What Do We Think About Climate Change

At last some sensible words from the Green side:

Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate
Environmentalists have long sought to use the threat of catastrophic global warming to persuade the public to embrace a low-carbon economy. But recent events, including the tainting of some climate research, have shown the risks of trying to link energy policy to climate science.
by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

From there:

"For more than 20 years, advocates have simultaneously overestimated the certainty with which climate science could predict the future and underestimated the economic and technological challenges associated with rapidly decarbonizing the energy economy. The oft-heard mantra that “All we lack is political will” assumes that the solutions to global warming are close at hand and that the primary obstacle to implementing them is public ignorance fed by fossil-fuel-funded skeptics.

Environmental advocates — with help from pollsters, psychologists, and cognitive scientists — have long understood that global warming represented a particularly problematic threat around which to mobilize public opinion. The threat is distant, abstract, and difficult to visualize. Faced with a public that has seemed largely indifferent to the possibility of severe climactic disruptions resulting from global warming, some environmentalists have tried to characterize the threat as more immediate, mostly by suggesting that global warming was already adversely impacting human societies, primarily in the form of increasingly deadly natural disasters.

The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in no small part so that they could characterize all resistance as corrupt, anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.

Little surprise then, that most of the recent controversies besetting climate science involve efforts to move the proximity of the global warming threat closer to the present. The most explosive revelations of Climategate involved disputed methodological techniques to merge multiple data sets (e.g., ice cores, tree rings, 20th century weather station readings) into a single global temperature trend line, the “hockey stick” graph. Whatever one thinks of the quality of the data sets, the methods used to combine them, or the efforts by some to shield the underlying data from critics, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those involved were trying to fit the data to a trend that they already expected to see – namely that the spike in global carbon emissions in recent decades tracked virtually in lockstep with a concomitant spike in present-day global temperatures."

Read the full thing at:
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2257

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Hey Guillermo,

Play time is over . . . . ! ! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mind the ‘‘ ’’ please . . !!

You have work to do

We miss you . . . . ! !

Hope to see you soon . . . . .

Cheers!
Angel

 

Worth repeating Mark. Democracy is a hindrance to global warming alarmist. The greens would, if they remotely could, cull humanity down to one billion, dynamite that forsaken glacier to make it collapse, or as it has been proposed by our local resident *****, add sulphur to aviation fuel and produce a particulate screen to stop the sun heat.

Green movements including global warming and green "peace" and all the others, are composed by a band of deluded unemployed daydreamers with an axe to grind, leaded by deranged ignorant, used by clever politicians.
The above is a perfect recipe for a new form of tyranny the world has yet to see and that would make Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Napoleon, Gengys khan and the rest salivate with envy.

Green movements know better what is good for you and would love to force it down your throat.

Can you imagine if Hitler in stead of using the race card had used the green card to wage war against the ignorant of this world? Kill the enemy of the planet! Only the environmentally conscious are allowed to live, the rest will be made into fertiliser for our pastures! The GreenJugend can be established to spy on who is not recycling or who uses the car for short trips and bring them in front of the green court to be flogged. A yellow star must be placed on his car and he will be banned for a year from using it and must contribute for a year to landscape the local park.
Wow...I can think of a lot of similarities, too many for comfort.

 

What a load of horse **** Boston. If anything, a point of view that is held by the majority can only hinder the scientific process placing bias and prejudice where there should be open mindedness.

Consensus does not represent "a level of understanding" it simply represents the effectiveness of a method of propaganda over another. There was general consensus in Europe in the thirties that Hitler was doing a great job and that incudes the Vatican.

To say that "consensus is rarely found to be in error", is so far removed from reality that is hardly worth debating. Should I mention the consensus that the earth is flat? That all unbelievers must be exterminated? That all black people are potential criminals? What about the consensus that Lee Osvald killed JFK single handedly? I can write until my fingers hurt a long list of "consensus" that not only proved to be wrong, but also that hindered open mind attitude because precisely there was a "consensus"

 

Much of what Boston says about consensus is true. The problem lies in how the consensus is formed and the data that is used to build the consensus.

The AGW consensus is a phoney one however in the classical definition. The handful of movers and shakers in the AGW cult have used political campaign tactics to promote it. They have misrepresented survey results, used survey techniques that do not conform with accepted practices. They have promoted altered distorted data, outright lies, and used ethics that would get you fired in private industry. They have hijacked the peer review process, attempted to limit dissemintation of to a handful of selected journals, intimidated holders of non confrorming views, and used governement agencies to squash alternative studies.

This is not science. In their attempt to "save the world" from itself they have created doubt mistrust and ridicule among the general population, which will, to their chagrin, decide their own future at the ballot box. If there were legitimate concerns on the AGW front, they have lost the high moral ground to present them by using the tactics of a demagogue.

 

Um, there was a consensus in Germany in the 1930s that Hitler was doing an O.K. job. The vatican did not like hitler and the germans even gave the pope a name- "enemy over the mountains". The french did not think Hitler was doing a great job, neither did the Poles or Belgium or England or Norway, etc. Maybe in your world, Hitler was liked; but in reality, only the Germans liked Hitler, and not even all of them. The Junkers despised him and called him the "little corporal".

 

Advancements in science are not a result of consensus, but precisely of the contrary. If it weren't because there has always been people questioning the stablished conclusions (consensus), we would still be jumping from one tree to another. We have a saying around here: "a conclusion is just the point where one has decided to stop thinking" (and this is an oximoron in itself )

Cheers.

 

Ok, OK! I'll be back to work!

 

Well, we can finally forget about all this AGW crap!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8594000/8594561.stm
"Trying to save the planet 'is a lot of nonsense'" - Lovelock, Father of Gaia
"too late"
"done deal"
"enjoy life while you can"

 

Boston, stop cutting in line.

 

Ever notice that the quoted gentlemans post are often totally unrelated in context to what we are talking about???????

 

Hoyt, I wish I had thot to say that!

 

Here's how one can quite reasonably come to such a seemingly 'outlandish' conclusion:

Weight of all atmospheric CO2: ~750 billion tons

Weight of all dissolved CO2 contained in the oceans: ~40, 000 billion tons

Measured CO2 atmospheric residence time: ~5 years

Annual atmospheric CO2 turnover: ~150 billion tons

Annual anthropogeic CO2 contribution (presently) 8 billion tons.


All of the above figures (with the exception of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions which we tabulate rather precisely) are approximations, with no better than +/- 5% precision, which means that the total anthropogenic contribution is well within the 'noise' of the above figures, in the realm of negligibility.

In a related matter, atmospheric CO2 varies seasonally. These variations are about +/- 14 billion tons. These variations are smoothed out whenever you see graphed data. But if you look around enough, you can find raw, un-smoothed graphs which show this variability, which at 14 billion tons is quite a bit larger than all present anthropogenic emissions.

Our emissions are 'in the noise'.

Jimbo

 

You're roaming pretty far afield there, Marco. Boston was talking about a scientific consensus. That's hardly the same thing as the (mostly imaginary on your part) social and political consensuses you're listing.

A scientific consensus is not the result of an opinion poll, nor is it a simple compilation of asinine beliefs held by the ignorant, uninformed and prejudiced. I believe you know that already....I shouldn't have needed to say it.

 

I remember when I was living in the uk 2007 when the EU governments organised a meeting of all the scientists they could find to agree to global warming ('or their would be no more funding' as the press proclaimed)...amazingly they all agreed and off the governments went inventing taxes for polluters...now they have science backing them.
Plenty of protocols to reduce polition but....
Their actual action to reduce pollution...zero..no money in that one!

When the press starting digging into each 'scientist' it was amazing how many voted yes there is gloabl warming when any and all papers they had ever published previously, disagreed with their yes vote.
That seemed to be a turning point in EU opinion that it may well be a scam.