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Listed below are comments made by Boring_username between Thursday, 2nd July 2009 and Wednesday, 16th September 2009.

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Barbecue summer? Newsnight turns up the heat on man from the Met Office 03:23am on 16 Sep 2009 Re: 133

Re-education must be taking longer than first thought!

I've even started to go back to Richard Black's blog every now and again - before despairing at the lack of scientific knowledge and thus leaving pretty sharpish!
Barbecue summer? Newsnight turns up the heat on man from the Met Office 05:46am on 24 Aug 2009 Re: 121 - Re: 119 (2)

With respect to your point on aquariums this is only valid if the aquarium wasn't kept at a constant higher CO2 elevation level. Yes, the CO2 is being used up but it is also being replaced at the same rate such that there is always an elevated level in order to keep the corals healthier.

The increased CO2 levels and warmth are why calcifying organisms are, in general, doing better nowadays than they were in pre-industrial times:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5874/336
Barbecue summer? Newsnight turns up the heat on man from the Met Office 05:40am on 24 Aug 2009 Re: 121

Quick chemistry test:

You have a solution with pH of 8.179. You add some acid to the solution to bring the pH to 8.108. The acid you are using only has enough strength and quantity to bring the pH to a lowest of about 7.8.

Would this be described as acidification of the solution, or neutralisation?

In ALL aspects of chemistry this would be neutralisation and is precisely what is happening with the increased levels of carbon dioxide into the oceans. It is therefore ocean neutralisation; the term acidification is used ONLY because it sounds scarier than the process actually is!
Barbecue summer? Newsnight turns up the heat on man from the Met Office 05:40am on 20 Aug 2009 Re: 118 - SheffTim

There is no such thing as ocean acidification in the vast majority of the Earth's water systems. Sea water is naturally alkaline and, even if all the fossil fuels in the world were burned, would remain alkaline (just less so).

The correct, scientific, term is therefore ocean neutralisation - but this doesn't sound as scary as acidification so isn't used all that much in the alarmist sphere!

It is also something that I am not too worried about - Geologists like me generally take longer term views of the world, backed up by looking at what has happened in the past too. Corals have survived temperature fluctuations from ice-ages to hot-houses; CO2 levels far in excess of 1000ppm and sea level rises of many 10s of metres in very short timespans. They are hardy little critters and actually do better in elevated CO2 times as their algal symbionts are able to make more food(anyone who keeps them in aquariums will tell you that to get them growing really well you pump in CO2 to raise the CO2 levels).

Methane clathrates are more interesting though - they do have the ability to rapidly change the planet's climate system (unlike CO2 which doesn't) - more research should, IMHO, go into the potential to control them and mine them for energy.
Barbecue summer? Newsnight turns up the heat on man from the Met Office 02:49am on 13 Aug 2009 Off topic but is there going to be any comment on the Hadley Centre / University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit loss of data and Freedom of Information fracas with respect to the original data for the HADCRU temperature data set?

From my readings of it they have admitted to losing much of the past data - which makes independent verification of the temperature series pretty much impossible.

In addition CRU have stated that much of the data is under confidentiality agreements (which they have mainly lost) so can't be disclosed to anyone (reading the few agreements there are they can't be disclosed to the Hadley Centre either - which makes the HADCRU temperature series a breach of copyright).

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6797

My personal opinion is that the best way to "convert" skeptics (of which I am one) to the cause is by full disclosure of data so that we can run through the calcs and see that, indeed, climate change is a real problem. It simply makes me more skeptical when they refuse to release or, worse, lose the data that supports and validates their stance.
Barbecue summer? Newsnight turns up the heat on man from the Met Office 02:41am on 13 Aug 2009 With respect to the lack of tax on aviation fuel you also need to know that, for international flights, there is a international agreement (called the Chicago Convention) to which most countries in the world have signed up. This agreement explicitly bans the taxation of fuel for international air transport.

So even if the UK wanted to tax aviation fuel used in international flights it wouldn't be allowed to unless it renegotiated the agreement and got every country in the world to sign up to it or decided that it no longer wished for the agreement to apply - in which case countries could levy huge taxes on all British registered or destined aircraft.

For domestic flights it is a different matter - in the UK domestic aviation fuel is taxable at 17.5% but has no duty on it. However in the UK all flights are subject to VAT at a rate of 0% - so any VAT charged to the airline on fuel is reclaimed in its VAT return as input tax with no output tax on the consumer. Other countries (such as France) charge VAT on domestic flights (I think at 5% for France but I could be wrong).

So it isn't really a tax break for the airline (as any VAT charged is reclaimed) but a tax break for the passengers as they don't have to pay VAT. This is, however, more than made up for most UK flights by Airline Passenger Duty and the recharging of all State costs with respect to security and immigration etc to airports (which then on charge these to airlines and again to passengers).
Who can you trust? Not scientists, say ... scientists 9:59pm on 09 Jul 2009 @ BishopHill

I find the best thing to do is to ignore the rantings of one poster and concentrate on the well argued case from the others. I don't even bother to read that poster's comments anymore. It is through debate, rather than rantings, that two sides can, at least, understand each other.

But I also get referred to the mods quite frequently so perhaps it is rantings that are allowed and debate isn't (which would perhaps be a sign of a change in tack by the BBC as the rantings must surely only undermine the pro-AGW lobby's case!)
Is the climate warming or cooling? 02:52am on 09 Jul 2009 Re: SheffTim

And, on the pro-sun camp you have the recent paper by Jean-Louis Le Mouel et al entitled "Evidence for a solar signature in 20th-century temperature data from the USA and Europe"

The only link that I have is to a PDF so I can't link to it here - but try googling the paper for more info.

And in further defence I would add that, if scientists had totally discounted the sunspot/cosmic ray theory by Svensmark then I doubt that Cern would be spending large amounts of its funding on the Cloud project.
Is the climate warming or cooling? 02:31am on 08 Jul 2009 Why is it that whenever climate alarmists pull out temperature numbers they use GISS and Hadley Centre?

GISS is so full of adjustments that it is more of a political plaything than a temperature index and the Hadley Centre refuse to disclose their methods and raw data so could, for all external viewers know, be made up by monkeys typing randomly on a typewriter.

However they both run "hotter" than the accurate satellites and so alarmists' confirmation bias pushes them towards those measures.

What is the current temperature anomaly according to UAH (one of the accurate satellite measures)? 0.001 degree. So it is 0.001 degree hotter now than "average". Help save us from this global warming! (Info available here: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures)

The simple fact is that we are in an interglacial period of an ice age. We are also recovering from the "little ice age" and so it is expected that temperatures will warm up. Just as they will, in a matter of a blink of an eyelid in geological time, cool down allownig the ice to expand as we head towards the next glacial maximum.

If climate changes are such a bad thing then the best thing for us to do is to work out how to adapt to them so that they aren't so terrible - that way the human race will be better adapted to making it through the next cold period of the current ice age.
Sea turtles, climate change and the 'Germaine Greer Effect' 03:06am on 02 Jul 2009 So increased temperatures may cause only female sea turtles to be born and lead to extinction of the species.

Amazing that these creatures are still around then as they have been spotted in fossil records dating back to over 200 million years ago. At that time the Earth's average temperature was, conservatively, 2 Kelvin higher than it is today and was on a 150 million year warming trend towards, again conservatively, 6 Kelvin higher than present. Since then temperatures have cooled to approximately 2 Kelvin below current temperature about 1 million years ago; oscillated rapidly between 2 Kelvin lower than today and 1 Kelvin higher quite a number of times and is currently warming up again from a cold spell.

Which is why I'm calling BS on this study - as usual the "scientists" haven't bothered taking the geological record and evolutionary record of the subject into account.

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