You'd have thought Anthony Watts would have learnt by now that some WUWT contributors are just too wacky even for WUWT. But no. Here we have Part 2 from Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin.
For hilarity's sake (is such pathetic ignorance really funny?) here are some excerpts from his 'essay':
How an engineer thinks the role of CO2 in photosynthesis has just been discovered
Ronald is ignorant of the fact that the role of CO2 in photosynthesis has been known for more than 200 years! He writes (my emphasis):
Here is an important fact: CO2 is a fundamental building block required by all life....All life on Earth is booming just now and it could not do so without elevated atmospheric CO2. Photosynthetic processes require three primary ingredients: sunlight, water and CO2. We have known for a very long time that the abundance of sunlight and water are critical to the growth of vegetation. But now, not so surprisingly, we have discovered that the abundance of CO2 is critical also. Vegetation on Earth is exploding just now due to elevated levels of atmospheric CO2.Here are some pictures of Ronald's exploding vegetation. Click images to enlarge:
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| Exploding banana plantations and trees on hills, flattened and stripped bare by Yasi. Source: ABC |
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| Exploding vegetation on burning hill. Source: Me. |
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| Exploding tree - debarked by a tornado Photo: Runningonbrains Source: Wikipedia |
It's insects!
Ronald might be a very good engineer, I don't know. But he knows little to nothing of physics, chemistry or biology, that's for sure. Ronald isn't familiar with this reaction:
hydrocarbon + oxygen --> CO2 + water
So if, as is so commonly assumed, the current spike in atmospheric CO2 is substantially or entirely anthropogenic, one then needs to ask what has inhibited the natural spiking that would normally accompany this 150 year long warming trend (actually 400 years of warming since the coldest depths of the Little Ice Age) such that our anthropogenic release could act as the sole (or primary) source of the current spike? A partial answer to this important question may be largely or at least substantially explained in my prior posting. i.e. We have inhibited insect and microbial emission and substituted a smaller quantity of our own. Then, is the current spike anthropogenic? Certainly it is not. The current atmospheric CO2 spike would be similar, most likely larger, if we were never here.OMG - It's insects!
Actually, he can't seem to decide if CO2 is increasing, if it's caused by humans burning fossil fuels or if it's caused by insects, and whether or not plants are using up all the extra CO2 and exploding.
Get another hobby, Ronald
What a nong! And to think he claims to have made "a hobby of studying climate change for the last 7 years". Given his inability to grasp basic physics, chemistry and biology, I'd suggest he take up another hobby.
WUWT: A crank blog for the deluded or a deluded blog for the cranks
What with the Anthony Watts relying on the potty peer to sing his praises, his own crazy ramblings on Antarctica and Ronald D Voisin and all the other cranks, WUWT is a nothing more than a crank blog for the weird and wacky; or a weird and wacky blog for the cranks.
Somehow Roland hasn't figured out that all these "exploding plants" are taking CO2 from the atmosphere. And from a trophic point of view, it is impossible that the insects, if not "inhibited", would have emitted more CO2 than the plants that they feed on absorb.
ReplyDeleteI just loved the cartoon graph he put up. It's not the sort of thing that could easily be reused as evidence in a later post, is it? I tried to find a graph that it resembled. Couldn't find one. Now there's a surprise. It also picks Mediterranean civilisations to illustrate points but doesn't have anything to say about Eastern or American civilisations. But I'm taking it too seriously because although he has now discovered photsynthesis, he has failed to discover respiration.
ReplyDeleteWhen all the other possibilities have been eliminated we're left with the last one - however preposterous. That someone would write something like this isn't surprising. Such a thing will eventually happen when there are millions of people sitting at as many keyboards. What needs explaining is why Anthony would publish it.
ReplyDeleteIt seemed appropriate for The Onion. A caricature written by someone familiar with denier arguments who wanted to mock the idea of a creative and personal pick-and-choose scientific outlook.
There can be only one reason for Anthony to include something as execrable as this on a web site with pretensions of 'science'. I hadn't expected it to happen so soon. And I never thought it would happen this way. But here it is. Anthony must've given up his skeptic positions, and secretly converted to consensus AGW, mid-range sensitivity and all..
Assuming such a real conversion, his dilemma would be what to do next to bring as many of his readers along with him. And maybe some of his commenters.
In hindsight, his acceptance of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas (with low sensitivity), and eviction of the dragon slayers, might be considered a first step forward. And maybe the foray wasn't considered successful. Leading from the front towards climate positions he'd long derided may not work.
So it now appears that he's chosen the other route. To drive away his more reasonable readers, back to a more respectable climate science. By demonstrating how knee-jerk anti-science passes via D.I.Y. science into obvious fantasy.
I briefly entertained the thought that Ronald D Voisin was a fake denier taking the mickey. But after a very quick google search I found there really is such a person. And he's probably a "very serious" person, going by his writing style.
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