Comments about ‘BYU professor Barry Bickmore's letter to Utah legislators’

Hooray, well said! Reason and logic has spoken! I believe a scientist (and 97 percent of scientists) more than I believe a politician, any day of the week. Thank you for standing up for truth.

Beautiful. I am so encouraged by this letter, that there are reasonable people willing to put themselves out there to continue the discourse on these very difficult issues. Thank you!

why do we have politicians? Scientist could better solve this issue. Doctors would do a better job of solving health care too.

Well written. Nicely done Prof. Bickmore.

To Scott of 10:54. To be very respectful in answering your question. We have seen governments run by experts with no citizen input. The best example was called the Soviet Union. Communism, or 'post partisan' leadership becomes a very dangerous tyranny.

This goes back to a few ancient Greeks who dreamed of philosopher kings, in which all decisions were made by the wisest, and everyone else benefited from their briliance.

History is also litered with these same briliant scientists being dead wrong. From the whole flat earth thing to our current discussion about destroying the economy for potentially hyped science.

One major failing of leftism is a complete lack of trust in average people. This is manifest in intellectualism where the masses are considered too ignorant to take care of themselves.

Please don't get so caught up in your professions platitudes to think your form of government hasn't been attempted. It has, and fails worse than an entire world of Rep Noel's.

I don't see that this paper proves anything, other than he has a different "opinion" than the legislature. so what? That makes him smarter than them because he has a different opinion? Still no science-never is with global warming freaks. Just opinion after opinion after opinion. Oh I'm wrong, the foremost authorities (scientists) did have science, and it was found it was all lies and made up. That's where we are in this debate so far. Thats why Al Gore said the debate it over, clearly because if there is a debate he gets his butt kicked.

Bickmore uses the tired argument about the 97% "consensus." The fact is, that poll was on the question of whether mankind has a "discernible" influence on climate. On the question of whether CO2 can drive climate, there is no consensus at all. Roy Spencer is in good company when he questions the role of CO2, and that position is solidly scientifically valid, which fact Bickmore and some of his colleagues refuse to admit.

He also uses a phony argument about CO2. The fact is, CO2 is harmless to people in concentrations even greater than normal atmospheric levels. Phosphates and nitrates are toxic even in low doses, and so regulating them is logical. Regulating a harmless gas is not.

When a scientist becomes so blinded by grant money and ridership on the peer bandwagon that he cannot see simple logical fallacies, much less the serious problems with CO2-driven climate models, something is very, very wrong. [I am a peer with a PhD in Geology & Geophysics and work in the field.]

The Y professor has an excellent point, except that I believe it invalidates his own position.

My understanding is that the legislature is asking for further independent and substantial evidence before regulating CO2, a position that the professor also agrees with.

How, exactly, does asking for more information on the subject equate to being 'a bad argument?' The very fact that he debates several of the facts put forth by the bill STRENGTHENs the argument to slow down, wait before we spend millions (or billions) of dollars.

Even Dr. Bickmore's own arguments seem to have flaws and might be considered 'bad' (see Thinkin' Mans post above).

Seems to me the legislature to the wise thing by pushing this bill. Let's find the truth first, before we start criticizing the arguments for or against it.

Here are some answers to a couple readers' points.

1. My colleagues and I wrote another letter to the legislators detailing several stupid mistakes in the text of the bill. They were pretty obvious stuff. So if Kerry Gibson and co. had merely written that they thought we should slow down and not commit ourselves to trillion-dollar solutions, I would have kept my mouth shut. You can read our original letter on the Tribune website, if you care to see the major errors we identified.

2. Phosphates and nitrates can be poisonous, but they are regulated even in waters that are not used for drinking. Part of the reason for regulating them is that they cause eutrophication. So the point was that it is perfectly reasonable to regulate a chemical as a pollutant even if it has only indirect effects on humans.

Elevated carbon dioxide levels have a variety of effects on plants, not least of which is a reduced capacity to uptake nitrogen. So, as atmospheric CO2 levels rise, so will the need for fertilizer in production agriculture, among other things, contributing to greater need for fossil fuels and leading to greater nutrient pollution. There are numerous sublethal effects of elevated CO2 on life that we should be concerned about, besides putative climate change, and regardless of direct effect on humans. It takes precious little Google Scholar time to uncover a lot of information on this subject. Climate change gets the press, but elevated CO2 has many more issues of immediate concern that are getting lost in the debate. We need to be finding ways to curb CO2 levels.

We need to pay more attention to CO2 levels. Climate change is getting top billing in the debate, but numerous studies have shown that elevated CO2 reduces the capacity of plants to acquire nitrogen from their surroundings. This means that elevated nitrogen can lead to increased need for nitrogenous fertilizers, increasing the demand for fossil fuels, and contributing to greater nitrogen waste and pollution (more applied, and less taken up). This is a serious problem. Elevated CO2 has other adverse effects on plants, which can be found easily using Google Scgholar. Regardless of how one feels about climate change and the validity of its predictions, the science of elevated CO2 effects on plants, and the animals that use them (e.g., humans) is far less debatable. If something isn't done to curb CO2, there will be a significant price to be paid even if climate change fails to materialize to the degree expected.

But the issue is, Barry, that no one has established that CO2 is a driver of climate. It never has been in the past (it was always a reaction to climate), and the past 12 years and 1940-1980 illustrate that there is not a correlation of increasing CO2 causing increased temperatures. Not to mention that increased temperatures would provide more benefits than harm according to many experts.

Since there is significant doubt about CO2's effects, expensive legislation is not warranted.

TM,

First, I don't support a cap-and-trade program. I simply would have liked our legislators to argue for taking another approach without larding their argument with a bunch of nonsense.

Second, the global avg. temperature signal is so noisy that you simply can't establish a trend with only 9-12 years of data. Whatever result you get, it isn't statistically significant. So let me be blunt. Whoever is telling you that we are in a cooling trend for the last few years, without mentioning that such a result is statistically insignificant (i.e., meaningless), is either incompetent with statistics or is trying to manipulate you. (And yes, I realize that environmental extremists try to manipulate people by misinterpreting data, as well.)

Finally, nobody says CO2 is the only climate driver. During 1940-1980 we had some big volcanic eruptions and a whole lot of industrial particulates going into the air. Most aerosols have a cooling effect. Anyway, if you put all the natural and anthropogenic inputs into the standard climate models, you get temperature trends that mimic the data very closely.

I never said the last 12 years were cooling, only that they were not warming -- at least no statistically significant change. But CO2 did continue to increase. So where's the cause and effect? The 1940-1980 window is longer and the temperature trend was definitely cooling, even with urban heat islands in the data (like today).

Models are not data, they are interpretations. Even I could make a model match past data by turning the right knobs. But that doesn't mean my combination of knob-turns was accurate, and has no bearing on whether the model can predict a chaotic system like climate into the future. That was established decades ago in Lorenz's first papers on chaos in climate, and demonstrated convincingly by failure of the 2001 climate models to predict today's temperatures AND CO2 levels.

The logical fallacy we see too often today is, "We know CO2 drives climate because the climate models we programmed with CO2 as a driver tell us so." As Richard Lindzen says, I think climate modelers have oversimplified the climate and the role of CO2.

TM - Atmospheric CO2 levels have risen 20% in 40 years from about 319 ppm in 1960 to just under 390 ppm at present, and there is little credible argument about its direction or its measurement accuracy. Continued increases will have wide-ranging ecosystem level impacts as plant physiology is modified. It will change the responses of insect pests and diseases to the plants, and alter the plants' ability to defend themselves. But then, production of food may not be all that important to some folks. Incidentally, there are global changes occurring in insect and disease patterns for crop plants that are linked to the long-term changes in global climate, and those changes are not good.

I'm not an extremist, and share some skepticism over global climate change, but I work in global agriculture, and changes are occurring that should alarm most folks. But most people are unaware, and simply ignore the warning signs as CO2 builds and begins to exert ecosystem level effects. If the CO2 continues to climb unabated, our grandchildren and their children may pay an awful price for our stubbornness.

Dr. Bickmore, I'd love hear more about your meeting with Lord Monckton. More to the point, I'd like to hear your answer to his central question. Something along the lines of:

What will happen if CO2 levels increase by 100%. Do you support other claims or have your own? Why do you support those claims?

It is my understanding that when asked the only question that really matters with regard to CO2 and policy, you did the obfuscation shuffle.

If you can't answer the central question, you should get out of the policy arena.