re: #374 Charles

The reason why the climate deniers are seizing on this paper is spelled out in the University of Waterloo press release: Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming.

OK so it is worth looking into a little more…

one note though is from the link that is not an abstract:

was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

If you are publishing in physics reports, then you get rejected a lot of other places. I am also wary, very wary of press releases from press people. I shall have to look into the actual paper.

Now this guy’s specialty is the ozone hole - certainly it is his current focus. Here is a very respectable paper he wrote this year that was published as a PRL. Having a PRL or two is a very big deal.

However, he makes no predictions about AGW. After digging some more, he seems to be a respectable chemical physicist.

I will grant exactly this much without being at the university right now to look at the paper directly… I doubt it says what the pepole are saying it says.

The best case scenario (for the deniers) is that we have one paper that proposes a novel mechanism for warming that is not CO2. The fact that the ozone hole is man caused seems to escape them also, I mean that would be AGW too, but by a different mechanism… However, I sincerely doubt that any respectable scientist would deny the impact of CO2 on the atmosphere. So the best case is that he is arguing that this is a larger effect than has been previously taken into account in the models.

Let’s say he is right. We wil wait for the other chemical physicists to weigh in on this, even if he is, it does not overturn everything we know about CO2. It really is a GHG and we have thousands of papers where the concentrations of it are doing what we think they should to the climate. Usually when estimates of impact are false, they are false the wrong way - as in too soft, as in the predictions were less severe than the data.

This is just reality. So the best case for denier types is that he is right - not known yet and that we need to take this into account more in the models and it would be confirmed by the models being worse and predicting more dire things.