Don Surber continues undisputed reign as stupidest West Virginian

by: Carnacki

Thu Jul 16, 2009 at 10:52:43 AM EDT

Science cannot explain global warming

about a new study on why the planet was hot 55 million years ago. I'm surprised with Surber's "knowledge" of science, he doesn't argue the earth is only 6,000 years old so there was no way it was hotter before it existed. Surber and other rightwingers have latched on to the study as "proof" human activity causing climate change is a myth.

And yet, we are supposed to spend trillions of dollars capturing carbon dioxide based on a guess that apparently has no historic basis.

But I'll leave the Surber mocking to the professionals at Sadly No!:

Watching some of the high-traffic wingnuts "do" science is a guilty pleasure, particularly when "done" by folks like Ace o'Play-doh and Don Bob Surber, both of whose scientific backgrounds appear to have been mostly garnered from careful study of NCIS reruns. Usually, their pseudo-scientific expertise on climate change is applied to a news report that it snowed in Las Vegas, or a rare southern sighting of the abominable snowman in a shopping mall in Mobile, or melting polar icecaps on Mars where there are no SUVs. ("Explain that, libs!")

snip

Now, here's the money quote from the abstract:

At accepted values for the climate sensitivity to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, this rise in CO2 can explain only between 1 and 3.5 °C of the warming inferred from proxy records. We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Translated into simple English (in the event that Ace or Don Bob Surber are moving their lips and scratching their foreheads while reading this post), the study doesn't say that carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming. In fact, the study relied on "accepted" values for the correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global warming. The entire point of the study was that smaller increases might result in more global warming than predicted, particularly if there is a "feedback" process involved. In other words, it's not a question of whether the planet is fucked, it's a question of whether it may be fucked worse than we thought.

It's almost as if the editors of Science Daily had thrown down a banana peel in front of Ace and Don Bob and were hiding behind an office plant waiting for those two stooges, and an army of other wingnut bloggers, to slip and fall on it.

Surber is given editorial space by the Daily Mail to consistently put out inaccurate information for rightwing propaganda purposes.

Meanwhile, those of us who live in the real world have to deal with the fact that not only is climate change real and human activity has contributed to it, but the situation is most likely even worse than people suspect.