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Exsolvo Orbis Terrarum

There was not much I disagreed with. He started out by saying of the IPCC summary:

And they say they're now ninety percent confident that human activity is contributing to the present rate of global warming, and I would certainly tell you I share that confidence.

and went on to say

So, I like to think that what we're doing in the west, we're conducting an unplanned, uncontrolled experiment on the chemistry of the atmosphere, and we don't know for sure the outcome of that experiment's going to be, but we're in luck because the contributions of China and India will make it very, very clear what that contribution's going to be because their efforts will vastly increase the rate of delivery of CO2 into the atmosphere, and we're not doing anything about that.

So he's not even really disputing the consequences - just saying that anything we do will be overwhelmed by the contributions from China and India when there economies are more developed (not quite sure why that makes us "in luck"). Even on sea level rise, he thinks that Gore's scenario is correctly based on the melting of the Greenland sheet; he just thinks that the likelihood of that is low.

The transcript is here.

The same could be said when mexican food became a fad

So, I like to think that what we're doing in the west, we're conducting an unplanned, uncontrolled experiment on the chemistry of the atmosphere, and we don't know for sure the outcome of that experiment's going to be

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I am not so certain. Yes he agress that we are contributing CO2 to the atmosphere but I don't take away from that an agreement with Gore on direction to address anything.

The following exchange from the transcript is a prime example (though it comes off more convincingly in the audio clip)

there is a chart that he showed in the film, he showed these two curves following each other very, very closely. One of them was the temperature of the Earth’s climate, or the temperature at the Earth’s surface as indicated from the Antarctic ice core. And the other curve was the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as determined by measuring the concentration of CO2 in the bubbles of air trapped in the ice. And now, this record goes back 650,000 years. And when you put these two records side by side, you see an astonishingly close correlation between the temperature as reconstructed from the ice, and the amount of CO2 in the air bubbles in the ice. And then Al Gore went out to the very recent end of this curve, and he showed a red spot where the CO2 is today, and then he got on his little industrial truck lift, and had it crank him up so he could show with his pointer where the CO2 was going to go in the next 45 years. And then I’m reading from what he said. He said it’s a complicated relationship, but the most important part of it is this. When there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperature increases because more heat from the Sun is trapped inside. What Al Gore did not ask, and did not point out either to his audience who watched the film, or to those who read the book, he didn’t ask the question what’s responsible for the lock-step correlation between these two curves for the last 650,000 years of Earth’s history? And we know from many other sources of information that the temperature of the Earth is controlled by these variations in the geometry of the Earth-Sun system, so we’re driven to the conclusion that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the consequence of temperature, not the cause of it. And the most astonishing thing about this curve is that it shows that long before humans started modifying the chemistry of the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the temperature and the CO2 concentration, and the methane, which he doesn’t show on his curve, varied in absolute lock-step. So there are processes out there that move carbon around from reservoir to reservoir on the Earth’s surface, that did that long before we started burning fossil fuels. So I fault him for not drawing attention to the real meaning of this curve, that says that the fundamental control of CO2 in the atmosphere is the temperature. It’s not the opposite.

I added the emphasis, but this exchange indicates to me that the professor does not "agree with Gore".

He also had things to say about Kyoto....

before the Kyoto protocol began, I think anybody who looked closely at what it proposed to do, it proposed to lower the emissions of these selected gasses, I think an average of 7% below 1990 levels by the year 2012. And if you just looked at 1990 levels, at how high they were, a 7% reduction below that level was not going to have a measurable impact on either the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the rate that is going to be emitted. We knew in 1997, when the Kyoto protocol was promulgated, that if you wanted to have an effect on the chemistry of the atmosphere, it would probably require 10 Kyotos. But we also know that the countries that signed on, and are making efforts to meet the terms of the Kyoto protocol, have failed.

Support the Mission - Honor the troops
Exsolvo Orbis Terrarum

following the long quote you've extracted about the past relation between heat and CO2, the exchange continues (from where you left off):

DP: Wait. Then is it fair to say that if he acknowledged that, he’d have no case?

RG: No, that’s not fair to say, because the amount of CO2 that we’re now putting in the atmosphere is higher than is shown in this 650,000 year record from the Antarctic ice core, and he makes a big fuss about this is the highest concentration of CO2 we’ve seen in the last 650,000 years.

DP: Is that true, by the way?

RG: Yeah, it’s true.

and he goes on the explain how the current carbon process is quite different to past ones. On the Kyoto process, he just says that it's much less than is needed, which of course is true, but the answer is not do do even less, and I don't think that is what he is saying.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I'll quote it:

RG: Yeah, it’s true. If you look at the curve, you know when the globe is warming, then the CO2 goes up. And we know the CO2 goes up, it has to go up, because it’s being driven out of the ocean, it’s being driven out of soils, it’s being driven out of permafrost. We think those are probably the sources of the CO2 increase at various times in the past. But today, we know, and listen to me while I give you these numbers, we’re probably putting 6.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year by burning fossil fuels. We’re adding another 2 billion tons, maybe 2.5, by tropical deforestation, something between 8.5 and 9 billion tons a year of carbon is going in the atmosphere. But only 3.5 billion tons stays there. And the rest of it, we know are looking, we know that 2, 2.5 tons are going back in the ocean. The rest of it is being driven back into some Earth surface reservoir, the soils, the permafrost, the forest, we don’t know exactly where it’s going, but many people have good ideas. So the one thing that’s different in the present warming trend, we have reversed the flow of carbon. Now it’s going from the atmosphere into the Earth’s surface reservoirs. And to the best of our knowledge, in each previous warming trend, it was coming out of those Earth surface reservoirs and into the atmosphere. And I think that’s a significant change in the way in which these cycles operate at the Earth’s surface.

What he's saying (and I strongly endorse) is that in previous cycles heating caused existing carbon to move into the atmosphere. That is quite different to the current situation, where we directly put 8 gigatons a year into the atmosphere, from where it gradually goes to other places. This time, it's the CO2 that causes the heating.

That does argue against the idea that CO2 is a cause for warming. The warming is what we want to stop. If CO2 is not the cause in the past why should it be now ? If its not the cause shouldn't we try to find what actually is ? Especially before doing damage ?
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Again, quoting from RG's talk:

And we know from many other sources of information that the temperature of the Earth is controlled by these variations in the geometry of the Earth-Sun system, so we’re driven to the conclusion that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the consequence of temperature, not the cause of it.

So in the past it's been the orbital geometry that causes heating, and we know that doesn't apply to the present. What we do know, as I talked about in a previous diary, is that the last century's CO2 increase brings in an effective heat flux of about 2 W/m2. That's pretty causative.

Or even the major determinant of earths climate that seems a bit contrived.

Like walking down the street observing that cars stop moving when the people moving stop and concluding that the peoples motion was the controlling variable.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I won't post the picture (threadjack) but here is a very important chart of the various radiative loads. In terms of new effects, CO2 is dominant, but there are certainly others.

And in the extreme. Every startup has an undefined growth rate in the initial reporting period. Seeing as the effect of particulates, clouds and the air ocean interaction are still poorly understood, you might as well use a child's fingerpainting.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Following your quote, when asked to be more specific, he gave a long answer best summarised by its ending:

And unless we come up with some kind of a plan that's going to deal with the projection of India's and China's future development, nothing we do to control CO2 going into the atmosphere will have any measurable effect.

But he seems to definitely think something should be done:

So any strategy we come up with to reduce the amounts of energy we use, and they're unpardonably high, any strategy we come up with to reduce those amounts of energy will give us all kinds of environmental benefits, and at the same time might eventually lead to the reduction of the amount of CO2 we pour into the atmosphere.

what appropriate energy usage is. Well that makes sense.

A funny bit of history, during WWII the American economy was largely by the war production board. They could eliminate items from being produced and decide that resources be diverted. One of the first things they did was deem that typewriters were an unnecessary item and suspend their production. Of course, with the vast expansion of government the number of typewritten forms went through the roof.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Dennis Prager's guest.