Well, this leads me to my hobby horse du jour. But first some other
Climate Brigade B.S. and scams:
When the glaciers are gone the rivers will dry up.
That's B.S. because it will still rain and snow in the valley and the
rain water and snow melt will still flow in the river.
Antarctica is melting.
It's well below freezing all year round in almost all of Antarctica,
it's not melting. And won't any time soon.
The deep ocean abyss is warming.
No it's not, water below the thermocline is a constant temperature.
It doesn't warm up.
The polar bear population is declining.
No it's not and they've been told as much by the people who live in
places like the Davis Straight.
Warming from 1911 to 1945 was natural but warming since 1975 is anthropogenic.
Because they say so.
Then there's the hundreds of ridiculous headlines you can find on the
Numbers Watch webpage.
OK that's enough, I am really annoyed with the "
Methane pound for pound
is 86 times as potent a greenhouse gas as is CO2" meme that has appeared
in the last year or so. No one it seems wants to step up to the plate and
call B.S. on it. That’s what annoys me. First of all CO2 is about five or
six times better at absorbing infrared in the atmospheric window than
methane. Any casual observation of any of the charts you can pull up on
an image search of "atmospheric window” will tell you that. Besides, what
does 86 times more powerful than CO2 exactly mean? It doesn't say anything
useful about how much a given increase in methane will run up the temperature.
It is in fact a colossal misdirection worthy of the best con-men.
The tipoff that it's a con is the "Pound for Pound" tag line that often
appears with it. Methane has about 36% the mass of CO2, so in any pound
for pound comparison an equal concentration of CO2 in parts per million
(ppm) must be reduced to 36% of that. Let's say you added 2 ppm to methane
to the atmosphere which would effectively double its concentration and
added an equal mass of CO2. 36% of 2 ppm CO2 comes to 0.72 ppm. So CO2
at 400 ppm would become 400.72 ppm while methane's concentration was doubled.
Well at this point you can see what's going on. But it's pretty convoluted
to get to this far. And that's what makes it such a beautiful scam. An
extra 0.72 ppm of CO2 isn't going to raise the temperature very much and 86
times whatever that comes to isn't very much either. But the 86 times as
potent meme sure makes it sound like a hobgoblin worth clamoring to be
saved from.
OH! I didn't answer your question.
Why do they behave like con artists?
Because they have found out that they can get away with it.
