A tip o’ the hat to WC for the post about Septic Arguments.

I will take one exception though: the category It’s aerosols. Yes, there are people who though the word aerosols out there just because it’s a fun word to say. But any true “skeptic” will latch onto any argument against anthropogenic global warming.

Is a Thinning Haze Unveiling the Real Global Warming? (Kerr 2007) points out that the sunlight-reflecting haze that cools much of the planet seems to have thinned over the past decade or so. If real, the thinning would not explain away a century of global warming but it might explain the unexpectedly strong global warming of late, the accelerating loss of glacial ice and much of rising sea levels.

If one reads the entire summary by Kerr, it says later:

If aerosols are really thinning that much, substantially more sunlight has been escaping reflection back into space and warming the planet. That extra energy, rather than an unrecognized quirk in the climate system, would explain the greater-than-forecasted warming of the 1990s and early 2000s that another team noted last month (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1136843).

And nowhere in the original article by Mishchenko et al does it claim that the recent warming is not due to increased levels of carbon dioxide.

Of course this doesn’t mean the “skeptics” won’t attempt to use it to their advantage. In fact, judging solely on the blog/article titles, I can fairly safely assume that this study is being misrepresented. What really discouraged me was the classification of Dr. Pielke’s post about The Role Of Aerosols On Regional and Global Climate, which is consists mostly of quotes from an article by Ramanathan, et al.. Again, this paper does not in any way suggest the carbon dioxide is not responsible for global warming.

I would hate to think that anyone involved in aerosols research is now a “skeptic”. Aerosols are an important part of our climate system. And even if they weren’t, it would still be appropriate to study and report on them in peer-reviewed journals.

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