Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

It’s Friday, which means that a lot of my Sciblings are busy taking their whacks at the cranks of the blogosphere. I’ll play!
I haven’t picked on Gribbit in something like a week, so I’m due. Thing is, I don’t know if he qualifies as a bona fide crank, because he doesn’t know enough science terminology to come up with the type of crazy crap the flat-earthers, 9/11 conspiracy mongerers, antivaccination nuts and Noah’s arkyologists routinely produce; instead he just parrots misinformation and cataclysmically poor opinions he collects from slightly more ambitious and far-reaching deniers, delusionals, and pissed-off wahoos than himself.
Anyway, here’s what he writes, not for the first time, about climate change (and please click that link even if you close the resulting new window immediately):

The arrogant idea that man has the power to effect the world’s climate shows that man, no matter how intelligent we are, can’t realize that we don’t control the world, we are part of it … The earth’s climate has been changing since the planet came into existence … If there were no humans, no cars, no industrialization, no wasteful incandescent light bulbs, and no burning of fossil fuels to heat and light homes, then what prey tell is the explanation for temperatures in excess of those we are currently experiencing? … -Crickets- … How about natural cyclic phenomena?
Current science better supports the idea that sunspot activity, not carbon dioxide has a direct effect on the levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. The most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor. Water vapor is produced by the world’s oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams and it is this water vapor which is trapping the heat in NOT carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide makes up 1/400th of 1% of all the gases in our atmosphere. Of that, man is responsible for approximately 3%. So if we were to halt all of man’s contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere, at best we would be saving an unimpressive 6 Billion Metric Tons. There would still be an estimated 180 Billion Metric Tons entering without man’s contribution.
Along with this is the fact that increases in carbon dioxide levels lag temperature increases by 10 to 20 years. So literally increases in CO2 are the result of, not the cause of global warming.

Cute, eh? Very nice use of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc logical fallacy there at the end, too.
The paragraph I bolded is where Gribbit most visibly goes off the rails. I mentioned this in a recent post in which I reproduced some of this fellow’s garbage, but once again, with feeling: He doesn’t understand that a small percentile increase in something can have drastic consequences. He doesn’t get the fact that just because most heat-trapping gases are produced naturally in no way negates the impact of adding fractionally more. I bet that if pressed Gribbit he would admit that he feels a lot more uncomfortable at 315 Kelvin than at 300 (that’s 108 degrees Fahrenheit versus 80, 42 C versus 27). But why should he? There’s only a 5% difference between those figures!
So if a two-degree rise in ocean temps in the southwestern Atlantic is sufficient to melt Arctic ice and consequently flood coastal and lakeside metropolitan areas (including Cleveland) and also drive increasingly powerful hurricances, who cares, right? It’s nature at work, not us! What’s another 6 Billion Metric Tons? It’s Just A God Damn Number, That’s What!
For people like this, ideology is the beginning and the end of the story. Gribbit doesn’t understand geoscience and doesn’t care to, and if for some reason the Republican Party were sold on the science unilaterally supporting the idea of human-caused climate change while the Dems denied it, Gribbit would be leading the charge calling for lowered greenhouse gas emissions and other policy changes. He’s a sucker and a sycophant, just how the Brownbacks and Inhofes and Coulters of the world like their supporters, and he’s far from a rare breed.
Just remember, folks: People like him may not be able to add two single-digit numbers without a calculator or tie their own shoes, but they can and do vote.

It’s Friday, which means that a lot of my Sciblings are busy taking their whacks at the cranks of the blogosphere. I’ll play!
I haven’t picked on Gribbit in something like a week, so I’m due. Thing is, I don’t know if he qualifies as a bona fide crank, because he doesn’t know enough science terminology to come up with the type of crazy crap the flat-earthers, 9/11 conspiracy mongerers, antivaccination nuts and Noah’s arkyologists routinely produce; instead he just parrots misinformation and cataclysmically poor opinions he collects from slightly more ambitious and far-reaching deniers, delusionals, and pissed-off wahoos than himself.
Anyway, here’s what he writes, not for the first time, about climate change (and please click that link even if you close the resulting new window immediately):

The arrogant idea that man has the power to effect the world’s climate shows that man, no matter how intelligent we are, can’t realize that we don’t control the world, we are part of it … The earth’s climate has been changing since the planet came into existence … If there were no humans, no cars, no industrialization, no wasteful incandescent light bulbs, and no burning of fossil fuels to heat and light homes, then what prey tell is the explanation for temperatures in excess of those we are currently experiencing? … -Crickets- … How about natural cyclic phenomena?
Current science better supports the idea that sunspot activity, not carbon dioxide has a direct effect on the levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. The most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor. Water vapor is produced by the world’s oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams and it is this water vapor which is trapping the heat in NOT carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide makes up 1/400th of 1% of all the gases in our atmosphere. Of that, man is responsible for approximately 3%. So if we were to halt all of man’s contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere, at best we would be saving an unimpressive 6 Billion Metric Tons. There would still be an estimated 180 Billion Metric Tons entering without man’s contribution.
Along with this is the fact that increases in carbon dioxide levels lag temperature increases by 10 to 20 years. So literally increases in CO2 are the result of, not the cause of global warming.

Cute, eh? Very nice use of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc logical fallacy there at the end, too.
The paragraph I bolded is where Gribbit most visibly goes off the rails. I mentioned this in a recent post in which I reproduced some of this fellow’s garbage, but once again, with feeling: He doesn’t understand that a small percentile increase in something can have drastic consequences. He doesn’t get the fact that just because most heat-trapping gases are produced naturally in no way negates the impact of adding fractionally more. I bet that if pressed Gribbit he would admit that he feels a lot more uncomfortable at 315 Kelvin than at 300 (that’s 108 degrees Fahrenheit versus 80, 42 C versus 27). But why should he? There’s only a 5% difference between those figures!
So if a two-degree rise in ocean temps in the southwestern Atlantic is sufficient to melt Arctic ice and consequently flood coastal and lakeside metropolitan areas (including Cleveland) and also drive increasingly powerful hurricances, who cares, right? It’s nature at work, not us! What’s another 6 Billion Metric Tons? It’s Just A God Damn Number, That’s What!
For people like this, ideology is the beginning and the end of the story. Gribbit doesn’t understand geoscience and doesn’t care to, and if for some reason the Republican Party were sold on the science unilaterally supporting the idea of human-caused climate change while the Dems denied it, Gribbit would be leading the charge calling for lowered greenhouse gas emissions and other policy changes. He’s a sucker and a sycophant, just how the Brownbacks and Inhofes and Coulters of the world like their supporters, and he’s far from a rare breed.
Just remember, folks: People like him may not be able to add two single-digit numbers without a calculator or tie their own shoes, but they can and do vote.