Posted by coby on July 29, 2010 Dr Roy Spencer, normally a darling of the septics, is getting the full denialist savaging over at his own blog for daring to defend the physical basis for the greenhouse effect.
CanadaFreePress saw “NASA” in his job title and must have mistaken him for Jim Hansen as they hold nothing back in their scorn.
All very amusing!
Nothing like watching the denialists engage in some desperate doctrine enforcement!
“Canada Free Press” seems to be a particularly strange collection of libertarian conspiracy theorists with an obsession for American politics.
Does any other climate scientist put their full name and title with all their posts and comments?
All I can say is “wow!” Reading the comments over there is painful. The vast majority of posters have no concept of how absorption and radiation of light works, or the fact that light can be transformed into heat by absorption and intermolecular collision. The understanding of basic thermodynamics is abysmal. No wonder these denialists are so thick-headed in their opinion: that is because it is just an opinion. No basis in fact or science. Absolute ignorance.
Spencer has two further posts up, one proposing a backyard experiment, then a post describing the results (which were, of course, what he predicted).
He’s doing some nice stuff … not that any of the idiot deniers over there are learning anything.
“…darling of the septics…”? Don’t let your blog tank like that!
Tasty -
Ethon
At least Spencer gets a chance to be the good guy, trying to educate deniers (and even Spencer calls them that!) about science. I wonder if he will be interested in going to more of the denialist conferences in the future, though.
The comments argy-bargy was civil enough, but the Canada Free Press article was extraordinary.I think Coby was 100% correct in his theory that the author saw the words NASA and went into overdrive. He may get a “was my face red” moment.
Regrettably,my formal physics education stopped when I was 18 so I am not in any kind of position to make an informed judgement. I did however think I followed Dr Spencer’s exposition and found it entirely believeable.
What has really astounded me about this is that there are obviously plenty of people who are on the face of it knowledgeable about physics who are able to argue amongst themselves about this presumeably far from arcane effect.
Common sense (not always the best guide, I admit) tells me that any change in the composition of the atmosphere, (unless it is by way of a change which by some miracle of chance entirely mimics all reactions of the prevous state) however small, would have an effect of some sort, again however small, on the rate at which the planet reradiates the heat it has received back into space.
How on earth one ever calculates this, or harder still, measures it, is and will remain a complete wonder to me, given the extraordinary number of variables involved and the observational errors which must be introduced by the need to estimate cloud cover,local variability of CO2 content and water vapour etc: and the need to factor in variability in the amount of radiation actually being received from the sun in the first place and any time lags involved. I would have thought the margins of error would swamp any results.
I am with Roy Spencer on the theory, but how some people can be so sure of their figures as regards the AMOUNT of warming being caused by the increases in CO2 will remain a bit of a question mark in my world.
Fascinating stuff.
Jack, have you ever browsed through the IPCC reports? It is not impossibly technical, depending on how much detail you have a stomach for. You could perhpas find out how these things are calculated, and find out if people are in fact “so sure” of the figures. Hint: the error margins are indeed very large.
I’m with Rob (#3): . . . Wow!
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