A strong, alarming warning from scientific luminaries: We have to decide...

This is an alert for denier watchers. Get ready for the possibility of another "whopping mad (crazy)" onslaught from the climate conspiracy theorists. Peter U. Clark and a team of leading scientists have published a paper in Nature Climate Change, this time looking ahead 10,000 years to changes in climate and sea level. The team is laden with some of the heaviest of heavyweights from the world of climate science:

Peter U. Clark, Jeremy D. Shakun, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix, Michael Eby, Scott Kulp, Anders Levermann, Glenn A. Milne, Patrik L. Pfister, Benjamin D. Santer, Daniel P. Schrag, Susan Solomon, Thomas F. Stocker, Benjamin H. Strauss, Andrew J. Weaver, Ricarda Winkelmann, David Archer, Edouard Bard, Aaron Goldner, Kurt Lambeck, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Gian-Kasper Plattner.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach makes more mischief with volcanoes

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a well-earned reputation for wandering off on a tangent and avoiding scientific research. He's done the same today at WUWT (archived here, latest here). He decided that two recent papers relating to volcanic forcing are "wrong". Not because he took any notice of the content of the papers - he didn't. Not because he took any notice of the observations reported. He didn't. He decided to reject the months of hard work by multiple scientists, on the basis of his own five minutes of "research".

Climate models and volcanic forcing

The two papers found evidence of volcanic forcing, coming from two different perspectives:

• Observed increase in Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth (SAOD) since 2005 (Ridley14)
• Multiple signals of volcanic forcing in sea surface temperature, atmospheric water vapour,  net clear-sky short-wave radiation, and elsewhere (Santer14)

One of the main points the scientists emphasised was that the CMIP5 models mostly assumed there was zero change in stratospheric volcanic forcing after 2000. They show that this assumption is not valid. Since 2005 in particular, there has been significant volcanic forcing, based on observations.

WUWT is taking a break to indulge in ozone hole denial

Over at Anthony Watts' anti-science blog, they are taking a break from rejecting climate science and returning to ozone hole denial.  It was prompted by a tweet from Andrew Dessler:

"You guys cried wolf about ozone depletion." "Actually, we saved your lives." http://t.co/8LRrUDb3Yf
— Andrew Dessler (@AndrewDessler) March 8, 2014

Andrew Dessler is a renowned climate scientist and professor from Texas A&M University with a PhD from Harvard, an impressive publication history and a decent entry in Wikipedia.  Anthony Watts is a blogger from Chico with an err... umm... a publication history and errr... umm... an entry in rationalwiki.  (Actually Anthony has a Wiki entry too :D)

Of course the fact that Anthony's just a denier blogger has never stopped him from taking a swipe at proper scientists.  In fact, it's probably why he takes a swipe.  After various odd jobs on school boards and announcing weather on tv, he's finally found success at last, of a sort. He'll never make it in the scientific world but by making a career of scoffing at science he's managed to become a minor celebrity among the scientific illiterati.  The dregs of society.  The Luddites.

Claiming a question

Anthony spun Andrew Dessler's tweet off into one of his "claim" headlines which, in this case, makes no sense, because it's not a claim, it's a question:

Claim: What would have happened to the ozone layer if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been regulated?

A five-year-new paper!

Anthony wrote, immediately under his headline:

A new modeling based paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics takes on that question directly.

A "new" paper? A modeling based paper?  Let's see.  Anthony provided a link to this paper, published five years ago to the month - in March 2009.  Talk about taking a long time to catch up to the science!  Of course his "modeling based" was a dog-whistle to his followers who haven't twigged that models are behind the knowledge revolution of the past century! (Think DNA, space exploration, particle physics, flight, finance etc etc etc)

Well, what would have happened?

The Newman et al paper was addressing the second of two important questions.  I'll let the authors explain (my bold italics):

The regulation of ODSs [ozone depleting substances] was based upon the ozone assessments that presented the consensus of the science community. The regulation presupposed that a lack of action would lead to severe ozone depletion with consequent severe increases of solar UV radiation levels at the Earth’s surface. Because of the successful regulation of ODSs, ozone science has now entered into the accountability phase. There are two relevant questions in this phase. First, are ODS levels decreasing and ozone increasing as expected because of the Montreal Protocol regulations? Second, what would have happened to the atmosphere if no actions had been taken? That is to say, what kind of world was avoided? It is this latter question that is the focus of the present study.

You can read the paper to get the full picture.  Here is one of their charts that shows what the world avoided in regard to depletion of stratospheric ozone:

Fig 2: Annual average global ozone for the WORLD AVOIDED (solid black), reference future (red), fixed chlorine (green), and reference past (blue) simulations. The curves are smoothed with a Gaussian filter with a half-amplitude response of 20 years, except for the WORLD AVOIDED, which is unsmoothed. The dashed line shows the 2-D coupled model simulation of the “world avoided”. The thin horizontal lines indicate the 220-DU level (the level usually indicating the areal extent of the Antarctic ozone hole) and the 310-DU level (the 1980 global value). The inset shows the WORLD AVOIDED total ozone plotted against global annually averaged EESC at 4.5 hPa from Fig. 1. Source: Newman et al (2009)

It was Mario Molina and F Sherwood Rowland who first alerted the scientific community and the world to the dangers of ozone depletion.  You can get a copy of the 1974 paper in Nature by Molina and Rowland 1974 here.

From Ozone Acceptance to Ozone Denial

I decided to see what Anthony has written about ozone in the past.  It's a bit of a mix.  At one stage in September 2009 he acted as if he knew something about the subject and accepted the science, but it soon becomes obvious that all he did was copy and paste press releases, as usual.

For example, that article in September 2009 was preceded by one of his classic backflips here, where he got pulled up for the title of one of his articles: "Galactic Cosmic Rays May Be Responsible For The Antarctic Ozone Hole".  That was back in March 2009, just a few days after the publication of the Newman & co paper.  I did a quick scan to find out what happened to that notion, which was put forward by Q.-B. Lu of the University of Waterloo (full paper here).  Seems to me that Q.-B. Lu is about the only one who favours Lu's idea, with other researchers showing why it ain't so, including Jens-Uwe Grooß and Rolf Müller.

TonyB has been wondering about ozone since 2009 (at least)

Interestingly, Tonyb has written almost identical comments to Anthony's September 2009 article and his March 2009 article and his March 2014 article.  This is from 2014:

how do we know if there hasn't always been an ozone hole prior to our ability to measure it from the late 1950′s?

First of all, back in the 1950s there wasn't an ozone "hole" over Antarctica of the type there is today.  It was first reported in the 1980s (eg Farman et al 1985).  Secondly, the chemistry is now quite well understood as discussed by Molina and Rowland (1974), Solomon et al (1986), Drew Shindell and co (1998) - who elaborate on the importance of temperature - and others.  For a simple explanation, the EPA account is not bad. Wikipedia has a longer description and isn't too technical.

(TonyB is, I believe, the same Tony Brown who thinks that England climate is back to what it was in the 1730s!)



Anyway, as you'd expect, Anthony Watts flip flops between proper scientific articles and ones from "CFC deniers" but always with the theme "it's not bad".  Deniers need nothing more than to be reassured.

From the WUWT comments

I think the crowd at WUWT are quite pleased to protest something other than global warming and the greenhouse effect, although some of them probably aren't too clear on the difference between them.

Dodgy Geezer is a fake sceptic who "recalls" stuff without citing anything (you'd probably not need all your fingers, let alone your toes to count the number of fake sceptics who cite scientific papers).  He says:

March 8, 2014 at 10:15 am
I do have a strong suspicion about the whole CFCs issue.
As I recall, the chemical was banned on the grounds that lab tests and models showed that it could damage ozone – there were few actual observations in the field, and those which were done were inconclusive.

I also believe that the banning also came at a very convenient time for DuPont, which would otherwise have lost the patent on a very lucrative chemical, and seen other companies undercut it heavily.

I never gave the issue a lot of thought before, but it is so similar to the AGW exercise, that you have to wonder…

sunshinehours1 says:

March 8, 2014 at 10:20 am
They took CFCs out of my asthma inhaler and replaced it with something less effective. I won’t forgive them for that. 

Thing is, the CFC's in asthma inhalers were purely a propellant like they were in all spray cans.  They didn't have any medicinal properties.  In regard to physical properties, this article suggests their replacement has some advantages.  sunshinehours1 is suffering a kind of reverse placebo effect.


Perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale, who relies on models for much of his "analysis" (eg he uses ERSST for his sea surface temperature "analysis") says:

March 8, 2014 at 10:23 am
Another modeling exercise….yawn.

There are quite a few people who think it's physically impossible for CFCs to reach the stratosphere because they are too heavy.  (The EPA explains why they are wrong.) For example:

george e. conant says:

March 8, 2014 at 10:25 am
cfc’s are too heavy and can not rise up, they sink rapidly, thump. 

Dennis Hand says (extract):

March 8, 2014 at 11:36 am
The basic laws of physics say that lighter materials will float above heavier materials. So, if the atomic weight of a free Nitrogen molecule (N2) is 14 amu’s and that of a free Oxygen molecule (O2) is 16 amu’s and that of a free CFC-12 molecule is 64 amu’s, 4.57 time heavier than a Nitrogen molecule and 4 time heavier than an Oxygen molecule, the question to ask is how did something so heavy, comparatively, get up to the ozone layer, between 50,000 and 115,000 feet above us? 

Keitho says:

March 8, 2014 at 11:41 am
I still don’t understand the mechanism for fairly heavy CFC molecules to get from the Northern hemisphere to the South. What propelled them? 

cba mixes conspiracy with "too heavy" and says (excerpt):

March 8, 2014 at 1:31 pm
The ozone hole was discovered during IGY (International Geophysical Year) back in 1957 – before there was substantial amounts of freon. I was told this back in 1974 – by someone who participated in IGY. The whole scam is the same old thing. Sheep going blind due to uV – a pink eye epidemic. CFCs escaping from airconditioners and refrigerators in the nothern hemisphere sneaking down to the antarctic where these rather heavy molecules were magically lifted up against gravity to go up into the stratosphere where they were disassociated into chlorine atoms while ocean spray chlorine ions were washed out of the atmosphere by rain just like the chlorine atoms injected into the stratosphere by an active volcano down there. 

Ignorant Pittzer thinks he's being funny when he says:

March 8, 2014 at 1:39 pm
CFCs are amazing molecules. They are emitted in an ozone rich environment, and despite being highly reactive, they eschew the “dirty” ozone from our tail pipes, defy gravity, and then fly up above the troposphere to munch on the much tastier ozone deposited by lightning in our upper atmosphere. This molecule exhibits preference and mobility. Could it be a new life form?

It's illuminating the number of WUWT-ers who "always wonder" without bothering to find out "why".  It's not as if the information isn't widely available.  For example, James the Elder says:

March 8, 2014 at 6:52 pm
george e. conant says: March 8, 2014 at 10:25 am cfc’s are too heavy and can not rise up, they sink rapidly, thump.

Always wondered why CFCs got that high to destroy ozone, but couldn’t seem to accomplish the same thing at ground level. 

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Farman, J. C., B. G. Gardiner, and J. D. Shanklin. 1985. "Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica reveal seasonal ClOx/NOx interaction." Nature 315: 207-10

Lu, Q-B. "Correlation between cosmic rays and ozone depletion." Physical review letters 102, no. 11 (2009): 118501.

Molina, Mario J., and F. Sherwood Rowland. "Stratospheric sink for chlorofluoromethanes: chlorine atom-catalysed destruction of ozone." Nature 249, no. 5460 (1974): 810-12.

Newman, Paul A., L. D. Oman, A. R. Douglass, E. L. Fleming, S. M. Frith, M. M. Hurwitz, S. R. Kawa et al. "What would have happened to the ozone layer if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been regulated?." Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 9, no. 6 (2009): 2113-2128.

Shindell, Drew T., David Rind, and Patrick Lonergan. "Increased polar stratospheric ozone losses and delayed eventual recovery owing to increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations." Nature 392, no. 6676 (1998): 589-592.

Solomon, Susan, Rolando R. Garcia, F. Sherwood Rowland, and Donald J. Wuebbles. "On the depletion of Antarctic ozone." Nature 321, no. 6072 (1986): 755-758.

Solomon, Susan. "Progress towards a quantitative understanding of Antarctic ozone depletion." Nature 347 (1990): 347-354.

How much CO2 can the atmosphere take?

Or, more properly, how much CO2 in the atmosphere can we, as humans, tolerate?

The EU Commission has agreed new targets for reducing carbon emissions. The EU plan is described at the Guardian as:

• To cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.  
• 27% of energy must come from renewable sources by 2030, which is described as a binding target as well as being described as "not yet clear whether the target will be binding at the level of member states". 
• No new legislation to regulate shale gas development.
• Reformation of the EU carbon trading scheme.

There is an article at the Guardian by Fiona Harvey and Ian Traynor that describes the EU's new targets in a bit more detail and provides some context.  For example, at one point they write: "Studies show that the EU's emissions are likely to be 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, making the targets easier to meet."

It's not a done deal yet.  It is still to be debated by member state governments, which I gather will be happening during March this year via the European Council, and the European Parliament. Given that some countries are forging ahead with emission reductions through renewable energy development and other means (eg energy efficiency), I gather that the emissions target and the renewables target are thought to be achievable.

The Cumulative Carbon Emissions Budget

The plan may be thought by some people to be ambitious, certainly compared to targets in other places, but is it enough?

Damian Carrington has an article at the Guardian about this from the point  of view of the cumulative carbon emissions budget.  He wrote:

For those focusing on climate change – the atmosphere right now is half full of carbon dioxide – the European commission's plan is clearly inadequate to meet the EU's own target of limiting global warming to 2C. For those focusing on the economy of the bloc today – EU citizen's pocket are half empty after a crushing recession – the deal was the most ambitious possible.

Damian put up the UK Guardians' version of this IPCC chart, which I've annotated. (Click for larger version.)

Adapted from Figure SPM.10: Global mean surface temperature increase as a function of cumulative total global CO2 emissions from various lines of evidence. Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers

To keep global temperatures at or below two degrees of warming (ie two degrees above temperatures of the beginning of the twentieth century), we need to limit the total amount of carbon emissions from all sources to around 1000 GtC or less.

Temperature rises linearly with emissions

The interesting thing is that there is a robust relationship between temperature and emissions.  The temperature response to carbon emissions has been shown to be linear up to around 2,000 PgC.    It doesn't matter over what time period or what the resulting CO2 concentration is.

That's an important point, so I'll repeat it.  Whether or not we emit the next 500 gigatonnes of carbon over a decade or over a century, the temperature will rise the same amount.  And it doesn't matter if atmospheric CO2 goes up by double or a bit less or a bit more.  The relationship we're talking about is between emissions and temperature not CO2 concentration and temperature.

That is why the focus is shifting away from concentrations of CO2 to carbon emissions.

This is explained quite clearly in a paper by H. Damon Matthews, Susan Solomon and Raymond Pierrehumbert.  To get some idea of how much temperature goes up for every 1,000 PgC emitted, the above paper shows the following:

• a very likely (5–95%) uncertainty range of 1–2.5°C of global temperature increase per 1000 PgC of cumulative carbon emitted
• the observational record showed a mean value of 1.5°C per 1000 PgC emitted, and a 5–95% range of 1 to 2.1°C/1000 PgC.

I doubt the 1.5°C observed rise factors in slower feedbacks. So I suggest adding a half a degree at least.  This is a moving target because we are still increasing the rate of growth of emissions.

The EU targets and those of all other countries need to be assessed in the light of how much they will add to cumulative emissions.  If we don't keep cumulative emissions to less than 1,000 gigatonnes (1,000 PgC) then temperatures will be likely to rise above 2°C.  Obviously there needs to be a cooperative international effort to limit cumulative emissions.  That's not to say that all countries have to have exactly the same route to reducing emissions.  It is to say that taken together, the whole world needs to keep cumulative emissions to less than 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon.

With cumulative emissions approaching 500 gigatonnes and carbon emissions currently at around 10 gigatonnes a year and rising, it doesn't leave a lot of time to switch away from burning fossil fuels, such as by switching to clean energy.  This involves a massive change in electricity generation for example.

Thing is, we need to leave some spare capacity for future emissions even after we make the major switch away from burning fossil fuels.  Remember, this is a cumulative budget.  Even when we cut annual emissions to around 10% of what they are at present, we'll still be adding at least ten gigatonnes a decade to cumulative emissions.  If we use up all the budget now, then future generations will be much more limited in their options.

The chart above shows how much time we have or not, depending on which emissions pathway we choose.  But really, in the short term (say, to 2050), unless we make radical cuts in emissions in the next few years, we're heading for more than two degrees of warming this century.  If you took the cumulative emissions by the end of 2014 to be 500 gigatonnes and assumed a 2% growth in emissions each year, then we'd have reached the 1,000 gigatonne target by 2050.  Even if we were to stabilise emissions at the current approx 10 gigatonnes a year, we'd fill the 1,000 gigatonne quota by 2070.  After that we'd have to stop all emissions immediately to stick to the budget  - which just won't happen.  So the sooner we start to reduce emissions the better.

Anthony Watts goes for a literal interpretation

Damian Carrington wrote: "the atmosphere right now is half full of carbon dioxide", linking to an article about the carbon budget as described above.  Anthony put on his literal hat (as he does) and responded with (archived here):

Maybe Damian doesn’t understand that whole “parts per million” thing, if he did, he’s certainly know that 398.58 is nowhere close to “half full”. The value of 500,000 parts per million is what would be considered “half-full”. He’s only off be a couple orders of magnitude.

And showed he doesn't follow hyperlinks, by adding:

Maybe he was thinking in terms of saturation of the CO2 effect in the atmosphere on temperature? In that case, we are closer to 90%, and additional CO2 won’t make much difference.

No, Anthony.  You are very wrong when you claim "additional CO2 won't make much difference".  You are also wrong about what Damian was thinking.  Damian was referring to the cumulative carbon emissions budget, as you'd have realised if you'd read the article to which he linked.

Anthony then puts up this chart, with no humour or satire tag, so he does intend for it to be taken seriously.  Which means that post of his was meant to trick his dumber readers.  He doesn't explain what the chart is meant to represent.  What it appears to be is a chart of a log relationship of CO2 and temperature. Since Anthony chose temperature on the Kelvin scale, I've highlighted and enlarged bits of it to show just the relevant temperatures as anomalies.  I chose the baseline temperature as that when CO2 was around 280 ppm, which is what CO2 concentration was before industrialisation.  The result is shown below - as an animation:

Anthony's chart shows that with a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm, temperatures would rise by about 2 degrees Kelvin (which is 2 degrees Celsius).  So he's in the ballpark of climate sensitivity.  However what he wrote shows that either he doesn't understand that or he's deliberately deceiving his readers - neither of which says much about Anthony Watts.  He wrote:

This graph showing CO2′s temperature response to supplement the one Doug Hoffman cites from IPCC AR4. here we see that we are indeed pretty close to saturation of the response.

"Close to saturation" is a relative concept.  There is plenty of room for temperatures to rise and cause untold damage.   (Note that Anthony's chart stops at 800 ppm.  Plus he's got the Y axis at a scale that makes reading associated temperatures difficult, and hard to determine if his chart resembles reality).

Thing is, of course, that we're heading for much more than a doubling of CO2.  If we were to continue to increase emissions by two per cent a year, then by 2040 we'd have doubled the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere assuming that half the extra emissions continued to be absorbed at the surface.  Sooner if the oceans reckoned they'd already absorbed more than they could handle.  By the early 2060s CO2 would be up to around 800 ppm.  And by 2100 we'd be over 1500 ppm.

In terms of the carbon budget, that would take cumulative emissions to almost 2800 gigatonnes, which is off the chart (of the top chart SPM.10) and getting into the territory of six degrees of warming by the end of the century.  Not a pleasant thought.

In the meantime, fasten your seatbelts.  It's going to be a rough ride over the next few years.

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Matthews, H. Damon, Susan Solomon, and Raymond Pierrehumbert. "Cumulative carbon as a policy framework for achieving climate stabilization." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 370, no. 1974 (2012): 4365-4379.

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From the WUWT comments

The comments are mostly of the "dumb denier" type, which isn't a surprise given Anthony's article is also of the "dumb denier" kind. (Archived here.)

Les Johnson didn't bother reading Damian Carrington's article or following the hyperlink but says what "he thinks" he meant, which was wrong.  Damian was referring to cumulative emissions not CO2 concentration:

January 22, 2014 at 11:01 am
I believe that by 1/2 full, he meant that we are 1/2 way to a ‘safe’ level of CO2. From pre-industrial levels of 260, that would mean we are at 390 (we are), and must go no further than 520.

Just a guess. But you would think a journalist would be able to communicate the concept better. Warmist wonder they have communication problems…

albertalad goes for conspiracy lingo and says:

January 22, 2014 at 11:20 am
Sadly it isn’t just this guy off his rocker – it is the EU mass insanity driving themselves into poverty led by an even crazier class of leaders without a gain of common sense between the entire lot. Genuine science has ceased to exist in the entirety of the EU – replaced by a self imposed dark ages eagerly followed by the masses.

climateismydj says dryly of Anthony's speculation:

January 22, 2014 at 11:26 am
Maybe if the author of this article followed the link under his highlighted Guardian article text, he’d find the answer staring him in the face. But then again, WUWT has journalism standards to uphold…

nutso fasst says:

January 22, 2014 at 11:38 am
Given the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen, isn’t the total carbon in the atmosphere actually closer to 0.015%?

I don't know if DirkH is trying to be clever or if he is being extra thick when he says:

January 22, 2014 at 11:59 am
He thought it’s 398 percent, not ppm. And 398 percent is about half full.
Quite a good one from the Guardian.

thebleedingobvious is right when he says CO2 isn't the same as carbon, but not right when he suggests that "alarmists" always use the wrong term.  As he rightly points out, CO2 is not the same as carbon.  However total carbon includes the carbon in CO2 (and CH4 and other molecules containing carbon).

January 22, 2014 at 1:03 pm
Carbon dioxide is not the same thing as carbon.
Why do alarmists use the wrong term?

Illiterati dbstealey says:

January 22, 2014 at 1:06 pm
thebleedingobvious says: “Why do alarmists use the wrong term?”
The answer is simple: because they are scientific illiterates, who are just repeating the standard talking points given to them.

Bruce Cobb is keen to get to six degrees of warming and says:

January 22, 2014 at 1:43 pm
Since the ideal CO2 level is probably somewhere around 1,000 ppm, at close to 400 ppm we still have about another 100 ppm to go before we’re at half full. But, close enough. Burning more coal could help us get there.

As does "So dumb" MarkW who says:

January 22, 2014 at 2:33 pm
A few million years ago, the atmosphere had almost ten times as muchCO2 in it compared to today’s atmosphere. The idea that the atmosphere is half full is something so dumb that only someone completely in thrall to his religion could believe it.

Brian Davis says:

January 22, 2014 at 3:04 pm
Anthony, do you have the source for the chart at the end of your post showing the temperature response to CO2?

REPLY: See link in the story -A

Anthony's "link in the story" is no help at all.  It doesn't provide any source of his chart either!


Critical reading is not one of Ron House's fortés - he says:

January 22, 2014 at 5:50 pm
There it says: “The world’s leading climate scientists have set out in detail for the first time how much more carbon dioxide humans can pour into the atmosphere without triggering dangerous levels of climate change – and concluded that more than half of that global allowance has been used up.”

That just makes the stupidity even more appalling than the ignorance: Half of a maximum addition to something is not in general the same as half of the total amount.

If we cut CO2 emissions today...or Dunning and Kruger visit WUWT again

Update: See below for ABC news item on the horrid but expected decision of this new government to disband Australia's Climate Commission. (The website is still up here.)

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Anthony Watts has a cartoon by Josh as part of an article (archived here) telling his readers about how PM Tony Abbott has shut down the Climate Commission.  The cartoon is this one:

(you wouldn't) Credit: Josh - who suffers a serious case of the Dunning Kruger Effect
Source: Home of the DuKEs - WUWT

The object of the cartoon is Professor Tim Flannery who chaired Australia's Climate Commission.  Tim Flannery is not a meteorologist but he knows more about climate than all the deniers at WUWT and elsewhere put together.

If you read the top and bottom of the quote, you'd see that Josh (and presumably Anthony Watts) don't understand much about CO2 or climate.  As you'll see if you don't already know, Tim Flannery is, of course, correct.

One gets the feeling that Josh and Anthony Watts believe that a mere cut in CO2 would result in a drop in temperature.  That's pretty silly of them.  Any old cut in CO2 won't drop temperature.  As long as more CO2 is being added to the atmosphere than leaves it, then energy in the earth system will increase and temperatures will keep going up.  CO2 is a greenhouse gas and what it does is absorb IR radiation.  The more CO2 there is the less quickly will earth radiate energy to space.  That's why earth is heating up.

What the science says about CO2 and future temperature

I thought it might be worth writing an article about what the science says if the world suddenly stopped emitting any and all CO2 and what would happen if we started to cut emissions.