I am heterodox when it comes to my environmental policy views. I believe that anthropogenic climate is real but I’m an agnostic about the role of carbon dioxide. I believe that we should change our policies to be more environment-friendly but I think that most of the changes that we’ve made over the last 30 years have been futile if not counterproductive. I don’t believe that one size will fit all in environmental policy and I don’t believe that developing economies have a right to follow a path identical to the ones that developed economies did because we know more now than we did then. When conditions are different, you hold to different standards. I also hold the very non-conformist view that an individual’s carbon emissions tend to increase geometrically with his or her income or, said more simply, if you want to reduce worldwide carbon emissions you need to figure out a way to motivate the richest people to reduce theirs which means that most policies make people feel better but don’t have a great deal of effect.
One thing that I do know is that anecdotes can’t prove a theory and that the minimum standard for proving the truth of a theory is that the theory be predictive. Anecdotes can, however, disprove theories and lists like this one should at the very least cause people to re-examine their beliefs.
In the interest of balance here’s the flipside of that coin.
Unfortunately, at this we have divided into two angry camps neither of which pays any attention to the other’s pronouncements. The articles I’ve linked to won’t convince anybody of anything because most of the people have already made up their minds.
I stopped with the list as #1, 2 and 3 are false. #3 is a real side-splitter as special mathy-math is used to “disprove” actual empirical evidence. “Why use ice-cores when you have linear functions!”
Actually, #3 is reason to suspect anything which comes from that site. It claims the IPCC is wrong in claiming excess carbon resides in the atmosphere for 100 years, that a CO2 molecule only resides for about five years. This is, by omission, a half-truth. An individual CO2 molecule does typically reside in the atmosphere for five years — what this list does not tell us is when that molecule exits the atmosphere it is usually replaced by a CO2 molecule from the oceans. The molecules just switch places. Because a net loss for each molecule is infrequent roughly 100 years is needed for the total excess amount to leave the atmosphere. We then see the IPCC is correct in its claim and Watts is incorrect.
Unless you can grasp the science, the NYT article is about your only understanding, and without some understanding, you cannot know who has any knowledge.
You have to go past the slides and into the body of the article. The comments are mostly on topic, but there is some nonsense. I do not agree with all the points, and for some of them, the equations begin to make my eyes glaze over. I rarely trust graphs because I do not have the time or energy to dissect them. I usually follow most or all of the supporting documentation, but I just do not have the time.
The first slide is a discussion about the Greenhouse Effect (GHE). It gets into the weeds, but for a better discussion, one of the commenters provides a link to another site: Best of the greenhouse. This is a full blown physics discussion. It validates slide #1’s reasoning, but it also refutes its conclusion.
If you can follow the physics, I would recommend it. (I mostly understood what they were talking about, but I do not have time to do much more research into it.) The people discussing the topic are knowledgeable, and the topic is quite specific but important. The problem is that in the overall picture it gets swamped.
Of all the commenters who dismissed the first slide, the one who added the link was the only one who seemed to understand the science. I do not follow the WUWT site, and the regular commenters may have gone over this multiple times.
The correct way to dismiss slide #1 is to explain that the usual way GHE is described is wrong, and the WUWT site is correct about the radiative effective being wrong. There is a second way, and it involves radiative-convective transfer. Most climate scientists do not know or understand this process, and therefore, they do not and can not explain it.
It actually leads to a better explanation of the overall GHE as one of the commenters (at the link) calls a blanket-like effect.