Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

What do you think of this report?
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong

I think it’s an agenda-driven misrepresentation of the discipline of climate modeling.

It’s helpful, I think, to consider its sources: prisonplanet.com, infowars.com and related websites, which are primarily the works of “paleoconservative” Alex Jones, and writer Micheal Asher, know for such blog posts as “Survey: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory”, in which he argues that there is no consensus among scientists that “humans are having at least some effect on global climate change”, because most papers in a survey of papers from 2004 to 2007 do not “an explicit endorsement of the consensus”.

In “Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong”, Asher states that, because of reliance on “totally wrong” equations, climate science has incorrectly predicted a “runaway greenhouse effect”, and agencies such NASA and NOAA are now attempting to suppress a correct theory that shows that disproves “global warming is a crisis”.

Both of Asher’s papers are, in my opinion, very disingenuous. “Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong” suggests that current concerns about global warming are based on a theory of “runaway greenhouse effect” (which to the best of my knowledge has not been proposed outside of speculative non-scientific writings in the 1970s), based entirely on “equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution” describing radiative equilibrium (which to knowledge is not used in current computer climate models, such as those described in Jean-Marc Jancovici ‘s “How can we know what will happen later on?”, but rather for first-order approximations of planets’ temperatures).

Jones and Asher both appear to me to be pursuing a strategy of presenting out controversial-seeming, out-of-context information “emphasizing disagreement” to assert either that most scientists do not agree with climate models showing a significant human influence on global temperature, or do, but are wrong.