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.

Let’s hope things will get warmer, rather than colder. We don’t need another ice age.

Forget all the junk science by so-called experts that are all in on the multi-billion dollar “climate research scam�.

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. It’s all a hoax.

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.

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 “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

The 93% figure is also an important one to note when it comes to questions of silencing climate change denialists. There is absolutely no reason to, they have lost the public debate about as comprehensively as it is possible to lose a public debate.

Also the whole freedom of speech thing…

That, I believe, is the basic reason why climate sceptics still exist. They are deeply deeply afraid that, if climate change is real, their way of life will have to stop, their fundamental construction of reality will be challenged. In the good old fashioned tradition of cognitive dissonance, they’d rather pretend it’s not happening than face that prospect…

No Tim we Skeptics are not deeply afraid at all it is just that many of us have pretty good bullshit detectors that have been ringing more loudly every time the likes of Robin Willims says on the science show that the oceans are going to rise by 100m or when the likes of Al Gore rants on about cuttiing carbon emmissions whilst being a very frequent flyer indeed.

On top of that the science is anything but settled but what is clear is that so many “true believers� like Silkworm are so afraid of a contary viewpoint that they want to ban desenting voices If ever there was an exampe of the religious being afraid of any doubt this poster is a perfect exempler. Consider the stats in this thread of the 42 comments here as I write apart from my six the majority support the notion of the post . so do less than one eigth of the comments pose such a threat if that they should be excluded from discussion ?

And lets get real: Climate change denialism is also a simpler phenomenon of paid whores publishing material they know to be baseless rubbish, for industry money.

You see it is people like Lefty E who do the AGW case a great disservice; in the same way that he would deny being in the pay of the communists whilst holding a Marxist viewpoint most of the people who are unconvinced that the AGW case has been definitively made are not “paid whores� at all. This is just a baseless attempt to smear. Many more honest commentators in the Pro AGW camp at least try to base their argument in the science and accept that the essence of science is a healthy skepticism and the notion that noting is immutable or immune to further question and inquiry. Sadly the likes of Lefty E and Silkworm are just making a religious argument based on the green faith, whilst the chant “silence the heretics� runs like a tape loop in their heads.

I suppose you’re a creationist, Iain? After all, you’re using precisely the same intellectually dishonest tactics anti-evolutionists use.

What you say reflects badly on the motivation and/or competence of Broad as author of the article.

As to your first comment, third point, of course we need to start immediately and yes the annual increase is likely to double over the next thirty years. I’ve just been reading Woodside’s projections of energy needs and they are banking on it.

Angela Merkel said the other day that we are 5 minutes after midnight in taking action. I think she’s right.

There is confusion in the literature about carbon, CO2 and CO2e. Also the starting point for temperature change, where we variously have last century, ‘before industrialisation’ which can mean 1850, 1750 or the 1750-1850 average, the last 50 years, the 20th century average, the last three decades, 1950-1980 and ‘now’. But ‘now’ is most likely the 1980-2000 average in climate scientist speak. I’m sure climate scientists take all this in their stride, but it becomes mangled in the secondary reporting and confusing for lay persons like myself. If you want to have a go at a guest post on this, let me know.

Yes, and the CO2e has problems because some of the other gases have a linear relationship with temperature change compared with CO2 which is logarithmic and persist for different time periods.

All of which makes people like Iain laugh because of the uncertainties. But the time for coherent, planet-wide decisions was yesterday and you have to run with the information you’ve got and vary things as you go.

I’ve just read that the Tugun desalination has 300 people building the plant and 120 designers designing it at the same time. It’s what you have to do when you are in a jam and have the responsibility, rather than sitting in an armchair and taking pot shots.

See y’all tonight.

Look …it would be nice to have denialists included in the debate, but Im afraid there just isnt time to waste on them.

AGW denialists/delusionists should be banned from LP. It sounds anti-democratic, but so what? We ban personal abusers, don’t we?

Perhaps there should be a discussion devoted to revising LP policy.

I think Chris’s first post has been the closest to the truth thus far, interestingly parallelled by Ian Hall, following the traditional Andrew Bolt line of argument.

As so often with the right wing hacks, they highlight their greatest fears by attributing certain goals to those they hate. In the case of climate change, being conservative and having benefited substantially from the status quo, they attack climate scientists and activists for attempting to tear down the status quo.

That, I believe, is the basic reason why climate sceptics still exist. They are deeply deeply afraid that, if climate change is real, their way of life will have to stop, their fundamental construction of reality will be challenged. In the good old fashioned tradition of cognitive dissonance, they’d rather pretend it’s not happening than face that prospect…

- firstly, 450ppm is NOT considered to be the “lower boundary of the danger zone” at all. Many people in fact consider it to be the boundary above which we dare not step. At 450 ppm, the likelihood of overstepping the tipping points into the complete melt of Greenland and West Antarctic, the melt of the tundra and the destruction of the Amazon becomes too great to contemplate.

- secondly, having raised the question of whether carbon or carbon dioxide is being discussed, you then compare a figure of carbon dioxide, CO2, (380 ppm) with a figure of carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2e, (450 ppm). CO2e is the measure of the climate forcing equivalent to CO2 concentrations, and includes methane, fluorocarbons and the various other greenhouse gases. The current CO2e is reckoned by some to be in the vicinity of 420 ppm or higher already.

- thirdly, how long have we got? You calculate your 35 years based on, I assume, a rate of 2 ppm increases continuing for 35 years, then stopping abruptly to be zero at 2042. This is a bizarre suggestion. Even without the CO2e issue discussed in my second point. To keep us below 450 ppm, we’d have to start the process of cutting emissions right now in order to be able to reach a level close enough to natural equilibrium soon enough. Of course, there’s also the point that business as usual will not see us continuing with 2 ppm annual rises. It’ll see us reaching rises of 4 ppm by the time we get to 2042, with little doubt. If we put off action until then, we’ll be so far over 450 ppm that there’s little chance of avoiding runaway climate change.

He refuses to acknowledge the easily testable scientific data that shows a clear correlation between anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations and rising temperatures.

Alex why is it that when ever you try to counter what I may say about this topic that your first response is the personal attack?
Somehow I suspect that you have never forgiven me for refusing to bow to your feminist dogma about domestic violence but that is getting off topic.
The graph you refer to relies on two sets of proxy data; one from a comparison of Oxygen isotopes to give an approximation of the temperature in the past and the other from Ice cores to provide a measure of CO2 in paleoclimates. I considered the matter of oxygen isotopes here and have long considered the Ice core data is rather dubious because the gas samples are in fact very small so a couple of squiggly lines for dodgy data sets have some correlation? You trust Wiki as a definitive source? Oh come on anyone can create a Wiki post why some one I know even wrote one about Moi ; you will have to do better than that.