Johnny Ball on Little Atoms Christmas Special

I listened to the Little Atoms Christmas Special podcast featuring Johnny Ball yesterday. It is so sad to see this man, whom I held in such high regard as a child, come out with such vacuous arguments in support of his belief that CO2 is not causing climate change. Even more worrying is that many who hold him in similar regard are going to be so much more convinced by his opinion.

A quick look into what he said would show you that how wrong the arguments he presented are. Water vapour in the atmosphere being more important factor than CO2? Come on Johnny! You should know this. It only lasts days at most (it's called "rain" btw) if not replenished, and the amount in the atmosphere is related to temperature... Solar activity is the cause? The Sun follows a clear 11-year activity cycle, but has recently in an unusually long period of minimum activity... And of all the arguments from authority, he trots out a Ian Pilmer, an Australian *geologist* whose arguments probably only gains so much traction with the general public because of his persuasive and entertaining delivery.

It's a shame the Neil Denny and Rebecca Watson didn't manage to inject any countering arguments to the more obvious claims, and didn't try harder to give a defence of climate science. Actually, they did try pretty hard to generally defend the science, Rebecca in particular, but Johnny was very effective at simply talking over her. I guess her options were to either give up talking, or face the conversation turning into a confusing mess. Perhaps they were decided it was better to give Johnny enough rope...

Unfortunately, it takes somebody who has at least read lightly about the subject to see the holes in even simple anti-AGW arguments like this, and time and effort to research what you don't know. That discounts most of the population - and they are exactly the kind of people the GW cynics (I refuse to call them skeptics) aim their arguments at.

More here: In which Johnny Ball demonstrates why we can be confident that AGW is happening