I was alerted to this piece of crap published by the right-wing website Canada Free Press (kinda like CNSNews for Canada), where known global warming denier Tim Ball (who is on the payroll of Big Oil) writes his latest denialist screed, this time pretending that pre-Industrial Revolution CO2 levels are the SAME as they are now, so therefore the entire premise that global warming is happening because of the increase in man-made CO2 being polluted into the air must be false!
Except, of course, Ball is utterly full of shit. Let's see how after the fold.
Ball only uses the arguments presented by Polish professor Zbigniew Jaworowski in comments he made to a Senate hearing on March 19, 2004. Except... no such hearing ever took place, and nobody named Jaworowski EVER spoke in front of a Senate hearing. Hey, maybe he meant that he was speaking outside the Senate building to any passersby that would listen to a crazy dude talking to himself.
I have to give credit to Some Are Boojums, they've completely debunked this much better than I ever could have. The "paper" he presented? They quickly found at least TWENTY-TWO mistakes, lies, distortions, etc. Here's just some examples of the lies contained therein.
(6) "... contaminates them with the drilling fluid ..."
Jaworowski knows perfectly well that drilling fluids, for example butyl acetate, are chosen to have minimal interaction with the studies that will be performed; also, that sample handling is a well worked-out technique and is conducted with excruciating care. Most of these developments were in place long before Jaworowski wrote his 1994 paper, as Hans Oeschger reminded him at that time. That he continues to spread this falsehood is disgraceful.
....
(10) "... CO2 concentration ... was 'too high' ..."
Here, Jaworowski begs meaning with the quotation marks around "too high", as if one of the researchers had issued a memo complaining about the data. This is just one of the many misleading rhetorical tricks Jaworowski employs in lieu of evidence.
(11) "An ad hoc assumption ..."
Again, Jaworowski imputes base motives to other researchers, and cites (who else?) himself in support. In fact, Neftel et al.'s methods were perfectly sound, and their results have been backed up by multiple independent studies.
(12) "... but they failed."
No, they didn't. The experiments demonstrating the age of the firn-ice transition, and of the air trapped above and below that depth, have been quite successful, a fact Jaworowski has been diligently ignoring at least since 1992.
(13) "... ignored the evidence ..."
Slocum said no such thing. Does Jaworowski think that no one will bother to look up his references?
(14) "... a biased selection ..."
Among Jaworowski’s citations, this is my second favorite. He actually has the spectacular brass to take a figure from a paper that agreed with Callendar's choice of data, redraw it and offer it as evidence that Callendar was biased! He also fails to cite Fonselius et al. (1956) properly in this statement, and claims that it is a criticism of Callendar (1958), which requires a time warp, but those are venial sins compared to the rest.
And the best?
(2) "... about 20 [papers] on climate research."
Jaworowski does not need to have credentials as an expert in gas measurement from ice cores in order to criticize those who do have them; if his arguments are valid, they can stand on their own. But being perceived as an expert elevates one's credibility, at least at first. To pick up a little of that luster, he leads off with a recitation of his ice-related activities, including 40 years in glacier studies, 11 expeditions to measure "natural and man-made pollutants" in glaciers, and extensive studies of dust and lead in the environment. But when we look for Jaworowski in the literature, he seems never to have done any primary research on the extraction and measurement of gases in ice. Later on, Jaworowski says that climate researchers' motives are suspect. But when it suits his purposes, he is happy to claim to be a climate researcher.
All this is not to say that Jaworowski's name has been unknown to print in recent years. He has had an article in 21st Century Science & Technology, published by Lyndon Larouche. Need I say more?
Yep! He's citing a discredited quack that only Lyndon LaRouche will publish! That the best you have, Mr. Ball? (Ball, BTW, retired in 1996 and has not been active in research for well over a decade, in which time we've obviously gathered a lot more data and refined a lot of stuff when it comes to global warming.)
Anyway, be on the lookout for this new talking point about pre-industrial levels of CO2, and how they arrived at it. It's all lies, but couched behind enough science that the average person wouldn't understand all the nasty little details. And that's what they're relying on, our general lack of understanding of science to get away with this shit.
Don't let it happen.