As I have maintained for years, the only thing that matters in science is the evidence, the data, the facts.
It makes no difference how beautiful your hypothesis is. It makes no difference how smart you are, who devised the hypothesis, what his name is or what her qualifications are - if it disagrees with experiment, evidence, data, the facts, it's wrong.
That's all there is to it. The facts are what matter.
In courtroom dramas we've all seen witnesses swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Just telling the truth isn't enough, it could be misleading if something were left out. The whole truth is required to arrive at a correct verdict.
Similarly in science, omitted facts could lead to an erroneous conclusion.
Todd Whitcombe's column, Simple facts about climate change (May 18) leaves out vital facts. While he describes the process by which the surface of the earth radiates heat and how atmospheric CO2 absorbs that heat, he omitted to mention the logarithmic nature of that absorption. While carbon dioxide is particularly efficient at capturing the heat given off by the surface of the Earth it can only absorb a small portion of the infrared spectrum frequencies.
The rest have no effect on CO2. Most of that absorbable heat is already taken up by atmospheric CO2, there's almost nothing left for any additional CO2 to absorb. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the less effect any additional CO2 will have (IPCC, 2001, p.635).
As an analogy, consider a window shade that will block half the light. A second shade will block half the remaining light or 25 per cent of the original total. Another will block 12.5 per cent of the total.
By the time the 10th shade is pulled it only blocks one tenth of one per cent of the total. It doesn't matter how much CO2 is in the atmosphere if there's almost nothing left for it to absorb.
While it's a fact that ice cores show increasing levels of carbon dioxide correlated with increasing temperatures, it's also a fact that they clearly show temperature increase preceding CO2 increase by at least 800 years (Mudelsee, M., 2001) which is caused by outgassing of warming oceans (Scott, L., Timmermann, A., Thunnell, R., 2007).
The facts would seem to indicate that CO2 is not and cannot be the primary driver of global warming/climate change.
Art Betke
Prince George
