George Musser, of Scientific American says he has "to call 'em as I see 'em."   I guess he sees himself as a global warming umpire.   But as any baseball fan can tell you, the umpire is not always right.   Sometimes umpires make bad calls which are obvious to even the most green baseball audience.

Musser puts forth the case for anthropogenic greenhouse warming as coldly and rationally as he possibly can.   He does a good job of explaining possible contributors to climate change and defining the terms thrown about by media climate reports such as "forcings."   He builds the case for identifying the "fingerprint" of "greenhouse gases" causing observed global warming.   But there are holes in his overall argument that even a layman can see from the top of the stadium.

Let's start reviewing Musser by noting that his specialty is space, not climatology.   He is Sci-Am's Mars bureau chief.   Space science is his primary focus.   His bio points out, however, that although space science is his primary focus, he is often drawn to a far more challenging subject, human society.   Put another way, he is so enamored of his intellect that he is pretty sure he is qualified to tell us his opinions on whatever subject strikes his fancy.   He is, in his opinion, qualified to tell us all how to live.

Based on his writings, Musser leans towards atheism because those who believe in God and the human soul are not without sin, they have historically mistreated fellow human beings about as often as those who do not believe in a God.   He takes time out to beat up on what he frequently refers to as "neoconservative columnists" and plain old "neocons" not to mention any initiative proposed by President George Bush.   He frequently points out how Europe is beating America on numerous business and scientific fronts.   He is fond of bashing corporations, especially the American pharmaceutical companies which have given us so much over the past 100 years.   Let's just say that while his bona fides as a rational, objective journalist are somewhat in question, his liberal tendencies are not.   His work bears the fingerprints of rampant liberal extremism.

But let's proceed to some of the specific arguments Musser puts forth in his Scientific American blog.   He targets specific comments made by those arguing against anthropogenic warming but he never addresses the most common argument which is the science is far too underdeveloped to draw any real conclusions.   Global warming detractors point out anomalies in the modeling which forms the basis of the IPCC's, mainstream media's and many government's conclusion that there is scientific consensus regarding the causes of global warming.   This is a reverse didactic.   When dealing with theories, it is not up to the detractor to delineate every objection.   The theorists are responsible for that.   Their job is to find the holes in their theories and plug 'em up.   The detractors, by the very nature of the scientific method, are given free reign to find fault and criticize.   A theory does not become fact because four or five possible infirmities are refuted.   A theory becomes fact after all possible problems have been addressed and even then, we still keep testing it.

Musser states the amount of forcings can be calculated by "filling in some very rough numbers, the current forcing is 2 watts per square meter, mostly from carbon dioxide, methane, and low-altitude ozone, minus the cooling wrought by particulates."   He doesn't much get into the science of particulates and with good reason.   That science is even less well understood than the science of atmospheric carbon.   We could simply perform the subtraction if we had the figures for particulate cooling, but we really don't.

Musser concludes "According to the geologic record, 1 W/sq m should lead to about half a degree Celsius of warming -- which matches the observed increase."   But much in the geologic record has been debunked as bad science.   The study of tree rings, for example, has so many shortcomings that its usefulness in climate science has about been thrown out.   Perhaps, these problems will be fixed in future modeling but for now, serious climatologists do not rely on any of the data back beyond 400 years.

Even Musser's use of the half degree Celsius is curious.   It is based upon "average annual temperatures at the beginning of the century and today."   "The century" means 1900.   But why is that a meaningful point in time?   Why not go back to 1850, 1800, or 1750?   The answer is because if we do that, we don't have a .5 degree Celsius increase.   We have significantly less and the whole global warming argument becomes far less reasonable.   If we expect to see a one half degree increase but we only see .2 and the possible reasons for that increase can be natural variability, well, you see where I'm going.

Musser does point out in his diatribe that "carbon dioxide spreads out evenly."   One of the facts which causes many problems in scientific circles is the undisputed fact that the northern and southern hemispheres are not warming at nearly the same rate.   Actually one is warming while the other is cooling which is, well, another problem.   Many of the supposedly observed phenomenon caused by global warming, melting of glaciers, is happening in the half of the world where temperatures are decreasing on average.   Many of the scenes in Al Gore's drama unfold where the average annual temperature is dropping.   That's sort of as big a problem for Musser as it is for Gore.   Why exactly is ice cover decreasing if temperatures in a region are pretty darn cold and decreasing?   Precipitation has also decreased.   But nobody is claiming that this phenomenon is anything but natural variability.

Musser has appointed himself one of the leading anthropogenic global warming umpires in the big leagues.   But that doesn't mean we can't question his calls.   Maybe he's a bad umpire since he seems to have made up his mind before the first pitch was thrown.   He has called it as he sees it but he decided the pitch was a strike before it was released.