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I actually went over to the blog and read the whole thing (which I rarely do for blog articles).

As often happens when a lay person tries to describe science, many details were left out. For example, he describes “climate sensitivity”, which is supposed to be a measure of how responsive the climate is to various climate drivers. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But then he says, “If the climate is very sensitive, then adding CO2 to the atmosphere could be a problem.” Well... that would only be true if it could be shown that adding CO2 actually has a significant effect on atmospheric energy content—which is a supposition that I have yet to see experimentally verified. The climate sensitivity in question is a measure of how much of the energy emitted by the sun is converted to energy in the atmosphere. And this is affected by factors such as the libido (reflectivity) of the ground, the cloud cover, and humidity.

Well, I’m not going to do a complete review of the technical oversimplifications of the blog. (Disclaimer: I am not a climatologist, but a biochemist. My analyses are all based on general scientific and mathematical concepts that any well-grounded scientist would know.) However, I *will* comment on the political side of it.

A great number of scientists (myself included) receive government funding to advance their work. There is nothing wrong with that—politicians want certain topics studied, and scientists are only too happy to take money for studying those topics. For the most part, as long as we remain busy, publish our findings, and assure the politicians that our findings advance human knowledge, the politicians are happy. On occasion, though, the politicians are not happy with certain findings, and that’s where the trouble starts. “Global warming” presented a perfect opportunity to certain politicians of an authoritarian bent. They’ve been trying to control our lives for years, and we’ve resisted—but if they can use the threat of “global warming” to convince us that we must submit or face the end of life on earth—then the idea of “global warming” is perfect for their agenda. Then the politicians put pressure on the funding agencies—only research that supports the idea of “global warming” gets funded. Soon, the only scientists making the decisions as to which work deserves funding and which doesn’t are those who tow the politician’s line. And that is bad. It undermines public confidence in science. It skews how scientific results are analyzed and published. It has a ripple effect on other scientific disciplines. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve seen the throwaway phrase “because of global warming” in discussions where it doesn’t belong. Bats aren’t dying in the northeastern US because of global warming; they’re dying because of a fungus that we still know very little about, and may be unintentionally spreading among the bats ourselves. It’s easy to blame “global warming”; finding the real answers is hard.

Anyway, enough of the soapbox.