“Knobs“. Anthony Watts gives us another example of Willis Eschenbach grappling with the English language, along with more of his goofy charts. In this case he’s directing his “scientific scrutiny” at Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature, a paper that appeared back in the October 15th 2010 volume of Science. There’s some useful coverage of it at Climate Progress.

So many words for so little value. Willis’ concern about the paper’s “theoretical claim” that “global net advective energy transports must equal zero” boils down to intentional obtuseness about basic physics. His complaint about computer modeling (which of course can never be trusted and are never useful) of an atmosphere without CO2 is another example of simplistic misrepresentation and trying to recycle unsupported denialist theories about cloud feedback.

Anthony brought this report to his readers ‘critical attention’ back in October with nothing more than an allusion to “last ditch effort” to fight “falling public opinion” (keep saying it Anthony, keep saying it). The comments were, as always, a sea of enthusiastic ignorance.

Interestingly, the corresponding author is Andrew Lacis, whom denialists tried to claim earlier this year as a dissenting climatologist by misrepresenting his remarks from back in 2005 about a draft of the IPCC’s AR4 report. Guess he’s back on the naughty list.