I am not a “coal industry lobbyist”. I get nothing from any coal industry.
Are you not the Richard S Courtney that is a Technical Editor for CoalTrans International (journal of the international coal trading industry) and was a Senior Material Scientist of the National Coal Board (also known as British Coal) and a Science and Technology spokesman of the British Association of Colliery Management (a coal industry union)? Were you not involved in the Leipziq Declaration? Apologies if you are not this Richard S Courtney who is clearly a mouthpiece for the coal industry.
The attempt to smear me shows how little you trust your dispute of my statements.
I prefaced my statement by saying that it did not relate directly to the validity of your arguments. Further I withheld comment about “Energy&Environment” as a publication until you attempted to give it more weight than it merited.
it is not “disingenuous” to choose 1998 as the year when the last period of warming stopped.
You say you are familiar with El Niño / Southern Occilation and are aware that multiple factors are involved in warming or cooling climate. You then choose a known peak El Niño year (with its accompanied warming) to assign as the end of global warming. This is at best disingenuous.
An imperfect but illustrative analogy would be the energy usage of a family of four. Their energy usage has been steadily climbing over the years. Periodically they have house-guests that stay for a few weeks or months and cause spikes in their energy usage. After the most recent extended visit that caused a peak in usage the household usage plateaued for a period. It did not drop to pre-house-guest levels, but plateaued at the house-guest level without the house-guests present. What you have done is quite similar to choosing to begin tracking energy usage at this peak of house-guest usage and to then claim that since a plateau followed that the family’s energy usage had peaked and has since held steady, therefor the family is not using more energy than before. While this may be true in some technical sense it is disingenuous.
And it is not “nonsense” to state that the sulphate aerosol excuse for the cooling from 1940 to 1970 “does not stand up”. I stated why it “does not stand up”, and I cited the reference.
You state that it does not stand up because when sulfates are combined with soots they produce a forcing of 0.55 Wm-2 when soot by itself produces a forcing of 0.90 Wm-2. When soot in isolation produces ~60% more warming than in concert with sulfates that is not an argument against sulfate cooling. It is an argument that soot warming can overwhelm sulfate cooling.
In the end it amounts to an argument that soots should be more strongly considered when confronting global climate change. That is an argument with some merit and was the point of Jacobson’s 2000 article you referenced and his later work. Of course you probably know that. Referencing this in an attempt to dismiss AGW is disingenuous and assumes that the reader either will not or cannot (no easy access to subscriptions) read and understand the article referenced.
Evidently, you think that scientists don’t have political, personal, economic, and religious (or anti-religious) biases and never engage in group-think mentality.
Scientists are people and are subject to human frailties and fallibility that is why the method and peer review are so important. On subjects relating directly to their expertise I trust scientists far more than I do politicians and lobbyists. When consensus develops around a particular hypothesis it is something to consider. When other competing hypotheses fail and one does not that is also something to consider. When one hypothesis is supported by hundreds of peer reviewed articles and the other is supported by a few agenda driven publications I tend to give the former more weight. To be accused of religious thinking for supporting the former in favor of the latter is laughable. That is not to say that there are not many people on both sides of this issue whose thinking is religious or muddied, but that the thinking of the relevant scientists is not.
