SponPlague

Back in the 70s, Newsweek and many scientists were predicting an ice age - Newsweek suggested we urgently paint the icecaps black, to help warm up the planet... If a week is a long time in politics, 30 years is nothing in climatology, but folks never learn...

Clippo

Sean43
Forgive me for being a little suspicious, but I saw from your very first post on this forum that you were gathering information for a school project in Politics. Can I assume that you are not doing the same here?

I infer from your posts here that you quoted the ‘swindle’ CH4 program as support for the contrarian view to be aired as well as Al Gore’s film. Despite the unqualified praise of the program by Brittanist, in all critical reviews it has been panned for using old & withdrawn data ( by the anti GW’ers who first published it), for fraudulently filling in small gaps of data in one of the other charts, for editorially misrepresenting the comments of a primary contributor. All of this done by the same program producer who has faced and lost a complaint for previously using the same tactics.

The scientist whose views were misrepresented, Prof Wunsch- also a member of the Royal Society, - has made a formal complaint to the appropriate television body. So, I would suggest you made a considerable tactical error in your letter to the Welsh Assembly by quoting this program as ‘evidence’ in support of your view. I think Claire Bennett’s response to you was a remarkably accurate and polite assessment of the program. (BTW what's Devilskitchen's qualification for challenging the AGW consensus view?)

It’s never wise to form your opinions on any subject via the media alone.

I have no idea what investigative preparation you have done previously to form your apparent anti-AGW stance but I would suggest you’ve been listening to the wrong people. Do you not consider it odd that your anti AGW view is not shared by the majority of scientists, especially those actually working in Climate Science & related disciplines? Do you not consider it odd that your views are at variance with practically the whole of the Worlds governments & policy makers? Have you not read about relevant GW topics in ‘neutral’ sources such as Wikipedia, or popular science magazines ? It would be much more sensible to get your science from these sources than the politically & US big business tainted ones – amongst which are the 3 that Sponplague recently posted.

If your main concern is ‘fairness’ in a debate, have you similarly contacted the WA to:-
1. Introduce Creationism as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in Biology teaching.
2. Allow Holocaust deniers the opportunity to put their viewpoint in History teaching.
3. Drop the compulsion to learn the Welsh language in Welsh schools ( I gather this is a another dislike of yours from your previous posts)?
…. I could go on.

I strongly suggest you’ve been the victim of ‘barrack room lawyers, ‘bullet makers’ or whatever a more modern phrase is for such people. Did you ask Brittanist if he had protested to the Dept. Of Education in London over his ‘illegality’ views posted earlier?

Finally, (& you may want to debate this in your politics lessons), in the UK system of government, (elective representation & parliamentary sovereignty), the majority opinion block in parliament assumes by precedent that they have the absolute electoral mandate to set taxes and then to spend them how they think fit. Since, as I said earlier, the majority of world governments & their advisors, especially the WA believe wholeheartedly in AGW, it’s not at all surprising they should offer youth the evidence that has convinced them of the potential disaster facing the world.

devilskitchen

Clippo,

No, I have no formal qualifications beyond Biology and Chemistry A Levels (and a couple of years of biochemistry masquerading as the first two years of a microbiology degree). What this does mean though, is that I can read and understand technical articles.

Oh, yes, and I am not flying around the world, whoring myself out to peddle a theory as fact.

(While we are about it, rather than giving school pupils that fraud's film, could we teach the advancing of empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific theory from non-science?)

I also write about AGW, on my blog, several times a week. In common with other decent political bloggers, I read and link to the research that I quote. And this research that I quote is very easy to find because, you see, there is very far from being a concensus on climate change.

Who gives a stuff whether Prof. Wunsch is a member of the Royal Society? They beccame utterly discredited thanks to the activities of the idiotic Roy Anderson FRA during the Foot And Mouth Crisis. Besides, Wunsch may indeed have complained about being misrepresented, but he cannot deny that he actually said the things that he did. Using his evidence and building it into an argument is a perfectly valid way to proceed. Besides, he was one scientist out of a good number that the programme used: have any of the others retracted anything?

Besides, no one has been able to refute the single, most telling argument that the programme employed: the evidence of the Vladivostok ice cores.

The basic data shows that a rise in CO2 lags behind initial warming by about 800 years. Now, the argument that was extrapolated, i.e. that CO2 has no appreciable effect on warming, has been questioned but the basic problem remains: once warming starts (for whatever reason) CO2 does provide a feedback effect but what is obvious is that CO2 does not drive global warming.

(Sir Karl Popper would have dismissed the CO2 arguments with those ice cores under empirical falsifiability. The theory has been tested and it has been proved wrong. End of story.)

What annoys me is the claims -- by that **** Miliband amongst others -- that because a few scientists have been paid to come up with a theory for global warming, that this theory is now accepted as "unambiguous".

(Almost all climatologists admit, quite correctly, that it is very difficult to understand what, exactly, drives the climate of a body as large as the Earth.)

The other thing that we need to consider is whether global warming is actually a problem. During the Mediaeval Warm Period the sea was about 1 degree C warmer than today (and, interestingly, it coincided with a high in solar activity). Was humanity wiped out? No. We are now technologically far more advanced than they were then, so I'm sure that we will survive.

But here's the trick: technology will render all of these arguments obsolete anyway. There are a huge number of technologies being developed that, I (and a number of people that I talk to who are actors and suppliers in the industries concerned) believe, will ensure that we will not be burning fossil fuels in 40 years. (I might go and place a bet at the bookies on that actually.) Amongst other things, there are supply problems, i.e. hydrocarbon supply is finite, and political problems, i.e. the instability of the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela.

But here's the trick: the problems are ones of engineering and they will be overcome, but making everyone poorer now -- which is at the root of almost all of the proposed actions on climate change -- will not bring those technologies to market any more quickly.

So here's my stance: the world is getting warmer and this temperature rise is being driven by the sun, not our emissions: however, this rise should not worry us. Technology -- include that Holy Grail of energy, nuclear fusion -- will end our reliance on hydrocarbons (except for making plastics and so on) within a few decades. The correct action is to... well, sit back and do nothing.

Although, substantial tax breaks and looser regulation on private R & D might be a good idea. Oh yes, and the US could take that $4 billion per annum that it spends on researching climate change and put it into new technology instead.

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Unio Europaea delenda est