[Coral-List] DONT BE TOO MUCH OF A SCIENTIST

[Michael Risk]

Huh. By mistake, I seem to have blundered onto a transcript from one of the Republican presidential debates…so much jingoistic nonsense packed into such a short space.

But let me respond to Mr. Raymond's posting, assuming it was serious, by pointing out two items:
1. this bears tenuous/zero relevance to coral reefs. The only possible connection, which Mr Raymond has not made, is that climate change will slay them all, so we reef scientists should be alert.
2. most of what he says is nonsense. When one considers (as one should) the entire heat budget of the planet (land, atmosphere, oceans) it has been demonstrated time and again that the upward march continues (Church et al., 2011). There is no post-1998 plateau. Secondly, solar activity has decreased in the past 30 years, during which time significant warming has occurred. There is a ton of literature on this.

Lastly: the rest of the world may not share Mr Raymond's view that the UN should be pro-America.

Let's stick with reefs, and keep political bias off this list.

Mike Risk

On 2012-02-07, at 2:34 PM, Bill Raymond wrote:

> Gene Shinn made a good point. Global temperature peaked in 1998, yet CO2 levels continued to rise over the past 11 years. Solar cycles correlate better to global temperaturer than CO2 levels. Yet, the IPCC claims solar forcing contributed +0.12 W/m2 since 1750 compared to +1.6 W/m2 from anthropogenic warming. They apparently chose to use a parameter of solar irradiance that has not changed significantly. Do they really expect us to believe the sun's influence is only 7 1/2 % of the human contribution? Will they also deny the recent increase in solar flare activity?
>  
> First convince the world of AGW, then demand $10 trillion to fix it. Is the UN pro-America?
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Michael Risk
riskmj at mcmaster.ca