Thursday 20 June 2013

Exterminate, exterminate. Not really


Ronald Voisin has spent a bit of time pondering the universe, especially this bit over here that we happen to inhabit and decided it is good. More than that, he has decided that it won't get worse.  More than that, he has decided that evidence doesn't really matter and that people whose job it is to study the climate don't count but he does, since he has spent seven years on his hobby, which happens to be the climate.

Has he heard what Neil Young does for a hobby?  He plays with model railways.  Yep.  And he actually improves them - has patents for it.  Doesn't write the patents.  He works on improving those things.

About the Author
Ronald D Voisin is a retired engineer. He spent 27 years in the Semiconductor Lithography Equipment industry mostly in California’s Silicon Valley. Since retiring, he has made a hobby of studying climate change for the last 7 years. Ron received a BSEE degree from the Univ. of Michigan – Ann Arbor in 1978 and has held various management positions at both established equipment companies and start-ups he helped initiate. Ron has authored/co-authored 55 patent applications, 24 of which have issued.


Voisin has posed three questions and suggested outcomes based on his reading of the answers.  He tabulates it for easy reference:
 

Let's try to examine the questions honestly.  My responses are in brackets.
1 Human emissions account for the increase?
(Let's assume he means increase in CO2 - I think the real answer is "partly, almost certainly a large proportion of the increase in CO2 is the result of human activities" and I don't know there is any real doubt in that.  Try here for a better answer.)
2 CO2 controls the climate?
(One thing among many but it is an important one and it is one that we do have a bit of control over.)
3 Continued rising CO2 will bring catastrophe?
(Depends where you are and what happens there - I wouldn't want to be on a low lying island, or somewhere that might be inundated by rising sea levels - oh, wait, I am - but the consequences are unlikely to be anything good, considering how we currently live, over the long term.)

Whoops. I failed to give yes/no answers because the questions aren't realistic ones. So not only is it ants with flatulance but strawmen as well. I'd like to have those three questions put to real climate scientists to see what answers they came up with. I don't think there would be a yes or a no amongst them.

The point I am trying to make is simple.  Real scientists are beset with doubt.  They don't act with certainty until their ideas have been tested to destruction and come out the other side.  Fake scientists, like Willis Eschenbach, Bob Tisdale and Ron Voisin over at WattsWrongWithThat don't think in such terms.They enjoy their certainty because, perhaps, deep down they know that the next fake hypothesis will be along in a minute.

This is from a site I only learned about today and it isn't about climate change but vaccine denial.  Amazing how similar some of the tactics used are.  What am I saying? Identical.

Finally, some engineers are better than others. Cheap but true.

A song for Ronald Voisin
And a cryptic one:


UPDATE (sort of)

I trained as a biologist so Voisin's nutty ideas about insects and microbes is in my field.  So I point you to Why Evolution Is True for a video on a plant (yep, that's right, a plant) that is a net contributor of CO2 tot he atmosphere.  It is heterotrophic, meaning (for some engineers at least) that it does not make its own food as most green plants do but uses nutrients from other sources, in this case from pine roots.  There are more things on this Earth than a mere engineer can contemplate. 

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