Lavoisier group member Louis Hissink has a response to my post and John Quiggin’s on the Lavoisier group. A summary cannot do it justice, so I will quote extensively:

A quick scan of the blogosphere reporting on William Kininmonth’s recent book launch on Monday 22 November by the Lavoisier Society showed many still retain a belief in man-made global warming.

So let’s get a little more scientific about this issue.

As far as the earth is concerned, and from a geological perspective, 99% of the earth’s mass is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius, and 1% of the earth’s mass cooler than 100 degrees celsius - statistics here.

The temperature of space is about 2.7 degrees Kelvin, or expressed in the Celsius scale, approximately -269 degrees Celsius.

Therefore the net heat loss from the earth to space is enormous, from which space could be thought as an almost infinite heat sink. And fluctuations of this heat source will overwhelm anything that humanity thinks it could contribute.

And why are we not being cooked to a frazzle on the earth’s surface by this enormous mass of matter at a temperature greater than 1000 Degrees Celsius underneath us?

Since the temperature gradient between the earth and space is somewhat steep, one wonders about the scientific basis of climate science and the hypothetical construct of anthropogenic CO2 induced global warming, given the overwhelming contribution that the earth’s interior makes to the surface temperature of the earth and to space’s ability to absorb all this thermal energy.

Given the mass of the solid earth is somewhat greater than that of the atmosphere, of which 0.033 percent is CO2, a simple physics 101 calculation of the heat balance might suggest that the contribution by CO2 to the earth’s surface temperature is, for practical purposes, irrelevant.

Are these scientific facts incorporated into the climate models? No, for which self respecting climatologist would study geology - the necessary background for miners of coal, oil, metals and industrial minerals….

[Climate scientists] are scientific morons.

Does the earth’s interior make an overwhelming contribution to the surface temperature? This claim seems to be contradicted by the fact that it is warmer in daytime. And in summer. And closer to the equator. It takes a rare kind of talent to present an argument on climate change that is inconsistent with the existence of seasons.

Scientists have extensively measured the flow of heat from inside the earth—it amounts to 0.075 Watts per square metre, while incoming solar radiation is 342 Watts per square metre, about 5000 times as much. Hissink is correct that heat from the earth is not included in climate models—but that is because it is negligible.

Fortunately Hissink has a theory to explain climate change. Or rather apparent climate change:

This is not the first time that shifts of the earth’s axis were noted in the historical past, the most infamous being the biblical Joshua Ben Nunn event who commanded the sun stand still by pounding his staff on the ground. Of course no man can do that, (but advocates of anthropogenic global warming assert that while man cannot stop the sun, he surely can change the weather, though it then strikes me that as the devout believe Joshua did stop the sun, then changing the climate would seem a trivial exercise for the devout, whether divine or secular - ask Sir David King - thereby confirming Michael Crichton’s observation that anthropogenic global warming is a religious belief rather than scientific fact).

Then there are other more ancient accounts in Egyptian history where the rising and setting suns exchanged places. Where once the sun used to rise, it now sets, and that this happened more than once. So they said. Modern science, limiting its understanding to Newtonian mechanics, finds these ancient accounts extremely problematical, if nigh well impossible but as we all know too well, science also has a habit of changing when new facts are discovered. So while the past might remain inexplicable using existing theories, it is quite likely that new facts will enable us to explain the past in a more sensible manner than by simply dismissing it as impossible today. That is science, of course, which always changes when new facts are discovered. Religion never changes, even when confronted with overwhelming contradictory fact.

But I am not going to dwell on this because it occurred to me that if the earth did change its axis of spin, or careened, slightly, or significantly in the past, then that would have had the interesting effect of moving regions which were once in the tropics, perhaps into more temperate zones, and those in the temperate, perhaps into the arctic zones. We can change the climate of a place simply by moving it about in space?

This would result in the illusion that a particular region suffered a severe climate change, which in one sense is true, but this was only because that region was moved to a different latitude by a change in the earth’s attitude around its axis of spin. The earth’s overall thermal balance would not have changed, but only appeared to have changed from a misinterpretation of the evidence.

This then suggests that during the Medieval warming period Greenland was closer to the equator, and afterwards was moved further north to colder latitudes as the result of some cosmic interaction. That also means that Europe moved to colder climates. Is there any evidence for that? Seems so, if the Korean Choson Annals are anything to go by, as well as the necessity to change the Gregorian calendar, at the time. Of course much research needs to be done in this area, but if no one accepts this, then funding of course will not be allocated. Same old story of facts being quietly ignored by denying funding.

So the science of Newtonian mechanics, which tells us that angular momentum is conserved, and which has been confirmed by countless experiments and observations is just going to have change when confronted by the “overwhelming contradictory fact” that the Bible implies that the Earth stopped rotating? Because otherwise it would really be like a religion. Because religion just believes that the stuff in the Bible is true and will not be swayed by contradictory evidence. Got it.

It also seems a little odd that if the Medieval Warm Period ended with the Earth shifting its axis of rotation, that no-one wrote down something like “Holy Cow! The constellations are in a different place!”. You’d think they would have noticed.

Update: Louis responds on the aptly named Mangled Thoughts blog: Warning: do not read his response while drinking coffee.

Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.