Wood Romances

A few years ago, I responded to a political " comment " from the CO2 Coalition in which Happer, Lindzen (and potentially ghost writers) made a series of self-contradictory claims about climate sensitivity. Recently I became aware of another political tract in which they simplified their argument tremendously. They've also hidden almost all their math, making it more difficult to check up on what they say. However, there is plenty we can say about this that shows that they are still actively changing their opinions, and this always in the direction of distancing themselves from the best scientific evidence. Much of this tract depends on the following graph: The graph above is supposed to agree with another chart in the tract, and it mostly does, except that ΔT14 = 0.054°C above but is wrongly rounded up to 0.06°C. In the description of these calculations, this tract asks, " How much warming did CO2 cause when CO2 increased from 280 ppm in 1750 to the 420 ppm in the ...

At least as far back as Myhre et al 1998 [1], scientists have understood that it's possible to approximate the effective radiative forcing (ERF, the amount of change in the outgoing energy flux near the tropopause) by a simple logarithmic equation: ΔERF ≈ α*ln(C/C0) I say "approximate" because the actual calculations for the relationship between ΔF and CO2 from line by line radiative transfer models are a bit more complex than this. The above equation is simply the result of curve fitting that matches those calculations over the range of CO2 concentrations that we're mostly concerned with. The value for α scales the radiative forcing change for the log change in CO2 concentrations. Myhre's value for α was 5.35, and this was used in the IPCC's TAR and AR4 reports. More recent IPCC reports, though, have improved the ΔF2xco2 estimates, and we can solve for the α values implied by these changes in ΔF2xco2 with α = ΔF2xco2/ln(2) ΔF2xco2 ≈ α*ln(2) AR3: 3.71 ± 0.4 W...