vapour in the air = more warming).
equatorial warming follows, that warming then extends to the rest of the planet, and atmospheric CO2 increases. Tropical sea surface temperatures increase, global temperatures increase, and atmospheric CO2 increases, in that order.
The huge āseasonal sawtoothā Keeling Curve of atmospheric CO2 is dominated by photosynthesis in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) Spring that draws down CO2, and oxidation in the Fall and Winter that releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. The Keeling Curve amplitude ranges from ~16 ppm at Barrow Alaska to ~1 ppm at the South Pole. The seasonal CO2 flux is much greater than the ~2 ppm average annual increase in CO2.
This is terrible maths and terrible science. First of all, the Keeling Curveās ~1 part per million annual variation at the south pole is NOT much greater than the ~2ppm annual increase in co2!! 2 is greater than 1, can we at least agree on THAT, damn you Macrae? Second, and more important - 16ppm is not that much greater than 2ppm either, in the greater scheme of things. What it means is that the co2 concentration is increasing so fast that the bottom of the cycle will have a higher concentration than the top of the cycle did less than a decade earlier. Thatās BIG and fast atmospheric change, in anyoneās language. Even in Macraeās occasional weaselwordy concessions that there MIGHT be a little bit of warming associated with human co2 emissions, weāre talking about a measurable impact here.
Atmospheric CO2 is increasing, and the conventional view is that this CO2 increase is human-made, caused by fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, etc. While this is scientifically important, it is not necessary to debate this point in order to disprove global warming alarmism.
Scientists including Salby, Berry and Harde have hypothesized that the increase in atmospheric CO2 to more than 400 ppm is largely natural and not mostly human-made. While my 2008 observations support this hypothesis, I have considered this question for ~11 years, and am still agnostic on the conclusion. Regardless of the cause, the increase in CO2 is strongly beneficial to humanity and the environment.
This is just arrant lies, thereās really no nicer way to put it than that. Just naked lies. There is a HUGE amount of analysis done on atmospheric CO2, and we can determine the ratio of naturally-emitted co2 to human-generated co2 by analysing the relative ratios of various isotopes of carbon atoms in the co2. Here is an article from FIFTEEN years ago explaining this fairly neatly.
As for the ābeneficial to humanity and the environmentā bit ā¦ weāll get to that as well.
References:
The Keeling Curve , Scripps Institution of Oceanography https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
Address to the Sydney Institute , Murry Salby, 2011 http://youtu.be/YrI03tsā9I
Weāve sunk to this, weāre referencing youtube videos of climate cranks lecturing to right-wing lobby groups and still trying to pretend this is a scientific paper. Have you no shame, Macrae?
āHuman CO2 Has Little Effect on Atmospheric CO2ā , Edwin Berry, 2019
https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/contradictions-to-ipccs-climate-change-theory/
Un-peer-reviewed blog post, Again.
āWhat Humans Contribute to Atmospheric CO2: Comparison of Carbon Cycle Models with Observationā , Hermann Harde, International Journal of Earth Sciences Vol. 8, No. 3, 2019
Remember Harde? Weāve met him before, he was the one who got his mates on the editorial board of a journal to accept his climate denial article against the recommendations of the expert peer reviewers. Funny how the same names keep cropping up, isnāt it?
Ah well, I was hoping to finish the article off today, but my shovel simply wasnāt big enough to deal with the bullshit. So tomorrowā¦
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The worst thing about all this great info is that there will still be people who will come here, read this (well a paragraph or two) and then go ānah heās wrongā and walk away thinking theyāve won.
No theyāll just ignore it, and then in a week or so time will drag their knuckles back into the thread and post some other crackpot BS
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Much appreciated, HM.
The fine Japanese whiskey awaits you at my joint.
Bomber1408 : āThatās really interesting HM and I feel like iāve learned a lot about your side of things, it certainly is a fascinating possibility youāve presented and my continued research into Plutoās effects on natural rain increase over London will only benefit. By the way have you read Barney McFarKcarltonās treatise onā¦ā
Essendon12 : āIf it takes that many big words to make your point HM then you have no point to make.ā
sorfed : āyouāre all idiots and iām a grumpy ignorant old ā ā ā ā so ā ā ā ā off and hug a rare wombat treeā
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And werewolf?
And werewolf?
Spoiler, part 5 will NOT be tonight, forgot we have a thurs night game this week!
(Remember when this website was a footy forum rather than a climate change debating society? I donātā¦)
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Thank you HM for spending a lot of time in writing about climate warming and change.
Appreciate your efforts and another perspective.
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Highest temps ever on record in Franceās ongoing Heat wave, ā¦ Fires ravaging Spain & Catalonia, ā¦ Melting Glaciers to the point of disappearance, Permafrost never before known not to be, now isnāt, releasing tonnes of the worst CC gas Methane into the atmosphere, ā¦ it just goes on getting worse.
Trump, Tories, Scumo, Werewolf, Capān Velcro et al, ā¦
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Can attest to how hit France has been. No one has seen it thus hit so early in summer.
Mate of mine is on the Canal du Midi. Reckons itās good beer-drinking weather.
Its OK because CC occurs naturally, therefore cannot be influenced by human activity.
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