Friday, May 10, 2013

Does WSJ want to flood NY under 60m of sea? - And surprising insight from Bob Tisdale

Anthony Watts has put up part of another ridiculous Happer/Schmitt article from the Wall Street Journal of the type "CO2 is plant food".

Get the headline:
Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer: In Defense of Carbon Dioxide

Talk about anthropomorphising!  Poor little CO2.

They start with: Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide.  I wouldn't have described CO2 as a 'chemical compound' - I'd call it a plain old molecule. But that's okay. I can also think of a few other 'chemical compounds' that have a poor 'reputation' - or at least ones that I'd not be touching, drinking, eating or breathing.


Update: Happer and Schmitt and Anthony Watts are idiots

Anthony Watts (or is it Tom Nelson) on WUWT can't let it go and in a second article goes on and on about 'emotions' and 'raw emotions' through to 'raw religious emotions'. When you sift through the hyperbole (who is the emotional one?) you find he is arguing that Gavin Schmidt is wrong when he tweets:


Anthony's evidence? A google count of the number of times each term is mentioned in books and the news! Let's try another search and see what lousy reputations other 'chemical compounds' have:


Happer and Schmidt want to flood New York, the home of the Wall St Journal?

Happer and Schmidt seem to be wanting to send CO2 shooting up to 3000 ppm, which according to them was the level until the Paleogene - though I'm not sure that's correct.  In any case, with all the ice melted, sea levels would rise by more than 60 meters.  Yes, that's right.  (That's about 200 feet for the metrically-challenged.) About the only plus would be that New Yorkers wouldn't need to worry about another Sandy.

Surprising insight from Bob Tisdale

While scrolling through the idiotic comments (my brain was starting to atrophy) I came across one that made me laugh.  I don't know if Bob Tisdale meant to be funny having a shot at himself as well as WSJ - or if he was really and truly serious.  This is what he wrote (my bold):

Bob Tisdale says:
May 9, 2013 at 7:26 am  Hmmm. Not expecting to be published but giving it a shot, I sent an op-ed to the NYT, and was turned down–or if you prefer rejected–but so are 90-95% of submissions. Looks like I should try the WSJ.
Some samples of Bob's work - here and here.  What do you reckon?  I say go on, Bob.  Give it a shot.  The Wall Street Journal has no quality control when it comes to articles about the climate.  (You might need to join up with an ageing NASA engineer or astronaut, don't know.)

CO2 is Plant Food


Peter Sinclair has made a good video about CO2 and plant food, starring the one and only potty peer!




Update: I see Peter Sinclair has written a take-down of Happer and Schmitt.  So has MediaMatters, which goes into some detail.

3 comments:

  1. 'Does WSJ want to flood NY under 60m of sea?'

    Water is essential for aquatic life. More water will allow fish to swim farther, increase diversity and replenish stocks.

    To quote Jimmy Kimmel: "Think water is dangerous? Try telling that to a fish!"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I had another thought, from what I can work out (and I could be wrong), if we let CO2 get to 3000ppm, then oxygen would start to get dangerously low.

      I guess that wouldn't be a problem for humanity. We'd have become wiped out long before then. Which probably means we wouldn't be burning enough sequestered carbon to get to 3000ppm.

      Delete
  2. After reading assorted pieces written by Bob Tilsdale, I found the perfect site to publish his work, The Daily Current.

    http://dailycurrant.com/

    ReplyDelete

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