Montanans Bundling Up For No Reason

http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/wrcc/nw/YearTDeptWRCC-NW.png

They just think they are cold – because they don’t understand peer review.

Citizens of Montana are being misinformed on the single most important detail concerning the effects of our increasing levels of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s temperature.

I am referring to what is called the “sensitivity” of CO2, which is defined to be the temperature increase caused by a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Direct measurements of temperature and CO2 levels over the past 700,000 years — as revealed by the ice core records of Antarctica and Greenland — show that the total sensitivity of CO2 is about 6.5 degrees Celsius. About half of this has been attributed to “fast” feedback effects (changes in water vapor and clouds) that become apparent in a few decades and the other half is due to subsequent “slow” feedback effects (such changes in the sheet ice of Greenland and Antarctica) that show up over the course of a few centuries. All of this is thoroughly explained in “Target Atmospheric CO2” in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2008, volume 2, pages 217-231.

Magnitude of change
The most recent ploy of the professional deniers of CO2’s effects is to acknowledge that increased CO2 will cause an increase in temperature, but then claim that the magnitude of this effect will be too small to be of importance. An excellent example of this national effort is being provided in Montana by H. Leighton Steward who presents himself as a scientific expert on the subject of climate change. He is the director of EOG, a gas and oil company formerly known as Enron. He is also the spokesperson for a fossil fuel advocacy group called Plants Need CO2, whose advertisements have been shown frequently throughout Montana.

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