Reason clouded by carbon obsession

You can't tax the sun, or clouds, or the variations in the earth's orbit, or volcanic eruptions, or water vapour, or a myriad other possible causes of climate change … but you can tax CO2 emissions (or at least you can try). Interesting, isn't it, that the alarmists would have you believe that the sole driver of "climate change" is the one thing that can be taxed and regulated. Coincidence? You decide.

Peter Schwerdtfeger, emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University in Adelaide, is an AGW believer, and yet even he has doubts about the role of CO2.

ALTHOUGH there are many doubters of man-made climate change, I am not yet one of them. But I remain unconvinced that carbon dioxide is the sole bete noire. Two decades ago, I pored over the spectral properties of the infra-red radiation of this gas, which is essential to plant life, and found that it was almost completely overshadowed by the radiative properties of water vapour, which is vital to all forms of life on earth.

Repeatedly in science we are reminded that happenings in nature can rarely be ascribed to a single phenomenon. For example, sea levels on our coasts are dependent on winds and astronomical forces as well as atmospheric pressure and, on a different time scale, the temperature profile of the ocean. Now, with complete abandon, a vociferous body of claimants is insisting that CO2 alone is the root of climatic evil.

He also considers there may be far more serious effects from burning of fossil fuels - namely the particulates released:

Detailed studies led by internationally acclaimed cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have revealed that the minute water vapour droplets that form around some carbon particles are so small as to be almost incapable of being subsequently coalesced into larger precipitable drops. In short, the particulates prevent rainfall.

Rosenfeld's research group has shown that humans are changing the climate in a much more direct way than through the release of CO2. Rather, pollution is seriously inhibiting rain over mountains in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, including China and Australia.

Whether all this is true or not is to an extent irrelevant. The point is that because the alarmists are so focussed on CO2, proper scientific research into other aspects of the atmosphere and climate is being ignored. As soon as dogma overtakes free-thinking scientific enquiry, we're back to the Dark Ages.

Read it here.