Query: Is Charles Krauthammer, a man with a degree in Medicine and Economics any science that I am aware of simply Ignorant, Stupid, Lazy, Evil or All of the Above? As the Sportscasters say, Let’s go to the tape:
Dear Charles, I checked. You’re wrong. Climate scientists do not worship a deity. They do not gather together in conclaves to perform rituals and prayers, nor do they all adhere to a single dogma of faith in the unseen forces that control humankind;s destiny.
They take facts, develop theories and then test those theories against real world data (i.e., information) regarding temperatures, the amount of greenhouse gases and known patterns of climate variablilty such as the cyclical El Nino and La Nina in the atmosphere, the effect of solar radiationThey fact check exh other and revise results when they discover they were wrong. Presumably your a bright man, considering you became a psychiatrist, so you ought to know what you don’t know. And you don;t know Jack about global warming the driving force behind climate change.
Maybe it’s because you’re too lazy to actually study up on the science. After all, pontificating on talk shows and writing political columns doesn’t require a lot of work. Maybe you are just following your bosses’ orders to hew to the ever more right leaning line of your newspaper, the Washington Post. Certainly your flippant and cheap shots at Al Gore are exactly the type of comment that allows political pundits to earn income far in excess of the value they provide to our society.
For example, did you know that climate change from a man made warming from CO2 emissions was originally predicted by a Swedish Scientist, Svante Arrhenius in a landmark scientific paper in 189%, over a 100 years before Al Gore became every Climate Denier’s favorite punching bag?
In 1895, Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” This article described an energy budget model that considered the radiative effects of carbon dioxide (carbonic acid) and water vapor on the surface temperature of the Earth, and variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. […]
Arrhenius argued that variations in trace constituents—namely carbon dioxide—of the atmosphere could greatly influence the heat budget of the Earth. Using the best data available to him (and making many assumptions and estimates that were necessary), he performed a series of calculations on the temperature effects of increasing and decreasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. His calculations showed that the “temperature of the Arctic regions would rise about 8 degrees or 9 degrees Celsius, if the carbonic acid increased 2.5 to 3 times its present value.
Arrhenius worked before computers (much less the supercomputers we use today) and before the massive data sets on rising temperatures and rising emission of greenhouse gases yet he was still able to postulate the first theory of global warming because he used science, not religion. He took the work of earlier scientists such as the Irish Scientist John Tyndall who first discovered that carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor all absorb infared radiation, thus trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Arrhenious also expanded
