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Bad Science Climate Change Non-Science

Jennifer Marohasy : Muddying the Water

Jennifer Marohasy is muddying the water again in Australia, with a piece entitled “Why I am an Anthropogenic Global Warming Sceptic (Part 3)”.

She quotes a disputed work by one, Lawrence Solomon, called “The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud”.

And she includes these paragraphs :-


https://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/why-i-am-an-anthropogenic-global-warming-sceptic-part-3/

IN order for increased human carbon dioxide emissions to cause accelerated global warming, the climate models need to assume that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for a very long time, up to 100 or more years.

“Since the IPCC’s task is to prove any global warming is due to human CO2 emissions, they decided to proclaim that carbon dioxide was long-lived in the atmosphere – a fabricated assumption.”

“They did this despite the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed studies (and corroborating empirical measurements) finding that CO2 in the atmosphere remained there a short time. Literally, a fabricated assumption, driven by political agenda, became a cornerstone of fraudulent climate model science. As a result, billions spent on climate models that are unable to predict climate with any accuracy…”


Ms Marohasy is apparently ignorant of how the determination of Carbon Dioxide’s availiability in the atmosphere is deduced.

You have to start by analysing the Global Carbon Cycle. Individual molecules of Carbon Dioxide exit and enter various parts of the Biosphere, coming back to the Atmosphere several times before either being permanently sequestered in a tree or under soil/sea or scooting off into space to be lost forever.

The amount of time that an individual Carbon Dioxide molecule resides in the Atmosphere as bio-available, is, according to John Houghton, only about 4 years. But because it repeatedly gets cycled through the Earth system components, an extra Carbon Dioxide molecule of Fossil Fuel origin will have an effect on the Earth System for scores, hundreds or maybe even thousands of years.

Here’s Houghton, from “Global Warming : The Complete Briefing : Third Edition”, Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-52874-7, Chapter 3, The greenhouse gases” :-

“It is important to realise that on the timescales with which we are concerned anthropogenic carbon emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide is not destroyed but redistributed among the various carbon reservoirs. Carbon dioxide is therefore different rom other greenhouse gases that are destroyed by chemical action in the atmosphere. The carbon reservoirs exchange carbon between themselves on a wide range of timescales determined by their respective turnover times – which range from less than a year to decades […] to millenia […] These timescales are generally much longer than the average time a particular carbon dioxide molecule spends in the atmosphere, which is only about four years. The large range of turnover times means that the time taken for a perturbation in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to relax back to an equilibrium cannot be described by a single time constant. Although a lifetime of about a hundred years is often quoted for atmospheric carbon dioxide so as to provide some guide, use of a single lifetime can be very misleading.”

I think that should make things a bit clearer. What do you think ?

One reply on “Jennifer Marohasy : Muddying the Water”

How does it make anything clearer? I don’t see a single bit of science to substantiate any number. And I certainly don’t see a shred of evidence to support the 100 year number. Thanks to Jennifer for pointing out that the 100 year number is bogus.

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