Year 2, Month 4, Day 12: Listen To The Expert. Please?

Climate scientist Ray Johnson writes a regular column for the Plattsburgh (NY) Press-Republican. This month he reviews the facts of AGW and makes the case yet again that the clever apes are the guilty parties:

When scientists measure the different isotopes of carbon in the atmosphere today, they find that the relative amount of carbon-14 compared to carbon-12 is decreasing. Since fossil fuels have been buried in the earth for millions of years, all of the carbon-14 isotope has decayed. Thus when these fuels are combusted they release the stable form of carbon (carbon-12) into the air. These emissions dilute the levels of carbon-14 normally present, which tells us that the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is coming from human activities.

Climate science and science in general, is not like a house of cards and is not based on a single line of evidence. There are many, many lines of evidence and data that collectively point to a single, consistent answer: namely, that rising carbon dioxide levels from fossil fuel burning is the main driver behind global warming.

The data continue to come in. The graph here of “Arctic Sea Ice Extent” is current through March 22, 2011. Sea ice extent normally reaches its maximum in the period from Feb. 18 to March 31. This year the maximum extent, so far, was reached on March 7 and at 5,650,000 square miles is 463,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average. This reduction in ice extent equates to an area larger than the states of California and Texas combined. That is a lot less ice.

Sent April 4:

In a country with fully functioning news media, Ray Johnson’s column on climate science would be old news. The facts about anthropogenic global warming have been known and widely accepted in the scientific community for years; Arctic ice melt caused by the greenhouse effect was discussed in the pages of a 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics! America’s problem is not that the facts are unavailable; it’s that in order to avoid surrendering one penny of their quarterly profit margins, the fossil fuel industry is willing to spend remarkable sums of money to sow confusion and delay meaningful action. As a result, remarkable and bizarre theories abound. Occam’s Razor exposes these paranoid visions; is it more likely that thousands of climate scientists all over the world are conspiring to promote Al Gore’s “New World Order” — or that the world’s most powerful economic actors don’t want to give up their enormous profits?

Warren Senders