Scott Pruitt and Steven Koonin have climate scientist-activists and their media promoters ranting and sputtering in an epic meltdown.
Pruitt is, of course, President Trump’s outspoken administrator in charge of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Koonin, a physicist and professor at New York University, was undersecretary of the Energy Department in the Obama administration.
Pruitt and Koonin, along with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and an impressive lineup of distinguished scientists have stirred the proverbial hornets’ nest by proposing (of all things!) — a scientific debate.
Climate alarmists say this is “dangerous,” even “un-American.” And why does the thought of debate stir such ire, angst, and venom in supposedly dispassionate, objective, “scientific” circles? After all, isn’t that what science is all about: testing, challenging, reviewing? Apparently not — at least not when “climate science” is involved. No less a scientific authority than Al Gore has assured us that when it comes to anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, AGW, “the science is settled.”
However, the science is far from settled, as the alarmist choir well knows, though is loath to admit. Despite thousands of stories in the print and broadcast media declaring that “97 percent of climate scientists” endorse the idea that global warming is a dire threat and man is causing it, that fraudulent claim has been crumbling rapidly. And the alarmists fear if they lose their most cherished “consensus” weapon in an open debate, their already far-advanced radical agenda will be dealt a possibly fatal set-back. President Trump has already canceled President Obama’s unconstitutional “ratification” of the UN’s Paris agreement. Now Pruitt, Koonin, and others are calling for an adversarial Red Team-Blue Team audit of climate science.
Although he is not the first to come up with the idea, Dr. Koonin got the concept rolling this past April with a column for the Wall Street Journal entitled “A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science.” “Put the ‘consensus’ to a test,” he argued, “and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process.”
What could be wrong with that? If the evidence for manmade global warming is as “overwhelming” as the alarmists claim, and if the “scientific consensus” is so near unanimous as asserted, then they should have no trouble making their case. It should be a slam dunk for them. But it won’t be — and they know it. That’s what has the militant climateers terrified. The key word they fear in the Koonin proposal is an “open” adversarial process.
Some of the biggest guns in the climateer arsenal are shooting themselves in the collective foot, as they compete to denounce the Red Team-Blue Team plan in the harshest terms. Michael Mann, the Penn State activist-scientist notorious for the Hockey Stick fraud used in Al Gore’s flim-flam film An Inconvenient Truth, as well as in UN IPCC and U.S. government agency reports, has declared the Koonin proposal to be “un-American.” AGW militants Benjamin Santer, Naomi Oreskes, and Kerry Emanuel co-authored a Washington Post rant calling the idea “dangerous.” Others are insisting it would be redundant, wasteful, and a sellout to the fossil-fuel industry.
“They’re looking to use taxpayer funds to run a pro-fossil fuel industry disinformation campaign aimed at confusing the public and policymakers over what is potentially the greatest threat we face as a civilization,” Mann told the left-wing group ThinkProgress, a “project” of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress led by John Podesta. “It is frankly un-American,” Mann declared.
Un-American? Well, considering that the cost of the UN-brokered, Obama-approved, media-acclaimed Paris climate deal would come in at around $100 trillion over the course of this century, all for the astoundingly minuscule “accomplishment” of reducing global temperatures by 0.057 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s five-hundredths of a degree!), and considering that much of this will come from American taxpayer funds, perhaps it should be considered un-American not to challenge such outrageously profligate schemes. Especially since the alarmists, such as former UN climate chief Christina Figueres, a globalist-socialist, have boasted that their goal is nothing less than “a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” And not only an economic transformation. There is an additional, more onerous price tag: subjection of all human activity to a global, all-wise bureaucracy that will direct all aspects of our lives in a “sustainable” manner, and protect us from our own carbon footprints.
But Santer, Oreskes, Mann, and company would prefer to direct our attention away from all that. According to Michael Mann, the back-and-forth process Dr. Koonin and others are calling for is already taken care of: It’s called “peer-review.” “The system they describe is precisely what scientific peer-review is,” Mann told ThinkProgress. “The reality is that the only thing these folks don’t like is the conclusion that the scientific community (that is, the world’s scientists, literally) has arrived at — that climate change is real, human-caused, and a threat.”
Santer, Oreskes, and Emanuel sounded a similar refrain in their Post op-ed, writing that “calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”
Peer Review or Pal Review?
The Santer-Oreskes-Emanuel trio claim that the Koonin proposal would inject ugly “tribalism” into the pure and pristine process of climate science. They argue:
The basic premise of these “Red Team/Blue Team” requests is that climate science is broken and needs to be fixed. The implicit message in the requests is that scientists belong to tribes, and key findings of climate science — such as the existence of a large human-caused warming signal — have not undergone adequate review by all tribes. This tribalism could be addressed, Koonin believes, by emulating Red Team/Blue Team assessment strategies in “intelligence assessments, spacecraft design, and major industrial operations.”
They continue:
In Koonin’s view, “traditional” peer-review processes are flawed and lack transparency, and international scientific assessments do not accurately represent “the vibrant and developing science.” He implicitly accuses the climate science community of “advisory malpractice” by ignoring major sources of uncertainty. To use present-day vernacular, both Koonin and Pruitt are essentially claiming that peer-review systems are rigged and that climate scientists are not providing sound scientific information to policymakers.
“Heresy” Causes “High Priestess” to Be “Tossed Out of the Tribe”
But, Dr. Koonin is far from the only scientist “essentially claiming that peer-review systems are rigged,” that they’ve already gone “tribal.” Ask other scientists, such as Dr. Patrick Michaels, Dr. John Bates, Dr. Chris Landsea, Dr. Benny Peiser, Professor Dennis Bray, Dr. Roy Spencer, or any of hundreds of other scientists who have seen and experienced the rigging and the tribalism up close and personal.
Ask (by all means) Dr. Judith Curry. Once considered the “high priestess of global warming,” she says she was “tossed out of the tribe” for questioning AGW dogma, as enforced by the likes of Santer, Oreskes, and Emanuel. The former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Professor Curry has a record of publication in peer-reviewed climate science journals that is second to none. For years she was a darling of the climate-industrial-academic complex. However, the “Climategate” e-mail scandal at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center (UEA-CRU) caused her to look more deeply into what had obviously become a blatantly corrupt, politically driven “scientific” system.
The British paper, The Spectator, wrote of her, in a 2015 article:
Curry’s independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 “Climategate” scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. “I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There’s no way I would have done this if I hadn’t been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I’d be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there’s no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I’ve stopped judging my career by these metrics. I’m doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing.”
Michael Mann called Judith Curry “anti-science,” but, considering the source, she is undaunted by insult. “It’s unfortunate, but he calls anyone who doesn’t agree with him a denier,” she told the Spectator.
The UEA-CRU e-mails include infamous exchanges involving Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and other leading lights of the AGW establishment conspiring on how to keep skeptical scientists from getting published in scientific journals, as well as scheming on how to get editors fired who refused to censor dissident scientists. UEA-CRU chief Phil Jones, for instance, discussed suppressing scientific articles he did not like: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
The “Kevin” whom Jones refers to is Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the vicious pseudo-scientists who signed a letter to President Obama, calling on him to prosecute and imprison climate skeptics whom they label as “deniers.” Trenberth is one of the “consensus enforcers” Dr. Curry calls out in a recent entry on her blog, “Climate Etc.”
Curry remarks that, in a recent congressional hearing, climate zealot Senator Al Franken repeatedly asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke if he could “tell me how much warming government scientists predict for the end of this century under a business-as-usual scenario?” Zinke stated: “I don’t think government scientists can predict with certainty.” “There isn’t a model that exists today that can predict today’s weather given all the data,” Zinke said.
Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, jumped into the fray, calling Zinke’s explanation “a stupid and ignorant answer.” Trenberth’s insulting comment was given widespread favorable media coverage, naturally, as a supposed smack-down of dim-witted “deniers” by a reputed authoritative voice of science.
But Curry smacks down the smug would-be smacker, observing: “Zinke’s statement is true. Trenberth is a scientific bully/thug for calling Zinke’s answer stupid and ignorant, especially when both Trenberth and [NASA’s Gavin] Schmidt basically admit that the models can’t predict the future.”
Read rest at New American
James Hansen should have been laughed out of the room for flunking undergraduate radiant heat transfer for claiming with neither quantitative equation nor experimental demonstration that Venus’s extreme surface temperature , 2.25 times that of a gray ball in its orbit , much less it much lower radiative equilibrium given its extreme reflectivity in the peak solar wavelengths , was due to some spectral “Green House” effect .
A review of the quantitative experimentally testable foundational physical theory must be included in any dispositive debate .The retardation of this field being treated like a measurement and statistics social science instead of the branch of applied physics that it is has cost a generation .
Since this OP is addressing consensus in science, this must be opened again:
“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
“… Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”
-Dr. Michael Crichton,
Educated at Harvard University A.B. (summa cum laude) 1964 (Phi Beta Kappa). Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964–65. Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. Graduated Harvard Medical School, M.D. 1969; post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, La Jolla, California 1969–1970. Visiting Writer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988. The books he has authored have sold over 200 million copies.
I’m reading Mark Steyn’s “A DISGRACE TO THE PROFESSION” (volume 1). Over 100 REAL scientists are quoted denigrating Michael Mann’s methods . The c.v.’s of some of these scientists are a paragraph in length. Some of then believe in global warming. None of them are fans of Mann. The book is a condemnation of psychopathic science.
Einstein understood that consensus is not part of science. When there was a petition signed by 100 scientists against his theories, he responded if they were right, only one scientist would matter.
Scientists do one major mistake. They assume that act of measurement does not affect the object which is measured. In fact measurement creates an object. There is no such thing as common view. Everyone sees through his own eyes. Everyone lives in his own universe. If we want to mitigate extreme weather we should do this from the perspective of each man made object. We know that any substance heats up when the number of waves in the substance increase. And today we produce lots of artificial waves. Every concept and every act of measurement creates a wave. And all our concepts and constants are derived from our planet. We have to introduce new constant to lift heat into space towards the moon and push cold to the poles and create perfect weather for all.
The true scientific process is one of continued discussion. This works well on getting closer to the truth. The trouble with the climate change issue, is that it is political movement based on fraudulent science. The so called researchers know this. They have modified data to fit the theory, rather than follow the scientific process of modifying the theory to fit the data. They ignore data that doesn’t support their conclusions, and in other cases come to conclusion not justified by the data. The researchers know that red teams would expose these practices. They are justified in panicking at the prospect of a real debate.
Al Gore will never ever debate his crack-pot theory becuase he would lose all that ill gotten cash for his yext leftists propeganda junk science fake documentry A INCOVENT SEQUAL
William Jasper, great article! I’m predicting that within a year, socialists will cop a plea, claiming the end (wealth redistribution) justifies the means.
The problem with a debate is who will do the fact checking. Peer reviewed science is strongly fact checked. I have been a peer reviewer for over 1200 manuscripts over 30 years. The Heartland Institute which is supposedly a source of recruited “experts” has a long record of lying and disinformation. First on the dangers of tobacco and now on climate.
So the unbiased solution is to have fact checkers who themselves likely rely upon outcome-predicated MMGCC grants for a living? We should rely on checkers who are steeped in the same isolated self-talk and academic/political environment as those promoting this scientific meme?
The data base itself is so corrupted by fundamental and systemic bias bought with politically-directed funding that the entire thing has become a farce.
This proves the very bias that this thing relies upon. The eco-left’s plan is to first eliminate as much true debate as possible, and then limit what debate survives to their own back rooms with their own set of rules. Never trust people to discern information that has not first passed multiple propaganda filters…
As a scientist myself, I am saddened at how much true science has been corrupted by politics and money, especially in the field of Climate Science.
1st. YOU are NO scientist. You use exclusively Propaganda Jargon and show no respect for the more that a millions REAL scientists who have studied these issues for OVER 200 years.
2nd. How do you Debate detailed technical science in front of an audience that could not understand the Science involved.
for example:
“1799
” ‘Climate Change’ was Postulated in 1799, Alexander von Humboldt.” verified thru multiple historical records
.
1811
“Climate Changed Scientifically tied to Global Warming & Human Activity by physicist & astronomer Simeon Denis Poisson, 1811….” multiple historical records
He lectured, extensively, on this threat by 1827 !
.
1847
“George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882) author of the 1847 lecture that predicted > “human-induced climate change.” <multiple historical records
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Scientists WERE ALREADY LECTURING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING and the resulting Climate Changes, in 1847 !
.
“The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide & other gases was experimentally demonstrated & PROVED in the mid-19th century.”
..( these same fundamental experiments are Challenged & REPEATED Every year, in nearly every University , around the world !
.
…they have been put up for study, & critique !
… for decades, no appreciable critique of the fundamental science of Global Warming
…not in climatology,
not in physics,
not Earth Science,
not physical science,
not in Meteorology, etc.)
.
“….The line of Solid empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming is as follows
.
We’re raising CO2 levels and H2O & other gasses.
Measured Today, at a couple hundred locations around the globe.
.
(here is how we have determined it)
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Human carbon dioxide emissions & other gasses are calculated from international energy statistics,
tabulating coal, brown coal, peat, and crude oil production by nation and year, going back to 1751.
CO2 emissions have increased dramatically over the last century, climbing to the rate of 29 billion tonnes of CO2 per year in 2006 (EIA).
.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are measured at hundreds of monitoring stations across the globe.
Independent measurements are also conducted by airplanes and satellites.
For periods before 1958, CO2 levels are determined from air bubbles trapped in polar ice cores.
In pre-industrial times over the last 10,000 years, CO2 was relatively stable at around 225 to 285 parts per million.
.
Over the last 250 years, atmospheric CO2 levels have increased by OVER 110 parts per million.
Currently, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing by around 15 gigatonnes every year.
.
( Instead of 225-285PPM, as it has been for 1,000’s upon 1,000’s of years, today we are NOW ‘OVER’ 411PPM ! )
Humans have never existed during a time when CO2 or Methane have been this HIGH.
We have no IDEA what this experiment with HIGHER Atmospheric Gases may have on Humans or life itself.
.
Atmospheric CO2 levels and Cumulative CO2 emissions (CDIAC).
While atmospheric CO2 levels are usually expressed in parts per million,
here they are displayed as the amount of CO2 residing in the atmosphere in gigatonnes.
CO2 emissions includes fossil fuel emissions, cement production and emissions from gas flaring.
….
( Humans are NOW emitting more than 135 TIMES as much CO2 as ALL of the volcanoes on EARTH, each & every year, COMBINED ! )
(The Unique Isotopic Signature proves that this CO2 INCREASE is from Human Activities & the Burning of Fossil Fuels)
.
CO2 traps heat
.
According to radiative physics & decades of laboratory measurements, increased CO2 in the atmosphere is expected to absorb more infrared radiation as it escapes back out to space.
In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite measuring infrared spectra.
In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations.
Both sets of data were compared to discern any changes in outgoing I.R. energy radiation over the 26 year period .
.
GOOGLE: IRIS Satellite
GOOGLE: Japanese Satellite IMG
Google this SOURCE: (Harries 2001).
these research studies have been peer reviewed
(red team blue team, True adversarily critiques),
published in respected Science Journals & the science has been repeatedly been Replicated.
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What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy.
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The reductions in outgoing radiation was consistent with Global Warming theoretical expectations.
** Thus these research studies & papers found “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect” and Global Warming.
( If Infra Red HEAT Energy, does not escape, it is retained in our Earth System as rising temperatures, warming seas,melting Ice. )
These results has been confirmed by subsequent Research papers using data from later satellites.
.
Google this SOURCE: (Griggs 2004)
Google this SOURCE: ( Chen 2007 )
THIS research has been Peer Reviewed (red team blue team)
widely published and replicated repeatedly.
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Change in spectrum from 1970 to 1996 due to trace greenhouse gases. ‘Brightness temperature’ indicates equivalent blackbody temperature
.
Google this SOURCE: (Harries 2001).
Peer reviewed (red team blue team), published and replicated.
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When greenhouse gases absorb infrared radiation, the energy heats the atmosphere which in turn re-radiates infrared radiation in all directions.
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Much of it makes its way back to the earth’s lower atmosphere.
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Hence we expect to find more infrared radiation heading downwards.
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Surface measurements from 1973 to 2008 find an increasing trend of infrared radiation returning to earth.
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Google this SOURCE: (Wang 2009)
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A regional study over the central Alps found that downward infrared radiation is increasing due to the enhanced greenhouse effect.
.
Google this SOURCE: (Philipona 2004)
Peer reviewed (red team blue team) published and replicated.
.
Taking this a step further, an analysis of high resolution spectral data allowed scientists to quantitatively attribute the increase in downward radiation to each of several greenhouse gases.
.
Google this SOURCE: (Evans 2006)
Peer reviewed (red team blue team) published and replicated.
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The results lead the authors to conclude that “this experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.”
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Spectrum of the greenhouse radiation measured at the surface.
Greenhouse effect from water vapor is filtered out, showing the contributions of other greenhouse gases.
.
Google this SOURCE: (Evans 2006)
Peer Reviewed (red team blue team),widely published, & replicated.
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The planet IS accumulating heat
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When there is more energy coming in than escaping back out to space, our climate accumulates heat. The planet’s total heat build up can be derived by adding up the heat content from the ocean, atmosphere, land and ice.
.
Google this SOURCE: (Murphy 2009)
Peer reviewed (red team blue team) widely published, & replicated.
Ocean heat content was determined down to 3000 metres deep.
Atmospheric heat content was calculated from the surface temperature record and heat capacity of the troposphere.
Land and ice heat content(eg-the energy required to melt ice)were also included.
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Total Earth Heat Content from 1950.
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Google this SOURCE: (Murphy 2009)
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SOURCE: (Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.)
PEER REVIEWED (red team blue team) widely published
and replicated.
.
From 1970 to 2003,
the planet has been accumulating heat at a rate of 190,260 gigawatts with the vast majority of the energy going into the oceans.
.
Considering a typical nuclear power plant has an output of 1 gigawatt, imagine 190,000 nuclear power plants pouring their energy output directly into our oceans.
.
What about after 2003?
A map of of ocean heat from 2003 to 2008 was constructed from ocean heat measurements down to 2000 metres deep .
.
Google this SOURCE: (von Schuckmann 2009)
PEER reviewed (red team blue team) widely published and replicated.
.
Globally, the oceans have continued to accumulate heat to the end of 2008 at a rate of 0.77 ± 0.11 Wm?2, consistent with other determinations of the planet’s energy imbalance.
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Google this SOURCE: (Hansen 2005)
Google this SOURCE: (Trenberth 2009).
Peer Reviewed (red team blue team) widely published and replicated
The planet continues to accumulate heat.
So we see a direct line of evidence that we’re causing global warming. Human CO2 emissions far outstrip the rise in CO2 levels.
The enhanced greenhouse effect is confirmed by satellites and many surface measurements.
The planet’s energy imbalance is confirmed by summations of the planet’s total heat content and ocean heat measurements….”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-016-1732-y
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/
Also, before complaining about secret adjusted data, consider skeptic Richard Muller and Berkeley Earth,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
Quote:
“1st. YOU are NO scientist.”
I guess you’ll have to explain that to my patients…
Some fields of science require a much higher level of proof before an expensive and risky treatment is accepted for humans. Medicine has no equivalent of Al Gore, or the influence of politicians dictating the terms of inquiry or debate. “Modern” climate science has become no better than voodoo, and its corruption has begun to infect the larger body of science. Believe it or not, many of my colleagues agree.
Outside of our left-focused universities, the halls of Congress, Hollywood, and what now passes for journalism, there is a whole other world of real world reason that you have yet to discover.
BTW, I think you mom is calling from upstairs. Maybe dinner is ready.
Show us your QUANTITATIVE experimentally verifiable equations so we can determine the magnitude of the minor change in our radiative balance with the Sun by our small changes in the already highly saturated spectrum of CO2 .
And show us ANY equations or demonstrations of how some spectral phenomenon asymmetrically “traps” heat causing the bottoms of atmospheres to be hotter than those radiative balance computations .
You can’t . They don’t exist . It’s a willfully ignorant to the point of ant-science FRAUD as much as claiming the invention of a perpetual heat engine .
It doesn’t take a Vegas card shark to spot this Titanic-sized tell. If the eco-left was holding aces their response would be “BRING IT ON!” when asked to ante-up with debate.
Now their hand has been called and suddenly they want to change the poker game to Go Fish.