Annapolis Capital Punishment

CP got a response from Ed Gulachenski, who from what I gleaned online, is an accomplished electrical engineer and fervid and almost omnipresent naysayer in the global warming debate. If you've been following the postings in the last week, you won't be at all surprised that Mr. Gulachenski appears to glean the internet so he can respond to any articles about this topic. For some context, read the recent postings, but here is Mr. Gulachenski's comments, followed of course by my response:

Too bad you did not research what the green house effect is all about. If you had you would have found that the temperature change in the troposphere has to be two to three times that on the earth's surface. If you then were to check out the satellite temperature data for the last 30 years you would have found that they do not show this 2 to 3 times differential. In fact they are about the same or less than that on the earth's surface.

The IPCC models which were used to predict surface temperature rises over the next 100 years correctly show this differential between troposphere and surface temperature. They have to in order to calculate the surface temperatures they do assuming a continued rise in man made CO2 emissions.

But, CO2 levels have increased over the last 30 years with no change in troposphere temperatures.

Conclusion: the IPCC models are wrong. http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=22604

Mr. Gulachenski, I am glad you stopped by following what must be your nightly round-up of web postings on this issue. For an electrical engineer, you are shockingly unaware of current events, have a high level of resistance and I suggest you get plugged-in, so allow me to provide you with some direct current.

I've read your on-line rants and I visited the web-site you provided for the Heartland Institute. Well, imagine my surprise to find it is a profoundly conservative and gushingly free-market oriented think-tank overseen by economists, finance and public policy professors. This made me think of my "irony" story below with the made-up think tank, NAIVE or National Association of Iron Vituperative Eggheads. Your letter fits in perfectly with my "irony" story. In your narrow world view, it seems that there are reasonable people such as yourself who believe in the free market, almost religiously, although you don't admit that of course, and you are in a battle with those of us that believe we might be almost suicidally messing around with our planet's life-support system. In your eyes, humans are not gravely damaging the earth's climatic system and that anyone who says we are must be a fanatical, collectivist.
Never mind objective reality about pumping more and more carbon into our thin atmosphere for a century. Ignore the loss of forests, widespread conversion of land to agriculture and urban areas, global burning of fossil fuels and everything we have done because it could not possibly be causing any global reaction. Ignore the increase in major storms, measurable sea level rise, the pronounced warming trend and the recent spate of record-breaking years, hundreds of refereed scientific studies, loss of glaciers and mountaintop snow, loss of polar ice and simply point fingers at anyone who says "Whoa--what are we doing?" and pin them as commies, chicken-littles, and pinko wussies or whatever. .....and yes, you are the scientific and rational ones because you have allied yourselves with a small minority of contrarian scientists who overwhelmingly hold profoundly conservative views or have connections to the coal industry.

So take that, Mr. Ed Gulachenski, and go back to gleaning the internet for more evidence of the global warming hoax so you can tell anyone else who is concerned as I am that we are just a bunch of ignorant, misled commies. I don't write this to convince you of anything. That's not possible. I write this to show my readers how those most profoundly disbelieving of and opposed to the idea of anthropogenic global warming are little more than politically-driven scoundrels.

I am reminded of the lyrics from the old Jefferson Starship song:

"In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our mind
In loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction"

Only time will tell.

More Hot Air from Ed Gulachenski:

Paul, your reply to my response (IPCC Models are wrong) was witty, humorous, and long. But it was not very helpful. Let me restate my point this way:

The foundation of the IPCC Report on AGW is the collection of computer program climate models which show how the global average temperature increases with increased CO2 emissions from smoke stacks and exhaust pipes.

The output of these models is then used to calculate the impacts on the environment; melting polar ice, sea level rise of up to 20 feet, polar bear deaths and the other impacts you list in your reply.

Finally, mitigation techniques are identified to minimize the calculated impacts.

Get the picture now? If the IPCC climate models are wrong; calculated impacts are wrong and the mitigation methods are meaningless.

So my question to you is; don’t you think it a good idea to resolve the errors in the models before we proceed on a global basis to limit CO2 emissions? And don’t worry; there is time to do this. There has been no net global warming in the last 10 years and the supposed environmental
impacts blamed on AGW can be explained by naturally occurring climate changes.

To which CP replied:

Mr. Gulachenski: Your response was not witty, but it was humorous. I have no reason to doubt you are an accomplished electrical engineer and because of that I am now going to remove your shorts, so to speak. I'll repeat what I wrote to you previously.
"I am writing again to emphasize my point. I don't write this to convince you of anything. That's not possible. I write this to show my readers how those most profoundly disbelieving of and opposed to the idea of anthropogenic global warming are little more than politically-driven scoundrels."

So there you have it. If you have some affection for or association with Annapolis, by all means stay in touch. Otherwise go ask your pal Patrick Michaels if he remembers the time he publicly asked me "When did you stop beating your wife?". Now you may crawl back in to your cave so you can fulminate against anyone who writes anything about which you disagree. Now, please, leave me and my readers alone.




AND FROM ANONYMOUS:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "More Hot Air On Global Warming Debate":

What makes Ed Gulachenski think he's smarter than 99% of the world's scientists? How many peer-reviewed journal articles has Mr. Gulachenski published on the subject?