logarithmic greenhouse gas effects and the impact of solar cycles

From David Archibald in The Daily Telegraph in Australia (hat tip: Randy Baker)...

John Connor of The Climate Institute says that my boat, my car and I are destroying the environment. My work says the opposite. The more carbon dioxide you put into the atmosphere, the more you are helping all plants on the planet to grow, and of course that makes you a better person. Virtue is in direct proportion to your carbon dioxide output.

What of the temperature, you ask? Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the effect is strongly logarithmic. The first 20 ppm achieves 1.5 degrees of heating, but it takes more than another 400 ppm to equal that. By the time we get to the current level of 384 ppm, carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. From here, every 100 ppm extra may be worth 0.1 of a degree.

So how does the IPCC achieve 5 degrees of heating from a doubling of the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide to 560 ppm? They do it by cheating. Their computer models are written so that a little bit of carbon dioxide-caused heating puts more water vapour in the air. Water vapour is the major greenhouse gas, so they have the heating compounding away until they get a number that will melt icecaps, kill polar bears and all the other effects of their apocalyptic visions.

Their view of the Earth's climate is that it is tremendously unstable, prone to thermal runaway at the slightest provocation. In fact it is the opposite, a buffered system that dampens disturbances....

What is strange is that the wailing of the global warming proponents is in the face of a temperature record that does not support their theory. Peak global temperature was in 1998 and we have had ten years of cooling since....The Earth's failure to warm has become quite annoying to the global warmers, and signs of cognitive dissonance are appearing in their camp. Surely a few more years of cooling will leave only the true believers in their misanthropic ideology, and the truly idiotic....

Can cooling continue, or is climate just a random walk? Not only will it continue, substantial cooling next decade is in the bag based on current solar behaviour. There is a good correlation between solar cycle length and the temperature over the following solar cycle. Long solar cycles cause lower temperatures. The classic case is the Dalton Minimum between 1796 and 1820....

The next decade will not be a good time to be a Canadian wheat farmer....The global warmers do not have a monopoly on apocalyptic visions. Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will help agricultural production a little. A 300 ppm increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase wheat yields by 50%. Australia is a dry continent and we will benefit more than most others....