Voisin an opinion

You might just remember Ronald Voisin, engineer and holder of many patents from Silicon Valley.  He of the idiotic insect rubbish that he spread over three posts at WattsUpWithThat in the dim and distant past.  Perhaps he should have got out of the clean room more and breathed in the California smog and learned a bit more biology.

Well, he's back and voicing his opinion, or not, in this archived expression of conspiracy ideation.  He is cynically wondering what will happen to NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite 2.

I guess Voisin is doing what deniers so often do, getting the retaliation in first.  By telling the denialati what to think, they are saved the trouble of doing it for themselves.  So Voisin gives three scanrios for the OCO 2, the first public release of data being tomorrow and, one suspects, that data won't be easy for the deniers to digest.

Anyway, Voisin's first scenario is pretty twisted:

1) NASA will continue to report transparent scientific results that will quickly and stunningly turn CAGW upside down. We will all realize that global CO₂emissions are not at all as taught, preached or predicted. That human emission to global atmospheric CO₂ concentration is and always has been a small single-digit contribution. That if we shut human CO₂ emission down completely tomorrow little would happen to the future trajectory of global CO₂concentration. And indeed, had we humans never industrialized, little would be different about that trajectory over the past 60 years right up to today.

I think the first line up to "that" is pretty accurate.  The rest, well, is bilious nonsense and I predict Voisin won't want to be reminded of it in a few years time. 

Second scenario:

2) NASA will homogenize the data with such effort as to make the original data set unrecognizable. There will be lots of hand waving and we’ll endure continued lame explanations such as in the caption that was released with this initial data set.

The first line all the way to "with" might be correct because homogenising data is a scientifically valid exercise.  The rest is hand waving itself.

And the final, according the Voisin, scenario is:

3) The OCO instrument will suffer a premature and catastrophic failure. 

Maybe, but unlikely these days.  One of those new Russian killer satellites (sic) or one of the Chinese ones could take the OCO out but modern technology is a bit better than the late 1950s which Voisin might be remembering.  He, of all people, might know that satellites pretty much work as expected these days.  But satellites do fail, as did the original OCO, or rather its booster did (not forgetting the GLORY satellite which was intended to monitor aerosols in the atmosphere), so there is a slim possibility that it will fail.  And if it does, the conspiracy minded amongst the deniers will be all over it.   If past form has anything to do with it.

But there are other scenarios that I can see.

4  Valid and reliable observations support current ideas of climate change and its relation to carbon dioxide forcing the deniers into ever more convoluted explanations and conspiracy theories to explain the inconvenient truth away.

5  The OCO works past its expected lifetime and nothing catastrophic happens to it.

Now these are more like it.  I would say that, wouldn't I, since they are my scenarios.  I add them to show one of the non-sceptical ways of the denier-sceptic - that old three card trick.  By telling the unthinking crowd what to think, Voisin forgets to tell them that there are other possibilities.  I know his is an opinion piece but it is amazingly short of real opinion and ends with an appeal to his favourite insects. 

Another characteristic of deniers: they never seem to learn.

For some sites where Voisin could do some learning (I know, I know):

http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/39211/1/03-0563.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006JD007375/pdf