The Rationalist Manifesto

The pseudo-science in Martin Durkin’s “The Great Global Warming Swindle” which I’ve just watched on ABC tonight has been so rigorously debunked that I’m tempted not to even discuss it, but… The short of the counter-argument to his so called documentary is that the solar-radiance model of climate has been valid for most of the history of the world, but then a certain species, known as homo-sapiens, started pissing in its own back yard.

Durkin intentionally ignores the last twenty years or so of climate data, which shows a huge divergence between the prediction of the solar-radiance model (which predicts temperature reduction) and the actual data which shows a sharp increase in global temperature. We are in fact going through the warmest period of climate since man invented farming. Durkin conveniently terminates his graphs at 1988.

The scariest part lies in something that was mentioned in Durkin’s film as an argument against human produced CO₂ as a cause of global warming– that the warming didn’t coincide with the post-war industrial boom.

This can hardly be accounted as an argument for his point of view, as climate effects often lag behind their causes by as much as several hundred years. Unfortunately for us the lag between carbon emission growth to temperature increase simply means that it might take us as many years or more between the time we finally hit the breaks on our carbon emissions to when we see the benefits, meanwhile we’re probably in for a hell of a ride. Literally.

As a side note, if anyone is interested, one of the prevailing theories of why we have only felt the effects of our emissions in the last twenty years is because the oceans were capable of absorbing a large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we have since saturated them.

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