RealClimate has an extended satire against climate denier use of false correlation=causation logic to argue for solar cycles as the main cause of global warming. As humor with extended charts and co-efficients of correlation go, it is quite funny. However, I must admit that an exchange between two commenters on the post was much funnier:
CO2 has an insulating effect — we know this because people have measured it. Humans have been putting more CO2 in the atmosphere — we know this too, because we’ve measured it. Putting those two facts together, we deduce that the Earth should get warmer as a result of the CO2. We look at temperature records, and lo and behold, we see that the Earth is in fact getting warmer.
Where exactly is the problem in this? It seems really simple to me, about at the level of figuring out that you’re feeling too warm because you’re wearing an extra sweater :-)
Aha, but you are just being fooled by a coincidence. In fact while in a lab CO2 will absorb energy and act as an insulator, when it is in the atmosphere pixies cast magical spells on the CO2 so that the radiation passes straight through it. Of course we would have realised this long ago if it wasn’t for the fact that, completely coincidentally, as human CO2 output has risen unicorn wave emission from the sun has increased at the same time. Now unicorn waves have the strange property that they curve away from detectors (they are shy), so the satellites and other systems that monitor the sun continuously don’t see them, and this is actually what has caused the warming.
Of course on its own this would still be detectable, as the upper atmosphere would be warming up as well as the lower parts, showing us that the GHG model of climate was flawed. However by complete fluke there has been a massive increase in cold dragon activity in the upper atmosphere in recent decades. These dragons of course keep themselves completely invisible to humans, so we can’t tell that the are massively cooling the upper atmosphere, more than offsetting the warming of the unicorn waves, and hence making us unaware of the actions of the pixies at messing up our understanding of how physics works in the real world.
