Hi, I'm Borepatch, and I'm a Denier

Hi, Borepatch!

James Inhofe.
Marc Morano.
Richard Lindzen.
Bjørn Lomborg.
George W. Bush.
Borepatch.

Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself. Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming.

OK, I made that bit about me up, but give a guy credit for trying, will ya? If you want to wander by the Anthropogenic Global Warming fever swamps, this one is a doozy. They have a list of people worse than the ones I posted here. I won't spoil the surprise, so please click through, just to make their hit counter spin.

My particular favorite bit was this:

The reality we’re denying? We’re denying that we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere already that positive feedback loops are well on their way to amplification hell.^[1]

Neat footnote, huh? Looks all scholarly and scientific-like, right? Well, if you actually read the footnote, it's (ahem) not so much:

[1] Strictly speaking, it may be difficult to nail down a feedback loop in action, such as melting ice. At what point can we say “the ice is melting and the resulting darker, warmer waters are more rapidly melting ice resulting in more darker, warmer waters” (amplifying feedback loop), as opposed to “the ice is melting simply because temperatures are warmer due to increasing atmospheric carbon” (no amplifying feedback loop, just garden variety endless global carbon pollution).

Here’s what I suspect is the key: acceleration. Think of moving a microphone towards a speaker, the volume and frequency of the feedback rapidly accelerate. Similarly, the climate phenomena that have arrived decades early, perhaps early by a century or more, may well be the manifestations of feedback loops in action before we know exactly what they are.

Translation: "I got nothing." Nice backup on that positive feedback loop, Scooter.

And in the unlikely event that anyone at that site notices and tracks back to this post, I lay out a lot of my reasoning for skepticism here, starting with Why I'm A Global Warming Skeptic. In it, I mention that positive feedback loops are a major point of skepticism, because we simply don't see them almost ever in nature. Your post hasn't changed that.

Hat tip: Climate Skeptic. He didn't make the list, either.