To seriously believe all the hype that man is causing a climate disaster that will destroy the planet is not only basically stupid, it is extremely arrogant.

We insignificant humans do not have the power to destroy this planet. Never did.

We also do not have the ability to change the current climate trends, or even to accurately forecast what is going to happen over the next 10 let alone 100 years.

Letâ??s hope things will get warmer, rather than colder. We donâ??t need another ice age.

Forget all the junk science by so-called experts that are all in on the multi-billion dollar â??climate research scamâ??.

Forget all the disaster reports being sold by environmental activists via the sensationalist media.

Forget all the self-righteous calls for action by power-hungry politicians.

Use your common sense. Itâ??s all a hoax.

the scientific debate has been hijacked by the â??social justice and equity lobbyâ??, the extremist environmental (the Gaia crew) and the far left â??we want a revolution nowâ?? cult.

Dearie me…

A few points:

1. I know enough natural scientists well enough to know that, as a group, they are temperementally one of the least radical, most cautious and most conflict-avoiding of all the professions. The most recent IPCC scientific assessment reflects this (as well as the political factors militating towards a more conservative assessment of the scope of the problem).

2. Perhaps the most significant “social justice and equity lobby” in the climate change policy debate is the one which is concerned about the effects of strong climate change response policies on coal and energy workers, their families and communities. To their credit they have not sought to call the science into question or downplay the environmental risks involved, but they are hardly going to be playing up the urgency of the problem beyond what sound science suggests.

3. The most frequently recommended policy responses (i.e. emissions trading schemes, carbon taxes, and arguably even carbon credits schemes) are all from the toolkit of mainstream neoclassical economics, and are not favoured by the ‘far left â??we want a revolution nowâ?? cult’.

1. There is no serious scientific debate about the consensus. Naomi Oreskes looked at a sample of 928 papers on global climate change and found that none of them disputed the consensus (warming is happening and we are largely responsible).

2. Factors such as solar and orbital forcing are in the models. Cosmic rays are just speculation, but in any event have not changed in the last 50 years, so cannot explain recent warming.

3. CO2 was last 10 times current levels 400 million years ago when the sun was cooler.

4. Computer models have predicted climate accurately. Most famously, in 1988 James Hansen presented his projections to Congress and his scenario B (the one he said was most likely) has been very close to the warming that has occurred since then.

5. The Hockey Stick has not been discredited. There have been some politically motivated attacks on it, but the researchers were vindicated by a National Academies of Science report published last year. The new IPCC report includes the Hockey Stick as well as other reconstructions that give similar results.

Please try to inform yourself better about these issues.

Wonder what Lysenko would have made of your 5 succinct sentences? Btw, there are two in point four, but this is no doubt just another minor aberration. I keep forgetting that you are a trained scientist.

However I’m sure this crusader for the real truth about AGW will be happy to entertain them.

PS: Good luck with the comb over!

I prefer: “Climate Change Proponents: Why do they do it?”

Let me try to explain why we do it in a few succinct sentences.

1: Because the scientific debate has been hijacked by the “social justice and equity lobby”, the extremist environmental (the Gaia crew) and the far left “we want a revolution now” cult.

2: Because there is valid science to suggest alternatives to the current warming (solar, cosmic, orbital etc etc etc etc) which are NOT in the models!

3: Because there are many unexplained anomalies with the science i.e. if CO2 is the cause, how is it possible that CO2 has been up to 10 times the current levels with no runaway effect?

4: Because the computer models (upon which the doomsday PREDICTIONS are based) are shoddy and have not yet predicted the actual climate accurately either now or in the past without severe fudging (i.e. the Hadley predictions). There are even comments in the GISS model warning against reducing the resolution!

5: Because there have been so many LIES told i.e. the deliberate and calculated removal the the Mediaeval Warm Period and Little Ice Ages from the now discredited Hockey Stick!

For these and a thousand other reasons scientists are questioning the “we are all going to die” bull being peddled as science!

(Prof) Jon Jenkins

I’d like to ask Iain, though, whether he supports all the assertions made in Broad’s article and whether, using science, he can refute all the criticisms of it in the four posts I linked to. It’s the Broad kind of denialism, and the sources he quotes, that I was on about.

Via Tim Lambert, Ray Pierrehumbert at RealClimate put an earlier Broad article through the wringer and found it seriously wanting. So the guy’s got form, although it seems that he’s a co-Pulitzer Prize winner and hence presumably capable of good journalism.

Here are two quotes from raypierre I found interesting:

Sometimes, something really truly scary is happening, and this is my considered scientific judgement about the situation with global warming. As I’ve said before, I’m not alarmist — just plain alarmed.

And points out that if you don’t act alarmed when you call emergency there’s a good chance they won’t take any notice of you.

There is no more doubt about the heat-trapping effect of CO2 than there is about the physics that causes a bowling ball to fall [if dropped from an airplane].

Start with this fact, look at climate observations over the last 30 years, then extend back in time to the last 50, the last 150, the last 1,000 and back in phases to the Pleistocene (1.8m to 11,550 years ago), realising that the data is less complete in it’s coverage and less direct, sometimes using proxies.

I don’t know how you can do this without becoming a bit alarmed.

To take up one point in the Broad article, Easterbrook flashed a slide showing temperature trends for the last 15,000 years. Why did he chose 15,000 years instead of 11,550 years representing the Holocene interglacial? Answer: It had some really big wobbles in it in the 8-15,000 section that suited his argument. In other words, cherry picking.

The interesting story is that from 8,000 years ago you hit a really sweet spot that really suits the large primate homo sapiens, without large variations but gradually cooling. But then it suddenly takes off. The AGW scientists provide a coherent explanation for this, in fact the only coherent explanation. Can we really afford to be relaxed and comfortable?

At a purely scientific level, the few peer reviewed sceptic articles that have appeared have triggered new rounds of research to investigate the issues. The most famous of these was the whole question of whether tropospheric cooling debunked the whole global warming theory. Further research showed that, in fact, given where the CO2e was accumulating, it was part of the very same phenomenon.

However, what I would like to see is appropriate treatment of sceptics at all levels of media – both mainstream and LP-type. What I mean by this is that:
- non-peer reviewed material must never be treated as equivalent to peer reviewed;

- there must be full disclosure in every case where funding is relevant (for example, every time someone publishes something from the IPA or the Lavoisier Group, like good old Ray Evans, it should be made clear that they are funded directly by coal, uranium, oil and gas corporations); and
- when using the dreaded term ‘balance’ to justify running stories that deny anthropogenic warming, the balance should be weighted to the proportion of credible scientists represented by the respective view.

That should settle the issue…

Brian, thanks very much for the invite. If I get the opportunity to pull something together, I’ll let you know.

Imagine, uncommodified raw fuel sources like solar and wind! The horror!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2004230,00.html