Says The Canadian Free Press (warning: it has lots of stupid ads on it). I wonder what it is? But not very much. What does it *say*?

Well, its an attempt to counter Gores movie (oh good, that means people are worried by it…). There is much of the same-old-septic-rubbish in there, but a new (and bizarre argument): that we shouldn’t think a vast majority are convinced by GW, because we should only count a small number of those who actually understand detection and attribution.

This is a very funny argument, because of course none of the skeptics are in this category. What most of the skeptics quoted in the article are, are “former” this or that – something of a hint that its the Old Guard. And lots of geologists, for some odd reason.

Some of the septic gunk: ”paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame‘ – this is silly. If you’re arguing at this level you have nothing. As the ice core record makes clear, there is a very good correlation between CO2 and T, over the last 650 kyr. You can argue which one leads, but the correlation is definitely very high. Patterson is going into the further past, for reasons of his own, where the records are much poorer.

Closer to home, Karlén clarifies that the ‘mass balance’ of Antarctica is positive – more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the ‘calving’ of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans This is (a) duboius and (b) irrelevant. Last I heard, the mass balance is pretty hard to say, in absolute terms, but not terribly important – the base rate is factored into the observed sea level rise. What matters are changes to it. I very much doubt that snowfall in the interior is going to affect calving rates in the near future. OTOH A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future is close to fair-enough: a collapse of West Antarctica is conceivable, but not likely. Over in the Arctic, they have some quibbling (see-also John Flecks recent about a new paper on Arctic T trends… interesting) but there is no doubt that Arctic sea ice has declined over the last few decades; see also the RC Greenland stuf from a while back.

I have some measure of sympathy for them: the best evidence for global warming is… that the globe is getting warmer. But that makes for boring pictures, so calving icesheets is more fun in a movie (I haven’t seen it, BTW). But thats no excuse for deliberately distorting things in return.