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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (19816)	5/29/2006 9:41:14 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 541005

Fascinating (and long, and technical) discussion here between science types arguing about Gray and his views on the climate "hoax". Interesting to read. : sample: realclimate.org "Re #11 (joel Hammer): I don't understand your complaints here at all. It certainly sounds like this RC post discusses the science of the subject. If you want an example of how not to start a scientific debate, you might look at Gray's paper itself, which opens with a quote from a U.S. senator who most intelligent people, especially scientists, consider an embarrassment to the institution, that basically calls a whole well-established theory of science a "hoax". And, it closes with a quote that speaks highly of a book that Gray himself characterizes as saying that global warming is a "conspiracy"! That is hardly the way to inspire an intelligent scientific debate. And, certainly if you are going to open and close a paper suggesting that most scientists in the field are involved in some massive hoax or conspiracy, you damn well better make sure that the science you present in between is rigorous and well-thought out. Gray's clearly is not. I think the RC folks were frankly very polite given the tone that Gray set! There's nothing wrong with writing a paper questioning the conventional wisdom in some field. My PhD thesis did this (albeit at a much less grand level). But, my advisor and I did it politely, not insultingly, and we made damn sure that we backed up our science as best as we possibly could. "

To: epicure who wrote (19816)	5/29/2006 11:14:13 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541005

Also note that while volcanoes are a very minor source of carbon dioxide they are made to appear significant by lumping them with other unrelated sources. This claim is patently false and has been debunked a number of times. Another myth. Don't you just love it? :>) It's what happens when you get the politization of science. Science searchs for the truth, politics searches for the untruth. One point that is also worth making is that although volcanoes release some CO2 into the atmosphere, this is completely negligable compared to anthropogenic emissions (about 0.15 Gt/year of carbon, compared to about 7 Gt/year of human related sources) . However, over very long times scales (millions of years), variations in vulcanism are important for the eventual balance of the carbon cycle, and may have helped kick the planet out of a 'Snowball Earth' state in the Neo-proterozoichttp://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/current-volcanic-activity-and-climate/ 750 million years ago.