In a recent California lecture, Ben Santer, one of the world’s most respected climate scientists, (and subject of thousands of spittle flecked denier rage-rants) gave a calm, understandable, and comprehensive overview of the state of climate science.
I pulled out 4 minutes where he hammered the “no warming since 98” nonsense.
Below, for those that haven’t seen, Ben “beats the crap” out of Pat Michaels in congressional testimony.
What I notice in the 2nd video is that Pat Micheals has gone from a position of “There is no Global Warming” (a few years ago) to “Well yes, there is GW and there is Anthropogenic GW, but it’s only 0.3 degrees out of 0.7 degrees of observed warming.”
The Anti-AGW camp is still vastly underestimating the effects of AGW, but they’re increasingly unable to deny the truth.
Ben Santer makes genius look easy.
Anthony Watts posted his front row seat video of the presentation.
http://bit.ly/tdVVOq
right. I made the suggestion to the Chico organizers to video the talk, to avoid any misquotes.
Their video had good sound from Santer’s mike, and it
turns out Watt’s gave me a second camera angle, which worked out well.
so, hat tip to Watts.
What I get from Santer is that a lot of what passes for genius is simplicity, integrity, thoroughness, and
hard work.
I was just beginning to enjoy the way in which Santer was able to rebut everything Michaels said, when the Committee called “Time“… In my view, Santer clearly achieved his stated objective. However, my fear would be that, as with Hansen’s encounters with Lindzen, non-scientific observers do not have the mental equipment to enable them to distinuish scientific reality from disingenuous bullshit.
Look, if the total annual atmospheric CO2 is nearly 200 billion tons. Half of what humans contributes winds (6 billion tons) up in the atmosphere. So, what we have left then, is that, the 100 ppm increase since the industrial age is responsible for the recent 0.7 degree F increase.
Where is the proof that there is an immediate global temperature increase for every little ppm of CO2 increase? The rise in global temperature, this video declares, is not due to volcanoes! There are 7000 or more known active undersea volcanoes out of a total of over 3 million.
It may be somewhat premature in the science community to state unequivocally that the warming culprit is, in fact, comes mainly from fossil derived CO2. Global temps are increasing naturally. But is man made CO2 really the cause or as the ocean warms, just natural out gassing.
On the one hand, this video asserts that the increase of atmospheric CO2 is immediately tied to the rise in global temps, but on the other hand, of the 100 ppm CO2 increase since the industrial age,only about 2 or 3 ppm at best is attributable to fossil fuels. So, above the natural effect of increasing CO2, it would appear, humans are responsible for just 3 ppm!