"Watts Up With That?": sniping the snipers...

"The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change" claims NASA's climate data manipulation invalidates the global warming assertion; but perhaps "he who pays the piper calls the tune" on both sides.

I have submitted the following comment on their latest post - will they print it? If so, will they answer it? I've taken the precaution of PrintScreening the submission, in case a wormhole opens up under my query:



UPDATE:

I have had a reply, though not from the site as such, merely from one of its readers:

What “Institute”? Oh, the specific job Heartland paid Watts to prepare one report on the accuracy of the US thermometers?
 
Gee. Again the claim that Heartland “bought” skeptics. If $25,000.00 paid for a skeptics viewpoint – and it did not, that “story” you were fed from “a friend” is an exaggerated piece of propaganda now several years old! – let me ask you: “How many so-called “scientists” will 92 billion dollars buy?”
 
Big Government spent 92 billion dollars ( 3,680,000.00 to 1.00 budget ratio, since you apparently cannot multiply) buying the ideas and promotions and the research and the journals and the budgets and the computer programs and the staffs and even more for the universities and labs and bureaucrats needed by Big Science … just specifically FOR their Big Government “scientists” – who are not all biased, are they? – reach decision designed and intended to create carbon credits for Big Finance and Big Business and for 1,300,000,000,000.00 in new tax dollars each year.
 
How much Big Government can you buy for 1.3 trillion dollars and control of the world’s energy resources? How much are you paid by Big Government for your ideas and your time?

Reply

• "Sackerson" says:

  Your comment is awaiting moderation.
  

  February 9, 2015 at 11:01 pm

  I am paid by neither side. And I can multiply – not that that remotely comes into it. Where on earth do you get your debating style from? The ad hominem approach may be effective for an orator, but it’s garbage as far as logical and factual debate is concerned.
   
• The relevance of funding here – and it’s not just the $25k from the Koch brothers, who are a study in themselves one understands – is that you need to “come to the court with clean hands”. If, as the anti-AGW party claims, the science has been skewed by financial support tantamount to bribery, then the critics need to show that their own approach is untainted by such accusations.
• Here on the Internet, it’s great that potentially we get to learn more about more things, but like cable TV we seem to be broken up into coteries of group-thinkers.
• Any recommendations as to where to turn for an expert in this field who is genuinely independent?

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Oceans protecting us from global warming? For how long?

Are the scientists researching climate change allowing sufficiently for the moderating role of water?

Water has a high specific heat capacity. The same energy that raises the temperature of water by 1°C, will make copper hotter by more than 10°C.

This Time article (November 2013) reports "the vast oceans carry 93% of the stored energy from climate change, compared to just 1% for the atmosphere, with melting ice and landmasses making up the rest." Some of that energy goes to raising the temperature at certain depths.

But water has other ways of processing heat. It can expand, so that could be one of the reasons sea levels are rising.

There is also water's tendency to form chains of molecules - or even rings - and presumably heat energy will be used in the breaking of these structures, and there's a lot of them in the Earth's 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of ocean.

Another energy-employing phase change is evaporation. “The atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per square meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988, and natural variability in climate just can’t explain this moisture change," says this article.

And then there's claims and counterclaims about melting ice. The argument is plagued by complexity because of the warming, cooling, evaporating and precipitating effects of wind currents and the difficulty of measuring ice thickness as well as extent.

The thermal absorption properties of water may have bought us more time, but they don't let us completely off the hook. Just as we are learning to discount climate change alarmists, we should look more skeptically at the sanguinists. There's a huge difference between "small chance" and "no chance", as we have found in financial matters; also, between "a long time ahead" and "never".

And then there's the at present theoretical concern about all that methane currently trapped in the oceans - by the water structures known as "clathrates", structures that heat energy can break.

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Climate change and industrial activity

Could the current cold weather be partly related to a downturn in fossil-fuel-powered manufacturing and transportation? I only ask because I seem to recall reading/hearing that big freezes also happened in the 70s, and after both World wars.