Comment

More Ammunition to make Deniers Feel Small

1
Norman Branitsky7/04/2010 7:46:35 pm PDT

Seems to be a nicely laid out paper. I have two comments:
1. B4 “Climate change is driven by cosmic rays”
Claims of a CRF-climate link on the million year time scale (Shaviv and Veizer 2003)
have been disputed (Rahmstorf et al. 2004).

Here is Shaviv’s response on his web site to the Rahmstorf et al.2004 paper:
“Rahmstorf et al. 2004 published a comment stating that almost all Veizer and I did was wrong. We showed in our response why every comment is irrelevant or invalid. In their response to the rebuttal, Rahmstorf et al. did not address any of our rebuttal comments (I presume because they could not). Instead, they used faulty statistics to demonstrate that our results are statistically insignificant. (Basically, they used Bartlett’s formula for the effective number of degrees of freedom in a limit where the original derivation breaks down).”

Just because someone has written a paper with lots of citations, you still have to be diligent as a reader because not all the citations may be valid.

2. C6 “CO2 does not drive climate” is missing from this paper.
(The -=- was the only way I could make a reasonable table as more than 3 characters like “.” or “-” are collapsed to just 3 characters.)

Time-=-=-=-=-Glaciation-=-=-=-=-=-=-CO2 (ppmv)
450-420 Ma-=-Ordovician-Silurian-=-=-4000(*)
360-260 Ma-=-Carboniferous-Permian-=400
151-132 Ma-=-Jurassic-Cretaceous-=-=2000(*)
Present Day-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-389

(*) Berner, R. A. and Kothavala, Z. 2001: Geocarb III: A revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time.
American Journal of Science 301:182-204

The obvious question the Urs Neu paper neglects to answer is how the Earth could be covered in glaciers if the atmospheric CO2 was 5 or 10 times the present day value? Why wasn’t the Earth’s climate a runaway greenhouse with so much atmospheric CO2?