Or...
it may not.
This comment from what appears to be a rational physicist is a good one, which reflected my thoughts as I read the "challenge" and most of the comments/responses on the first submission page.
Anonymous
June 25, 2014 at 9:25 PM
Chris, as a fellow physicist I'm.. disheartened? You are allowed to believe whatever you want and I won't judge you. One of my colleagues has his PhD in physics and is extremely christian! I don't judge his beliefs, but he seems to think that the burden of proof is on the rest of the world, to prove that he is wrong.
That is problematic.
If he can prove that god is real, I would convert, repent, and pray everyday. But he can't prove it to me, so when he fails he turns and says "well fine, you prove that he isn't real because I already know he is because of my faith."
This all coming from a very intelligent physicist. It hurts to hear it coming from a professor.
Unfortunately, whether or not global warming is man made or not, you have fallen into the same hole. You're insisting that others prove you wrong. This isn't helping your cause in the scientific community, in fact, anyone who uses the "scientific method" should groan when they read your blog, regardless of their beliefs. At most you could hope for from this is publicity among those who do not practice science.
For the record, your curiosity or otherwise, I'm not what you have been painfully referring to as a denier (no one would call someone who believes in god a "denier" in the topic of evolution, as true as it might be, it's still an ugly name).
Global warming is happening, we have evidence, we know it is, we know climate change has always occurred
We need to do something about it, because if you look at our history, we know we will hit another ice age and a lot of people will die.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and it heats up the world.
We have dumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Anyone "denying" any of the above facts are following a bias.
But also, water vapor is a much much larger contributor to our greenhouse effect.
This is super important in this discussion. It overlaps with CO2's cross section (which responds to wavelengths of 2.5 microns and 4.25 roughly, water vapor already responds to the 2.5 micron light emitted by Earth back to space, does more per molecule, and there are many more molecules of H2O)[note: he's not even bringing up the 15 micron issue--heck], leaving only the wavelengths within (plus minus) .25 microns from 4.25 microns wavelength as a contribution to the greenhouse effect from CO2.
This is visible light, much lower energy than the 4.5 ->8 microns that water vapor absorbs. and again I repeat, there is more water vapor molecules and it is more responsive per molecule. the numbers are .004% CO2 and up to 2% water vapor depending.
Now, here is where my opinion stabs in.
Our Earth is heating up and we need to be working as hard as we can to prevent it from doing that. But instead we're dumping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, making it worse. How much? We can bicker about it all day, even the climate "scientists" bicker back and forth and can't quantitatively agree on the thermal feedback per CO2 molecule. Most arguments are qualitative and I think "there might be something to that, they should have a legitimate scientist check it out."
but the facts remain:
climate change is happening.
we aren't doing enough to slow it down or prepare ourselves for it.
we don't fully understand it.
everyone has a different theory.
However, we can only do it so long, one day we'll run out of oil. A much larger concern of mine is what happens the day after we run out?
We better start relying on alternative forms of energy. This is just how it is, feel free to help us spend the rest of our lives arguing about it just like religion.
Oh also, just to be an ass, I'll give $1,000,000,000 to the first person to prove god isn't real.
~~~~~~
Keating's response to someone else trying to bring up the question of CO2's responsibility was met with the same hand-waving which is typical of every text/presentation I've seen so far. They know the frequencies, but they don't know the mechanism (if there is one), so they just try to move on to other topics in climate science ASAP. I can't blame him, though; it is a difficult question to consider, with different avenues of potential action.
All in all, this whole "stunt" is just publicity (as others have mentioned to him) which will attract some less than scientific people to his "dialogue" with liang ge xiongdi about climate change (which you can pick up for a measly $3.07 from amazon on your Kindle reader...I would suggest reading the "Cloud in a Beer Bottle" book instead).
He'll never pay-up because the challenge is not scientific...It is some clever marketing, though. He's no dummy.
A lesson to be learned there