Lies on Climate Change

Professor *** Hall (I have removed his name, because I don't want google searches for his name leading people here) from the Chemical Engineering department delivered a talk yesterday for the ME Grad student seminar. His talk was supposed to be on biomass fuel conversion - which is his area of expertise.

What is not his area of expertise is the science of Climate Change. But that did not stop him from delivering a few slides straight from the Rush Limbaugh pocketbook .

Firstly, there was this horrendous claim that the world has been cooling for the last few years. Not warming. Cooling. His view was that all plots about global warming in the media were "MODELS" and not actual temperature data. The hockeystick curve is a "model".

This is incorrect. The hockeystick curve does not come from a model. Is is actual temperature and CO2 data based on ice cores, alga concentration, CO2 concentration in trapped air, tree ring width measurements and several other techniques (primarily because those stupid pterodactyls on ancient earth were not considerate enough to measure temperatures and record them). While it would be wrong to just believe one reconstruction, when several totally independent actual (not simulated) reconstructions tell the same story, it would make more sense to believe them. And that's what the smart climatologists have done. We've got several hockey-stick curves tracking temperatures for a very long period.. And they all tell the same story.

And then he went on to make an amateur flaw, in the spirit of "The ocean is salty. The rivers feed the ocean, so they must be salty". He went ahead and stated that human emissions are a small percentage of the actual co2 concentration on the planet. They're so small that they can't change anything.

But he fails to notice that human emissions are ANNUAL. They're a time derivative. The earth's co2 concentration is a concentration. Of course it is meaningless to talk about percentages. It's the compounding effect of using these for a very very long time (100 years). There's a thorough debunking of this argument here.

And when asked why climate change skeptics were not able to publish in reputed journals, he answered that all climate change is in political documents (such as Science, Nature and New Scientist, I added.). His discussion of climate change seemed to resemble the flat earth society website. Here is a very good sentence from that website:

Q: "Why do you guys believe the Earth is flat?"

A: Well, it looks that way up close. In our local frame of reference, it appears to take a flat shape, ignoring obvious hills and valleys.

Almost all his claims on climate change are incorrect. I felt like yelling out "You Lie!" during his speech. But I did not.