James R. Barrante Ph.D., ex-physical chemistry teacher, flunks organic chemistry

The latest bit of idiocy at WUWT is from someone who goes by the name of  James R. Barrante, Ph.D. A Google search shows that for many years now, young James has been trying to convince whoever is silly enough to take any notice of him that it's the oceans that are causing atmospheric CO2 to increase or something like that. He's a very mixed up chappie and can't seem to keep his story straight. Today at WUWT he wrote how burning hydrocarbons doesn't produce CO2, or words to that effect:

...if the measurement of ocean pH were not so complicated, and we had that data for the last 150 years, I would bet that we could show exactly that the increase in atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppmv to 380 ppmv in the last 150 years is an ocean temperature effect and not at all related to burning fossil fuels.

Oceans could not be more important, and time is running out

The new paper that was published in Science this week will, hopefully, be a wake up call that it's not just global warming that is of great concern, it's the changes in the oceans. When people talk about the ocean and CO2, mostly it's in terms of ocean acidification. However the changes we are causing to the oceans go way beyond changes in pH. It's not just shellfish and other pH sensitive species that are affected by the changes we are bringing about. The oceans are crucial to climate (think ENSO), to our food supply, and to biodiversity.

The paper was from a large international team of scientists led by Jean-Pierre Gattuso of the Observatoire Océanologique de Villefranche-sur-Mer. It concludes by summarising four critical messages - the main one being that we must immediately make substantial reductions to CO2 emissions (my emphasis):

1. The ocean strongly influences the climate system and provides important services to humans. 
2. Impacts on key marine and coastal organisms, ecosystems, and services from anthropogenic CO2 emissions are already detectable, and several will face high risk of impacts well before 2100, even with the stringent CO2 emissions scenario (RCP2.6). These impacts are occurring across all latitudes and have become a global concern that spans the traditional north/south divide. 
3. The analysis shows that immediate and substantial reduction of CO2 emissions is required in order to prevent the massive and effectively irreversible impacts on ocean ecosystems and their services that are projected with emissions scenarios more severe than RCP2.6. Limiting emissions to below this level is necessary to meet UNFCCC's stated objectives. Management options that overlook CO2, such as solar radiation management and control of methane emission, will only minimize impacts of ocean warming and not those of ocean acidification. 
4. As CO2 increases, the protection, adaptation, and repair options for the ocean become fewer and less effective.

Irons in the fire at WUWT...well there might not be so much in the oceans these days

Frequently Anthony Watts (owner of the blog WUWT) copies and pastes a press release about a new scientific paper so his readers can have something new to mock. He usually starts his headline with the word "Claim", just so his followers know they aren't supposed to "believe" science.  Many of his followers aren't too bright and they need these clues so they can tell how to respond.

Today Anthony puts aside his "claim" headline in favour of this (archived here):

Warming climates intensify greenhouse gas given out by oceans

From the University of Edinburgh and the department of soda pop science, comes something we already knew. I wonder who approved the grant for this one?

Anthony reckons this is something "we already knew". He doesn't spell out what he "already knew" but going by his "soda pop" reference, it's fairly clear that the paper discusses something that he didn't know already and he doesn't know now. He's confusing the findings of this study with the fact that CO2 dissolved in water will be released as the water warms. But that's not at all what this study was about. The study is about diatoms, silica, iron and carbon. (Click here to read more if you're on the home page.)

Partial to Carbon Dioxide - Why Willis Eschenbach Wonders at WUWT

Update - I've updated the archive here, just so anyone interested can read the comment from the batty duke (rgbatduke).  See below.

Update 2 - Willis has added a new chart and now has another question - Click here to jump to it.


Wondering Willis Eschenbach is wondering again.  This time he's wondering about carbon dioxide in the sea surface and the air (archived here, latest archive here).  He used data analysed by the following team, that was collected way back in the 1950s and 60s:

Lee S. Waterman, Pieter P. Tans and Todd Aten from NOAA, Boulder, Colorado; Charles D. Keeling from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California and Thomas A. Boden from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

A gigantic geochemical experiment...

The paper that Willis linked to provides an interesting piece of scientific history.  It has a quote on the front page:

"...Man, in his burning of fossil fuels and denudation of the land's surface, may be performing a gigantic geochemical experiment in which the CO2 cycle is being influenced. It is thought we may be increasing the C02 input into the atmosphere by 70% in 40 years, although it is not certain how much of this may be absorbed by the oceans. A substantial increase in C02 content in the air would trap more of the earth's radiated heat and cause a warming of temperature.

Data collected during the IGY will be needed for comparison with measurements made 15 to 25 years from now to determine whether the C02 content is changing ..."

Lill and Revelle
IGY Bulletin
October 1958

Early ocean CO2 research

What the researchers did was analyse data collected in three oceanographic expeditions between October 1957 and August 1963.  The data related to carbon dioxide in the air and the surface water. (IGY was a major international collaborative scientific effort between July 1957 and December 1958. From Wikipedia - "It marked the end of a long period during the Cold War when scientific interchange between East and West had been seriously interrupted".)

It didn't take me long to find what was probably Willis' source. The research is described by Scripps CO2 Program as:

During the late 1950's and early 1960's, Charles D. Keeling supervised the measurement of pCO2 in surface ocean waters and in the atmosphere just above on a number of seagoing expeditions mounted by Scripps Institution of Oceanography. These expeditions ("cruises"), comprising long transects in the major oceans, were chosen to map the global features of surface ocean pCO2. Data from most of these cruises are presented here for the first time in detail (in the form of hourly averages). The data had been processed soon after the cruises and presented in several research articles as averages, over geographical areas, of the difference in CO2 concentration between ocean and atmosphere (see References). This site contains data from the DOWNWIND cruise in 1957, the MONSOON cruise in 1961, and the long LUSIAD cruise in 1962 and 1963.

The wrong end of the stick

Willis took the difference between the air and sea surface CO2 data, which he mistakenly thought was parts per million by volume of CO2, and plotted it against sea surface temperature.  (He obviously didn't read the above paragraph or the paper very closely.)

Source: WUWT

Willis wrote:

To describe the situation in another way, when the water is cool, it contains less CO2 than the overlying air … but when the water is warm, it has more CO2 than the overlying air.

Say what? I gotta confess, I have little in the way of explanations or comprehension of the reason for that pattern … all suggestions welcome.

In fact, as Nick Stokes pointed out in the comments, the data Willis used wasn't the amount or parts per million by volume of CO2, it was the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2).  So Willis' positives meant CO2 was going from the sea to the air (which is expected as water warms up) and his negatives going from air to sea, not the other way around - which was what Willis mistakenly thought. No wonder Willis was wondering why his chart was counter-intuitive.

There is more that is wrong with Willis' chart, but because his main error was so fundamental, he probably wouldn't have plotted the data that way if he had understood what the data was. So I won't go into that.

About ocean CO2

Ocean CO2 data have since been collected over the years by individual scientists or research teams.  Now there are attempts to coordinate efforts globally, as described on the Global Observing Systems Information Centre (GOSIC) website.

CO2 dissolves fairly readily in water.  Once in the water it reacts chemically and there's only a small bit that remains as CO2.  As described at GOSIC:

The CO2 and associated chemical forms are collectively known as dissolved inorganic carbon or DIC. This chemical partitioning of DIC affects the air–sea transfer of CO2 as only the unreacted CO2 fraction in the sea water affects the CO2 flux, which is determined from measurements of atmospheric and surface sea water partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) and wind speed.

The surface ocean partial pressure of CO2, pCO2, is a critical parameter of the oceanic inorganic carbon system

1. because it determines the magnitude and direction of the exchange of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and
2. because it is a good indicator for changes in the upper ocean carbon cycle.

In addition, it is an oceanic parameter that can be routinely measured with high accuracy and precision. 

The oceans are absorbing about 30% of the CO2 we are adding to the air (and the biosphere is absorbing about 25% of the extra CO2).  The amount of uptake is affected by ocean modes such as the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and ENSO. For example, in El Nino years, the oceans absorb a about 30% more than the long term annual average (which according to this 2010 paper by Valsala and Maksyutov is estimated at around 1.5 petagrams of carbon a year).

Here's a map from CDIAC showing the mean annual net air-sea CO2 flux as measured in 2000.  Click for larger view.

Source: CDIAC Ocean CO2

It varies a fair bit, with the green parts having zero net exchange, the blue and purple bits are the ocean areas absorbing CO2 and the red bits emitting CO2.  (The year 2000 was part of an extended La Nina period.  That year saw Australia's second wettest year on record at the time, exceeded only by 1974, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.)

Here's some more information from CDIAC about the differences in the CO2 absorption in different parts of the oceans.

Major source of CO2: The equatorial Pacific (14°N-14°S) is the major source for atmospheric CO2, emitting about +0.48 Pg-C/yr.

Major sink of CO2: The temperate oceans between 14° and 50° in the both hemispheres are the major sink zones with an uptake flux of -0.70 Pg-C/yr for the northern and –1.05 Pg-C/yr for the southern zone. 

Most intense CO2 sink: The high latitude North Atlantic, including the Nordic Seas and portion of the Arctic Sea, is the most intense CO2 sink area on the basis of per unit area, with a mean of –2.5 tons-C / month / km2 (1 Ton = 106 grams). This is due to the combination of the low pCO2 in seawater and high gas exchange rates. 

Lowest CO2 flux: In the ice-free zone of the Southern Ocean (50°S-62°S), the mean annual flux is small (-0.06 Pg-C/yr) because of a cancellation of the summer uptake CO2 flux with the winter release of CO2 caused by deepwater upwelling. 

Net global flux: The annual mean for the contemporary net CO2 uptake flux over the global oceans is estimated to be -1.4 ± 0.7 Pg-C/yr. Taking the pre-industrial steady state ocean source of 0.4 ± 0.2 Pg-C/yr into account, the total ocean uptake flux including the anthropogenic CO2 is estimated to be –2.0 ± 0.7 Pg-C/yr in 2000.

So - now I know a whole lot more about the absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans.  I've always maintained that I learn a whole heap about climate science by researching the wrongs from pseudo-scientists :)

From the WUWT comments

There were some thoughtful comments (I'd say more than usual) among the usual swag of thoughtless comments in response to Wondering Willis Eschenbach's article.  Here is a smattering (archived here, latest archive here):

ronald foolishly takes the word of Wondering Willis over that of the scientists.  He's full of conspiracy ideation and says:

November 27, 2013 at 2:55 am
Can it be a agw survey? Cold water absorbes CO2 and warm water let it go by out gassing. It looks to me that someone wants to let look to work the other way to help agw.

Macha has it all back to front when he says:

November 27, 2013 at 3:23 am
Relative difference is not the same as absolute. Warmer water can absorb and hold more CO2, than cold. The rate of change I more a question of kinetics.

martin brumby is a paid up member of the Scientific Illiterati and says:

November 27, 2013 at 3:25 am
The vast majority of their dots are for sea surface temperatures greater than 20ºC.

Perhaps the cruises in oceans where this was the case were more popular with the psyentists than those trawling around oceans with temperatures below 10ºC?

Or maybe the latter group just kept warm and cosy below decks?

Nick Stokes comment prompted me to look into this.  He says (excerpt):

November 27, 2013 at 4:02 am
Willis, I don’t think the water measurement reflects concentration of CO2, and I’m sure it isn’t ppmv of water. It’s described in your link as pCO2, which would be the partial pressure of CO2 in equilibrium with the seawater.

In that case, there’s no particular expectation about variation with temperature. With no flux, it would be zero at any temperature. What it does reflect is which way CO2 is moving.

Richard Graves also has it back to front when he says:

November 27, 2013 at 4:42 am
I like to make soda water. Thinking very cold water would make bubblier soda that’s what I tried. Results not good! Then I tried water from tap around 20C. Result nice bubbly sodas. Seems the warmer water absorbs more CO2 more easily. Its been bothering me why?

François is impressed by the scientific research done 55 years ago and says:

November 27, 2013 at 4:11 am
Five years of measurements, fifty years ago, with the instruments available then. I am impressed.

Dodgy Geezer is a conspiracy theorist too and, after quoting Willis, says it's all a political plot:

November 27, 2013 at 4:39 am

…The first surprise was that I was under the impression that there was some kind of close relationship between the atmospheric CO2, and the CO2 in the surface seawater. …

Alas, Willis, you have been infected by IPCC reasoning. The idea that there are only a few big variables and they interact with each other in a simple manner is what you say when you are a political advisor hoping to persuade a politician.

“Yes, Mr Prime Minister – if you enact this law you WILL get more votes…”

In reality we have two domains here, the sea and the air. Each has a set of pressures and balances which determine the local CO2 concentration. At the point where they touch – the sea surface, they probably interact with one another. But how important that interaction is compared with their own internal driving variables… who knows?

Update

I've updated the archive (and again here) because there is a very long comment by the batty duke (rgbatduke AKA Robert G Brown.  Don't worry, I'm not outing him.  He hasn't hidden his identity at WUWT).  I have to wonder how he got and managed to hold onto a job at Duke University.  He doesn't seem to be aware that the data is from samples collected 50 years or so ago.  He says he would have brought on-boat computers and automated robots! In 1957!  And he wants the data compared to CO2 at Mauna Loa - which didn't start measuring CO2 until 1959. And despite the fact that quite a number of people mentioned it, the batty duke is also oblivious to the fact that Willis made a mistake and the data was pCO2 not ppmv CO2.

There's worse still.  From his ivory tower at Duke, the batty one writes:

...but I’d bet my sweet bippy that it also reflects the selection bias of researchers to prefer ocean cruises in the warm, sunny tropics with lots of interesting places to stop and things to see relative to cruising around the Cape of Good Hope or Tierra del Fuego or knocking around Iceland or the Bering Straits — presuming one can get in through the ice and so on. 

What a nong.  If he'd checked the paper he'd have seen from the map of the routes that voyages went from around 70S to 35N and virtually all around the globe from east to west.  They did sail around the Cape of Good Hope and while they didn't go around Tierra del Fuego, they went pretty far south in South America and right down near the Antarctic.  (How many American scientific expeditions travelled around the Bering Strait during the cold war?)

Not only that, the batty duke has no appreciation of how real live scientists do field work - and the way that so many of them risk all sorts of dangers and put up with all sorts of hardships, so idiots like the batty duke can figure out whether to bring a brolly to work or will need to put in more firebreaks or add a water tank to his comfy home in North Carolina.

Update 2

Willis has added more to his post including another chart and has another question (archived here).  This time he asks:

My main question in all of this is, how does the CO2 content of the seawater get to be up to 100 ppmv above the CO2 content of the overlying air? It seems to me that the driver must be biology … but I was born yesterday.

I came across an older paper that examined ocean CO2 in more detail, including looking at seasonal and diurnal fluctuations.  The paper stated:

These results support that the diurnal change in pCO2 measured in the present study are associated with the photosynthetic activity by photoplanktons in seawater.

From what little I've read so far (and it's a huge subject area of which I haven't scraped but a fraction of the surface) the seasonal variation is driven by temperature but this varies by location.  There are other factors that play an important role including upwelling / downwelling water (vertical mixing) and wind. There is also spatial variation that is driven by biological factors (which themselves vary with the season) and which combine with the effect of sea surface temperature.

Willis has simply plotted pCO2 vs sea surface temperature.  He hasn't plotted by space (lat/long) or season.  In his plot where the sea surface temperature is above 25 degrees and more particularly so when it gets closer to 30 degrees, pCO2 (ocean surface) is generally above the average atmospheric CO2 pressure.  But I don't think that tells much.

What I don't understand is why Willis goes and plots all this stuff with no apparent particular aim in mind without doing any reading.  You'd think being chided by Roy Spencer would have taught him a lesson.

---

L.S. Waterman, P.P. Tans, T. Aten, C.D. Keeling, and T.A. Boden, Quasi-simultaneous CO2 Measurements in the Atmosphere and Surface Ocean Waters from Scripps Institution of Oceanography DOWNWIND, MONSOON, and LUSIAD Expeditions, 1957-1963, draft report, 38 pages, 1996.

Has Anthony Watts just declared he now rejects AGW?

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I think it means that Anthony Watts has finally fallen off the cliff into utter nuttery.  Seriously.  He himself.

He's been tending that way for a while now.  Despite some vague arm-waving about how he won't let slayers who don't accept physics on his blog, he has been publishing their articles and now is down to a mere handful of utter nutters like Christopher Monckton (birther, curer of AIDS) and Tim Ball (author of the slayers book).

The evidence

Today he writes about a new paper about the role of the eastern equatorial Pacific in recent surface temperatures and writes:

This has important implications for IPCC’s upcoming AR5 report, where they will attempt to give attribution to the warming, which now looks more and more like a natural cycle. See updates below.  – Anthony

Is Anthony Watts saying that he now thinks that global warming is a "natural cycle"?  Or was he just being careless with words and writing that he now accepts climate models and that this one shows the role of the oceans in global surface temperature?  I've archived the WUWT blog article here.

I'll let you know if there's any more info.

I don't have time to write about the paper itself.  If you like you can comment on it.  I'll be back later.  Oh, I should point out that the paper in no way rejects AGW, as if I needed to write that!

Kosaka and Xie Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling, Nature (2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534

Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity.

Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA.

Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.

Flashback to the future as seen in 1959

This is part of HotWhopper's Flashback series.  It's not about climate but I figure I can squeeze it in because it mentions wave and tide power and desalination.  I came across it when following up research on my last article - it mentions the Nautilus submarine, the first sub to go under the North Pole - back in 1958.

CB Momsen "Swede"
Source: US Naval Historical Centre
via Wikipedia 

From The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995) Saturday 20 June 1959

Future In Sea Says Admiral

By G. K. HODENFIELD

ARLINGTON, Virginia (Associated Press). -—To Vice Admiral C. B. Momsen (Ret.), all this emphasis on space is a little bit ridiculous. Man's future, he insists, is on this planet —in and below the ocean.

The Admiral, who has studied the sea for years, can foresee the day when:

• Submarines carrying hundreds of passengers will speed from the United States to Europe at 225 miles per hour, quietly, cheaply, safely.
• Cargo subs will cross the top of the world under the North Pole, at 70 miles an hour. Behind them will trail a mile-long chain of sausage-like rubber containers filled with 12 million gallons of oil.
• Fish farms in the ocean depths will supply the bulk of the world's food.
• The force of the ocean tide, currents and waves will be converted into electricity in giant underwater power plants. 
• Submarine "mining camps" will sweep the ocean floor, harvesting a fabulous wealth of minerals. Extracting plants will process the limitless acres of sea water for gold, copper, magnesium and dozens of other essential elements. 
• Vast reservoirs of oil and natural gas beneath the ocean floor will be tapped. 

Fresh Water

Sea water will be converted to fresh water, pumped inland, and used to transform vast desert regions into garden spots.

Science fiction? Not all all.  All these things are feasible, says the Admiral, and will come about just as soon as man is willing to put forth the time, money and effort.

The oceans, their power and their resources are Momsen's business, and have been for 38 years.

He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1919, and two years later went into the submarine service. He stayed with the underwater ships until his retirement in 1955. Since then he has served as a consultant to a number of U.S. firms interested in under water travel or resources.

If his name sounds familiar, it is probably because he gave it to the famed "Momsen Lung," which he helped develop as an individual escape apparatus for men trapped in sunken submarines. The device is still in use today by navies all over the world. He also had a big hand in developing the diving bell which saved the lives of 33 men trapped in the submarine "Squalus" off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1939.

"Little Crazy"

"We have all gone a little crazy about this outer space business, just to keep up with the Joneses," says Momsen: "The ocean is the place where we should be putting our efforts in order to provide for future generations.

"The population of the world is expanding at a tremendous rate. Within a few hundred years at the most people will have to look else where for the things they need. They will find them all in the sea—the world's last great unexplored frontier."

Submarines cannot go below 1,000 ft. now, but a submarine is being developed, Momsen says, that should be able to go down 10,000 ft. That would hit bottom 75 per cent, of the time, although the maximum depth of the ocean is known to be about 36,000 ft.

When the atomic-powered Nautilus sailed under the North Pole last August, broad new vistas were opened in the field of underwater commerce.

Here was a route that would cut nearly 5,000 miles off the 11.200-mile iourney from London to Tokyo. Here was a possible new way to carry oil from the fields on Canada's Hudson Bay to the factories of Europe and America.

Containers

U.S. Rubber, one of the firms for which Momsen is a consultant, has been developing rubber containers for the transport of liquids for more than 15 years. The company visualises the day when cargoes will be hauled around the work by submarines towing a series of containers, 20 ft in diameter-and 400 ft long. Each container would bold a million gallons, and each submarine could putt a chain of them 5,000ft. long.

There are about 75 different liquids—acids, oils and alcohols—that could be transported this way, plus a great variety of such items as dry lime, grains, fertilisers.

Big oil tankers cannot get into shallow water harbours to unload. But a submarine cargo train could surface outside a small harbour, cut one of the containers loose and let it be towed into the harbour by tugs.

The top speed of the U.S. atomic-powered submarines is still a military secret, although it has been announced as being in excess of 20 knots (about 23 miles an hour).

Now in the process of development, says Momson, is a plastic-type coating designed to cut down the drag which any ship encounters in going through the water. Submarine speeds of 70 miles an hour will be entirely possible, he says. That is more than twice the speed of the S.S. United States, the world's fastest ocean liner.

"But that is not the limit, by far," the Admiral declares. This coating, plus expected improvements in power plants, can boost the speed of submarines up to 225 miles an hour."

New Engines

Nuclear power is not the complete answer to greater speed undersea.

"The ultimate engine may be an entirely new type that uses some substance which reacts with salt water in the way that a petroleum product mixes with oxygen to produce a combustible mixture.

"A new method of propulsion may be found, doing away completely with propellors. Water-jet propulsion is a possibility."

There are a number of advantages the Admiral can see in submarine passenger vessels.

He says:

"They would be faster than any surface ship, more comfortable than any aeroplane. The passengers could have their own cabins, more room all round. Under the surface there is almost absolute calm; no one could set sea sick, or suffer motion sickness. The passengers would not know they were moving.

"Passenger subs could operate on definite schedules. The wildest surface storms could not wash out the trip. A traveller could journey from New York to London and not know about a North Atlantic storm until he read about it in a newspaper."

Passenger and cargo-towing submarines are not on. the drawing board now, and will not be until there is a demand for them. That demand, Momsen believes, will come first from the military. And he notes with satisfaction the increased interest since the development of the Polaris missile, which can be fired from a submerged submarine.

Use In War

Momsen is the first to concede that cargo-towing submarines may not be economically practical right now. But he makes this point:

"In World War II, 14 million tons of Allied shipping were sunk in the Atlantic, 6 million tons more in the Pacific. If we could have built the cargo subs then, they would have been economically practical because they would have been necessary."

The same holds true for the vast riches of the sea, the Admiral says.

"We know that in every cubic mile of sea water there are approximately 20 million tons of minerals—including 90 million dollars worth of gold and 400 tons of magnesium. And we know there are more than 300 million cubic miles of this sea water.

"The Scripps Institution of Oceanography found an area of thousands of square miles in the South-East Pacific literally covered with nodules— rock-like pieces of valuable ore from the size of a man's fist upward. Scripps estimated their value at 500,000 dollars per square mile. It's a mystery where they came from, but they are just lying there waiting to be picked up.

More Denier Weirdness - Somebody Tell Trenberth

Mankind has been had!

Today I noticed this comment on the "most visited anti-science website". You cannot heat water from above on this planet:

I wonder if robert barclay has ever asked himself how the atmosphere gets warm?