Note the tone of faux-authority:
philc | August 5, 2011 at 11:10 pm | Reply
What you are missing is the ~190 GtC/yr that cycles through the oceans and land mass, with an uncertainty of about 40 GtC. The mechanisms of that cycling are largely unknown and unstudied. We don’t even have enough data to analyze whether or not there might be oscillations in that cycle. Given all the known cycles in the climate(PDO, AMO, ENSO, etc) forgive me if I think that a 1-2% change in the global carbon cycle over a period of 50-100 years is probably more than likely.
"Unknown and unstudied," gosh. Sounds like scientists have really been laying down on the job. But just to confirm what our expert has told us, let's check Google Scholar and see if the carbon cycle is really "unstudied."
“Carbon cycle” pulls up 138,000 results on Google Scholar. “Carbon sink” — 21,100. “Soil respiration” — 32,600 articles. "Biological pump" -- 5,090. And so on. And on.
"Philc" is not just causally wrong, he exemplifies the psuedoskeptical tactic of presenting himself as knowledgeable about matters of which he is totally ignorant. "We don’t even have enough data to analyze whether or not there might be oscillations in that cycle." You would think from the way he writes that he is just on the verge of sitting down to do the analysis himself, and straighten the matter out once and for all. Yet this clown thinks the carbon cycle is "unstudied."
Having duped unskeptical skeptics, he move to his big finish:
Given all the known cycles in the climate(PDO, AMO, ENSO, etc) forgive me if I think that a 1-2% change in the global carbon cycle over a period of 50-100 years is probably more than likely.
He doesn't claim to have made an argument for this -- good thing, since he can't -- but instead very directly invokes the "authority" he asserts with his faux-expertise: "forgive me if I think." No thank you. We're all out of forgiveness for dishonest and obnoxious morons today.
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