Darth Data Destroyer

As all good auditors know destroying data is a sin. They should go tell it to Harold Lewis, one of the Princeton Denial Club and Retirement Party. Lewis was interviewed a while ago by the American Physical Society oral history project. Let the dear boy speak for hisself (Tip of the ears to Marco)

Dr. Aaserud: Your papers — correspondence, notes, manuscripts, things of that sort — what's the status of those? That's another thing we're interested in.

Dr. Lewis: Yes. I really don't have them, you know. I've long since either lost in moving or discarded everything that I had. So I have no papers around from JASON, if that's what you mean.

Aaserud: No, generally — both JASON and generally speaking.

Lewis: There are lots of things, but they're scattered in a complicated way. Generally speaking, I throw things away after a few years, so the only things I have are the things that have accumulated over the last few years and are relevant to the things I'm actually doing these days.

Aaserud: That's another thing that the Center is strongly involved in — just saving papers for historical purposes.

Lewis: Yes, I understand. But I have enough trouble keeping up with current papers.

Aaserud: But if for any reason you wanted help or advice on what to keep and how to keep it and where to go and all that, then we'd be happpy to help on that. But for JASON in particular, you don't have anything.

Lewis: No, I don't.

There is shredding going on in Santa Barbara. Data has been destroyed. Where are the auditors when you need them?

Lewis has taken on the challenge of being sillier about climate change then Sarah Palin

I think it behooves us to be careful about how we state the science. I know of nobody who denies that the Earth has been warming for thousands of years without our help (and specifically since the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago), and is most likely to continue to do so in its own sweet time.

Well, actually most people who have a clue think that without our contributions the surface would be cooling a bit right now due to the Milankovitch cycles which have reached and passed the warm peak. In Science Speak, as Imrie and Imrie put it

Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.

There are some nice graphics at the Wikipedia UPDATE: but while chewing the orange ambrosia with Carrot Eater (best Bakersfield Bunny Feed) over this one he pointed out that the global temperature difference between the coldest part of an ice age and the warmest interglacial is about 6 C, for a transition period of ~30,000 years. That means that it takes about 5,000 years to go down 1 C and we are going up 1 C in less than 75 years at the current rate. Rates are kinetics, eternity is thermodynamics. Give me another envelope please, Eli has filled the back of this one.

The point is how RAPID the current (last 100 years or so) warming is, driven by the RAPID increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, something that would NOT happen driven by natural stuff and which Hal kicks down the memory hole.

The important question is how much warming does the future hold,

So Hal, Eli knows what you’re thinking. “Is climate change really happening?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement the bunny kind of lost track himself. But being greenhouse gases are the most powerful forcing we know, and the best science predicts disaster ahead, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

is it good or bad, and if bad is it too much for normal adaptation to handle.

Above 2 ^oC it's gonna be REALLY bad. Here are some pictures for the hard of learning

The real answer to the first is that no one knows, the real answer to the second is more likely good than bad (people and plants die from cold, not warmth), and the answer to the third is almost certainly not.

Again, the Lindzen Lope. We know that if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase it is almost certain that global temperatures will increase. That does not mean that we know with certainty, but that's the way to bet heavily. We can predict that if global temperatures increase more than 3 C, there will be major damage (see the above from the IPCC WGII report). Eli would remind Hal that adaptation to changes above 3C involves a lot of die off, and that includes large bipedal mammals.

It gets sillier

And nobody doubts that CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing for the better part of a century,

Ernst Beck, Willis Eschenbach, a lot of the guys over at Marohasy's now closed for business. In short, your friends.

but the disobedient temperature seems not to care very much. And nobody denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, along with other gases like water vapor, but despite the claims of those who are profiting by this craze, no one knows whether the temperature affects the CO2 or vice versa. The weight of the evidence is the former.

The temperatures are tracking the CO2 forcing just fine and we know that both CO2 affects temperature and temperature effects CO2. Add CO2 to the atmosphere and you get a temperature rise. Increase the temperature say by increasing the luminosity of the sun (which has not been happening bucky) and CO2 in the atmosphere will increase as it does after an ice age, but, of course, that becomes a positive feedback, contributing to additional warming.

Remember, denialism kills, costs and confuses.