Obfuscation

Lubos once again demostrates his ability to blow irrelevant smoke at us in a long, tiresome, and essentially pointless rant against Gavin Schmidt and Scientific American.

The odd thing is that he seems to understand most of the relevant facts but can't seem to figure out which ones could be relevant to anthropogenic global warming (real or not). He blathers on about oxygen, a somewhat weak greenhouse gas (because its IR absorbtion band is rather narrow) but spends most of his time on the absorption of UV (an anti-greenhouse effect) by oxygen and ozone. Doh - how much UV does the Earth emit!?

The one argument I thought interesting was about the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere. The validity of the argument depends on detailed calculation, of course, but he only presents a plausibility argument. Whether climatologists have anything better, I don't know.

If he could free himself from his habit of confusing invective with rhetoric he would be a lot more readable - though maybe not to his wing-nut readership.

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