If you want any credibility or respect at all, Lazar, you will have to do better than this:
“Yet Al Gore does not repeat nonsense like Paul Unulaska does.”
This is patently false. Many of Gore’s pronouncements have been debunked and in several instances shown to be outright misrepresentations and untruths. His problem, and that of too many other AGW proponents, is the reduction of a great and poorly understood complexity to a simplicity that serves a narrow political agenda.
Your apparent interest in and citation of principles of theoretical atmospheric physics, while it addresses an important component of the problem, is illustrative. Atmospheric physics is but a single component of the question and I conclude that you unduly weigh its importance at the expense of other, perhaps far more important variables. Atmospheric physics in isolation and even in some aggregate where it has precedence (I don’t care how much you quantify it or build models of it), while it may explain the processes and elements of atmospheric physics does not necessarily explain or answer long term global climate trends. Without the context and a much FULLER UNDERSTANDING than we presently have of many complex variables the question of whether and if even AGW is important can not be answered. But I assume even you will acknowledge that. (Or at least common sense would suggest you should.)
Consider (but let us not limit ourselves to) for example, our incomplete knowledge of 1) myriad oceanic processes and their dependent relationships as they relate to this question, 2) an understanding of the processes of natural carbon sequestration and release over the millions of years of earth history, 3) the cyclic nature and variability in solar radiation over similar time spans, 4)the impact of differing geologic processes such as volcanism and glaciation and a progression of environmental changes as the planet has evolved over 100′s of millions of years, culminating most recently (over the last couple million years) in 5) extreme unexplained climatic variations characterized by huge advances and retreats of ice within the Pleistocene (and an unknown number of smaller oscillations within each of the advance and retreat phases of the four (or more) past glacial episodes), or 6) geologically recent, and historically low atmospheric CO2 levels compared to the extremes that “science”, by golly, has determined have occurred in the distant past. Science does not fully understand the how or why of any of these, their relative importance and what impact they have. Neither does it understand the significance of such recent events as the Maunder Minimum, or the Medieval Warm Period or the more recent “Little” Ice Age. Now combine that with highly variable rates of occurrence over time, not only at an almost infinite number of different geographic locations around the globe but with issues of both measurement accuracy and sampling validity, numerous questions about short term and longer time frames, differing base lines, and an entire raft of possible methodological shortcomings. These are the reasons that a growing number of scientists and others are skeptical. They know they don’t know. They know that science is imperfect. They have studied the history of science and they know its past failings.
But the question, Lazar, is not one of science. It is not even one of faith—though a religion is what many believe this issue has become. It is really a question of common sense and logic, which is what I always supposed was part of science. That has been forgotten–whether by USGS (in the last several days) who derives its funding from a political machine with agendas, or by Dr. Hanson and his NASA colleagues who also strive for continued or greater funding from government, by numerous grant striving university academicians crawling on bended knee to the alter of NSF, the European Union, the otherwise failed UN or whatever other agency holds out the possibility of grant money. AGW has, unfortunately, turned many in the scientific community into prostitutes to mammon and their naïve minions into worshipers of false gods. They have thus lost a great deal of their credibility and you should not be surprised that many no longer believe what they and their uninformed supporters have to say.
So go ahead and exclain about how Al Gore doesn’t spout nonsense like Paul Unalaska, how I and others wear tinfoil hats and are “uncool”, you diminish not myself, John Moore, Thinking Person or the others with your narrow, largely uninformed arrogance, you diminish only yourself and your own“argument”.
