" As anyone who’s ever tried to figure out the he said/she said campaigns run by the US climate denial lobby can attest, doubt is much more powerful than outright suppression.".
I don't know about the campaigns but the point about doubt is as it should be because if you put forward a hypothesis it's vital (a la Popper) to subject it to tests to see how well it matches reality.
The CO2 versus global temperature relationship is anything but simple. Between 1998 and 2013, the Earth’s surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18°C increase in the 1990s. At the same time, CO2 levels rose uninterruptedly as they did earlier. Someone should compute the enforced degree of depression of industrial activity across the world which would according to the theory, have reduced global temperatures to be consistent with those figures. What a pointless and tragic exercise that would have been.
I don't know about the campaigns but the point about doubt is as it should be because if you put forward a hypothesis it's vital (a la Popper) to subject it to tests to see how well it matches reality.
The CO2 versus global temperature relationship is anything but simple. Between 1998 and 2013, the Earth’s surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18°C increase in the 1990s. At the same time, CO2 levels rose uninterruptedly as they did earlier. Someone should compute the enforced degree of depression of industrial activity across the world which would according to the theory, have reduced global temperatures to be consistent with those figures. What a pointless and tragic exercise that would have been.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n3/pdf/nclimate293...
Of course CO2 is implicated in the energy balance on Earth but to claim a direct strong causal relationship is simply in denial of the facts.