How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie

Gores father was “in the pocket” of Armand Hammer the ghastly old wretch who promised the victims of Piper Alpha “millions”.

Any body with family ties like Gore is not to be trusted, not forgetting he sat back whilst “The Rapist” got away with it…..slimy creep.

Blimey James what are you playing at? I’m going to tell Jo on you.

Thanks for this: one of the most interesting new contributions to the GW debate for a while. Let’s see how the warmists try and wriggle out of this one (probably by ignoring it completely).

Very interesting. Perhaps you could also give us your take on the new Met Office study predicting even higher temperature rises by 2060 than its earlier forecasts.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8279654.stm

I was pleased to see the question asked about declining temperatures since 2001 on the BBC News last night. I’m afraid I can’t recall who replied. Was it David Shukman? Other readers recall? Anyway, he waffled on in response and said virtually nothing. If even the BBC is now prepared to ask sceptical questions, are the wheels of the great Global Warming Scam (because it is a scam, regardless of the ultimate scientific truth) beginning to come off?

Cherry picking data to prove the case is unfortunately not uncommon. Another example is Prof Dr Ancel Keys in his Seven Countries Study to prove his Diet-heart-cholesterol theory. He cherry picked the seven countries out of 22 available. If all countries had been included it would have shown the reverse trend.

When you are a KOL (key opinion leader) the truth is no longer paramount; only individual status!

“Dr Betts and his colleagues emphasise the uncertainties inherent in the modelling, particularly the role of the carbon cycle.”

Better ask Prof. Latif about that. “Prof. Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.”"

James, programs is right for computers, it’s the American spelling. Programmes is the English spelling and not applicable here.

James, excellent blog.

It’s almost a duplicate of the problem that McIntyre had in trying to get the data from Dr. Michael Mann. In Mann’s case the work was funded by government money and legally should be available to the public. Mann tried all he could to avoid passing the data to McIntyre.

Do you think McIntyre will be on the front cover of the next IPCC report?

It would be interesting to see some of the exchanges between McIntyre and the Met Office or Mann. They sound like weasley excuses for not sharing data.

James,

Fantastic piece you’ve written here. After reading a previous post of yours about how Prof. Mojib Latif basically admitted that the IPCC’s models don’t work, I read through some of the links that you posted in this one and can scarcely contain my glee. I work as a financial engineering consultant, and we finance wonks have gotten plenty of stick about how bad our models and methods are- but the AGW crowd simply takes the cake for bad science, bad methods, and bad thinking. You’ve gone a long way towards proving (as if it wasn’t already obvious) that the AGW lobby is simply unscientific and irrational. Keep this up and maybe the Beeb will finally have to start paying attention!

The hypothesis that man made CO2 emissions will cause dangerous global warming is not proven with or without the hockey stick re-construction.

The whole edifice of the global warming alarmism is founded upon this graph, which time after time is shown to be created to provide an answer, which the so called climate scientists seems to desire.

The BBC yesterday reported, without any, balance the announcement by the MET office, 4 degree rise in temperature in 50 years. Of course no report about the Hockey Stick again being shown to be a fraud.

This newspaper does not seem to moderate/censor as the Guardian does please keep it that way. On the Met nonsense, the censor yesterday at the Guardian was going at it hammer and tongs trying to prevent links to Clmate Audit but gave up after many complaints. The censor didn’t see the irony in one post let through which said “This is a great story”

Our friend Prince Charmless is featured on the front page of the MET Office site and they have posted a speech by him, the usual sanctimonious drivel.

I despise the word Denier but the more insults thrown by the Dogooder Doomsayers the better as they lose the argument.

I have been continually surprised that no-one used the Freedom of Information Act against the Met Office; i.e. hand over the publicly funded data in the name of the public interest or be the subject of a complaint to the Information Commissioner which you will lose. The ICO would undoubtedly have applied the public interest test contained in the Act and ordered the Met Office to hand over the data. This could and should have been done years ago. There was no need for the data to be obtained in such a roundabout way when there was a well-established legal remedy already available.

Interesting. Someone mentioned GIGO in the last blog I was commenting on.

GIGO applies here, but the computer is James D’s unusually empty skull cavity.

Garbage In – the idea that temperatures have risen in the 20th century and this is anomalous to prior centuries is reliant on the Mann et al Hockey Stick graph. …. that graph is controversial and some argued debunked by McIntyre and Mckinrick.

Garbage Out – AGW is a myth, and a MASSIVE lie.

If you needed directions to a place of interest, and you asked 13 people where that place was, and eleven of them pointed you in the same direction, and one pointed in the same direction but stood next to a someone who disagreed, what would you do?

I don’t know about you but I think I’d trust the 13 people in agreement. Only an idiot would cross-examine that one dissenting person, and assume that therefore his friend, who pointed in the same direction as everyone else, was lying. Or is there an error in my logic here?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/

If you want to use ‘programmes’, James. please do. After all the Brits invented the first programmable computer and so our spelling is certainly applicable here. And it’s ‘disc’ not ‘disk’.

This is a godawful article. Not necessarily because it’s wrong, but because it’s so cheap, poorly-written and stupid; the sort of thing I’d be disappointed to see in a student newspaper. From the excitable capitals in the headline to the puerile reference to “rectally-inserted suicide bombs” – from the cynical intellectual dishonesty of the way it misrepresents the debate, to the citation of the scientifically-illiterate Brooker, this is ghastly tosh of the highest order. When I clicked on the headline I didn’t expect to find an article I agreed with – but I expected to find one with some standards.

It presents a genuine, ongoing scientific controversy as having settled the debate once-and-for-all on one side (one allegedly invalid result means that “Global warming is a MASSIVE lie” – you can hear the playground petulance in it, can’t you?) Tell me, if global warming is a massive lie, then why is the Arctic icecap thinning? How come commercial ships can navigate the Northwest Passage now, with the crew of one cargo-ship in September 2008 reporting that “there was no ice whatsoever”? Remember – this route was utterly icebound as recently as 1978.

Global warming is real. Whether it’s being caused by man or not is another matter – but I’d sure like to know how to stop it. Idiotic articles like this sure won’t help.

Keiranmac: your link is 5 years old. Things have moved on since 2004.

James, you are now ‘most definitely misguided’.

http://www.joabbess.com/2009/09/29/james-delingpole-is-most-definitely-misguided/

She’s still after you, had you noticed?

The Intrepid Europhile: the Northwest Passage was navigated many times in the 20th century, at least if you believe what Mr Wikipedia says.

AGW deniers do make me laugh. James, to believe it’s not happening, you’ve either got to believe that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, or that CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t increased by about 30% since the industrial revolution. Do you honestly believe either of those things? Or are you politically motivated – do you think that more capitalism, growth and technology will make everything OK. At least (most) deniers have stopped saying that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans. Laughable.

Sure the point in the Northwest Passage is that you can navigate it, it wouldn’t be much of a passage if it wasn’t navigable.

It’d be the Northwest Obstruction.

Clothilde Simon: Yeah, a few icebreakers with hulls like steam-ploughs managed it in the 40s and 50s; from the 80s onwards more and more ships start completing the journey, and since 2000 it’s become an annual occurence. Sep 2008 saw the first commercial cargo voyage. The trend is clear. Here’s the link to Mr Wikipedia in case readers are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_West_Passage

The Intrepid Europhile

Ah yes, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. Perfectly suited for the AGW fraudsters.
Michael’s mother was a Mann, that may explain some things.

Clothilde;

Do you want to tackle my argument? i.e. the logic behind it? and the contents of the article? …

My impression is that things haven’t moved on – the anti-AGW brigade, exemplified by your comment and this article, still cling to that one dissenting view, as opposed to listening to any others. Like the idiot who doesn’t know how to take directions, needless to say, they end up in the wrong place.

Mr Delingpole.

I wonder if someone could explain that Yamal RCS Chronologies chart to me.

At a casual glance it looks as if the average temperature of the world now is less than it has been for two thousand years. Can that be right? I would say S.E. England is definitely warmer than before.

Apologies if I have completely misunderstood. (I’m going to feel stupid when someone explains.)

For what it is worth I don’t believe in the “A� bit of GW either.

I think the true reason for the campaign is that people of a certain psychology hate progress and materialism and prefer “art” and spirituality and to feel guilty.

(There is a similar effect in regard to capitalism. It is by far the most successful system devised so is bound to be an object of loathing for mad people.)

Yawn; Dear Mr Intrepid Europhile, Submarines have been bobbing up at the North pole for years. I believe USS Skate was the first in 1959. The North West passage itself has been periodically navigated since Amundsen in 1906 so your example is meaningless.

The point is that the source data underpinning all this anthropogenic climate change malarkey is being called, and quite legitimately so, into question.

Keiranmac.

Beware conventional wisdom.

When I was young it was a well-known fact that women weren’t that keen on sex and were seldom promiscuous. No, they were more interested in babies and in decorating.

The ratio believing that to be true was not 12 to 1; it was about 99 to 1- if you asked the women. They said whatever they believed they were required to say. (Ring any bells?)

And there was lots and lots of scientific evidence to back it up as well. All to do with women knowing who the mother of their child is but men never really able to be sure who was the father.

All very convincing – all totally wrong.

Keirenmac: no, I don’t think you have made any valid points worth rebutting. And if you introduce words like “idiot” you are not conducting a scientific debate.

Jo Abbess makes me laugh, however. “The clue is in the name they choose for themselves : “scepticsâ€� hints at nagging doubt, at justified questioning. What they’re actually about is “denialâ€�.” She really needs a course in the English language: it is perfectly possible to deny something that isn’t there. But let’s link it with the holocaust deniers shall we?

Finally, I suppose it’s too obvious to point out that once a big ship has smashed a path through the NW passage, you won’t need such a big ship the next time, as ice just doesn’t re-form that quickly.

Thanks James for pointing this out. I gather our Met Office alarmists are now saying “things are worse than they thought and Arctic temperatures might rise by 15 Celsius by 2050.” Funny how these comics keep saying that the science is settled then finding their calculations are wrong.

Ok Clothilde, I retract my use of the word idiot, I don’t know you well enough to assume you are one. Indeed, I’m sure you’re not an idiot, just on the other side of an argument. I’m an idiot for using the word.

Please, I courteously ask you to deal with the contents of the article or at the very least the logic of my statement. I’m genuinely interested in the response, because if nothing else, I’d like to be assured that anti-AGW thought is not faith/conviction based, but reason based instead.

Gladiatrix 12:42 “I have been continually surprised that no-one used the Freedom of Information Act against the Met Office; …..”

You can be assured that this has been tried time and time again and been resisted.

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6623

James, Hope you don’t have to “take one for the team”.

Well yes.
When we’re all gathered on the fringes of the Arctic Sea, which will then be more like the Mediterranean; and the rest of the planet is more like the Sahara Desert, we can all re-read this piece and smile.
oops. Guess I was wrong.
But clever. I was very clever with all the Al Gore jokes.
ha ha.
Sorry.
Great job.

Hi James,
appreciate the humour, but do you want to have a go at the questions now?
do you think CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not?
do you think that CO2 levels have risen more or less 30% since the industrial revolution or not, and if so, what do you think has caused it?

All mathematical modelers concede computer outputs are not “predictions” but are in fact merely scenarios. But in case of climate modeling they let policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, comes to mind.

Brill, you are always right about everything

@Keiranmac

You ask for a debate but your offering boils down to more “scientists” believe in global warming than don’t so the majority are right.

On that basis the Sun goes round the Earth ( as that was the scientific consensus) 1 billion people believe that if you strap a bomb to yourself and kill unbelievers you will reside in heaven with 72 virgins.

Must be true then

@Yakaboo

C02 IS a greenhouse gas, so what? The most prevalent greenhouse gas is H2O should we ban that too?

Do you have ANY idea at all what the greenhouse effect is, why it’s important and why it is pretty obviously NOT the cause of the global warming that isn’t currently happening.

“do you think CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not?”

Do you think it is the most influential greenhouse gas?

“do you think that CO2 levels have risen more or less 30% since the industrial revolution or not”

Do you think the claimed increase in global temperature started at that time or predated it substantially?

“what do you think has caused it”

Belching cows? Oh no, that’s methane, isn’t it.

“NOT the cause of the global warming that isn’t currently happening.”

It is 11 degrees Celsius here, that’s 52 degrees in old money, and that ain’t warm.

Nice work James.

I was reading this earlier and wondered when the Telegraph would get onto it.

You’re right about the deliberate lie and you’re right about the significance of this development, too. It’s a global warming bombshell, a bloomin big one, and the greens know it.

So a question; if the hockey stick – which was absolutely integral to the IPCC promoted AGW hysteria, can be so completely and utterly undermined as to be less than worthless, who will be the first ‘pro-AGW’ turncoat of significance?

Brown? (Or Blair!)
Cameron?
Clegg?
Monbiot?
Gore?
Lord Adonis?
Lord Stern?
Bonio?

I’ll lay my bet now. NONE will turn, as the embarrassment would be too acute for their ego to contend. They’ll ignore it.

But James D, the crisis is now called “climate change.” The graph you show has temperatures going down. That is “change,” so all the climate “change” people, even Kieranmac, can stay in business.

What is going to happen to the us when the oceans and all the rivers and lakes freeze over and it snows even in the Sahara? This is a surely a much bigger crisis than if temperatures were going to rise. And it shows “climate” scientists know exactly what they are talking about. I mean they started to warn us in the 70’s about the catastrophe that awaits us in the imminent new Ice Age. I remember all the magazine stories. I think it may have even been on the cover of Time.

As the temperature falls, what if the ice gets so thick in the Arctic that polars bears are unable to break through it to hunt seals? They will starve. I think this calls for even bigger donations to the World Wildlife Fund and more dire governmental action to stop carbon emissions.

Does this mean you can kill ManBearPig with a broken hockey stick?

James,

please note that Stave M has found a mistake in his calculations and replaced the graph you are linking to.

http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_chronologies_rev2.gif

This discovery doesn’t mean that global warming hasn’t happened – what it means is that tree rings are an unreliable proxy and that the climatologists who use them appear to know this because they hide all their data – something that would get them in big trouble if they were say drug companies or people flogging mine stocks

@ Yakaboo “AGW deniers do make me laugh”

Is that something to do with stockings?

@keirenmac, thanks for your response, but no I’ll have to leave this to the experts; it seems to me that several quite respected figures are now casting doubt on the hockey stick graph. As others have noted, the majority doesn’t always get it right first time.

The new graph posted by francist does look more plausible than the original. No evidence for the hockey stick or (yet) for the new ice age.

It’s really sad to see the Telegraph giving space to this kind of nonsense.

To The Intrepid Europhile:

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

——-

Link 1 is Antarctic, Link 2 is Arctic

The truth hurts sometimes doesn’t it bud. But thanks for telling us that ice is dissappearing when it is actually growing at an alarming rate. Oh also, you forgot to mention the reasoning that global temperatures have been steady/slightly declining since 2001.

You AGWers need to start acting out of common sense and reality instead of mainstream media brainwashing and emotions.

To The Intrepid Europhile:

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

——-

Link 1 is Antarctic, Link 2 is Arctic

The truth hurts sometimes doesn’t it bud. But thanks for telling us that ice is dissappearing when it is actually growing at an alarming rate. Oh also, you forgot to mention the reasoning that global temperatures have been steady/slightly declining since 2001?

You AGWers need to start acting out of common sense and reality instead of mainstream media brainwashing and emotions.

The increase in CO2 over the past 200 years is maybe the one thing we could agree on. We might also agree that the UK has warmed since the times when the Thames is recorded to have frozen regularly. The work reported here brings strong doubt to the claim that recent decades are warmer than 1000 years ago. Over the past 10 years, some people have started to question precisely what the instrumental temperature record tells us – and sadly, the original data is lost so the ability to make checks has been made harder.
Where the panic starts to set in seems to be that the models can’t explain the result of the instrumental record unless CO2 is invoked, along with a magical amplification factor – which is educated guesswork.
Add to this the slow emergence of accurate measurements of the sun, over which there is not even agreement for the past 10 years, and the consensus does seem to be more of a guilt trip than a con trick.

Keiranmac a century or so ago would be flat earther; imagine the horror of him permanently on the horizon.

Crusty Foo, I believe that DENIER is something to do with the Thickness of Panty-Waist Material. You will get a smack if you dare to look it up.

To Al Gore, the scientifically illiterate retard:

CO2 vs temp variations:

“Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.” Patterson asked the committee, “On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century’s modest warming?”

Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and “hundreds of other studies” reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth’s temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.”

Note, Patterson is a climatologist, unlike Al Gore

Maybe CO2 causes global warming…
maybe it does not.

50/50

The problem is: if the GW people are wrong and we do something, it does not really matter all that much.

However, if the GW people are right, and we opt to do nothing, the results are nothing short of the worst catastrophe humanity has ever faced.

So now you have to ask yourself, just how cock sure are you that they are wrong.

Just how sure?

Because there is a lot riding on your answer.

“The problem is: if the GW people are wrong and we do something, it does not really matter all that much”

Would you care to explain that to the people who could not afford to buy basic food items due to a load of stuff and nonsense about bio-fuels?

Kieranmac

I have noticed that you have not mentioned your scientific background or, in fact, any kind of background. On James D’s previous thread about Jo, the physics-twit, many people did give their areas of expertise and/or background, and it was an amazingly impressive technical array, from geologists to mathematicians to chemists to geotechnical engineering, to various other technical areas. (Not “bozos” who need Fox news or anyone else to form their opinions for them.) I’m not a science person, and I even gave you my degrees and kinds of work.

So what exactly is your background? What are your degrees? What areas have you worked in?

________________

nomorepc

Speaking of backgrounds, I remain really impressed with your degrees. I mean poeple who get Nobel Prizes have degrees like yours. (No offense to Terry who may have the same kind of impressive degrees in chemistry.)

One thing you said:

“PS the astronomy bit was the evolution and structure of contact binary systems, galactic structures etc.,”

Er, that “etc.” I don’t even know what the things listed are, much less what would be in the “etc.” I’m all the more impressed. Do you think Kieranmac would know?

50/50? How sure can you be that it does not really matter that much if we take action? How about we spend that £500 per person in doing something we really believe will save lives? Would you rather give the starving masses access to cheap power, or gamble against a might be catastrophe, and say they should only be allowed to use solar power?
When it comes to it, wouldn’t the wiping out of 90% of the world’s population be a good thing for the planet? Who’s side are you really on?

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. So is CH4 (methane), SO2 (sulphur dioxide), NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), NO (nitreous oxide), H2O (water vapour which is FAR more potent as a greenhouse gas than all the others put together) etc etc.

The key thing is that these gases have been in the atmosphere – in varying concentrations – for millenia. In the geological past there have been numerous heatings and coolings of the Earth – there have been countless ice ages – there have been countless times when the ice caps have melted.

During ALL these periods of history, man had not yet evolved to be on the planet so man couldn’t have been responsible for them then.

If there is any reason at all to believe that man has an influence on the climate then I would say that it is because there are SO EFFING MANY MORE OF US now than there were at the industrial revolution – about 6 billion more. All breathing out C02 all farting methane. Together with all the billions of extra breathing and farting sheep, cattle and so on to keep us fed.

The natural environment that is the earth is like a lifeboat in space. Like all lifeboats, there is a limit to the number of people it can hold.

Eventually, the earth will rid itself of the neccessary number of excess billions to bring things back into balance.

Whether climate change is a hoax or not will be immaterial to this inevitability. But it will most likely be massive climate change that will be the agent of destruction. That and war.

Woolfie,
water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but it’s in the atmosphere in the form of clouds, which reflect a lot of incoming radiation, and so water vapour can be discounted as a problem greenhouse gas.
‘Do you have ANY idea at all what the greenhouse effect is’
yes
‘why it’s important’
yes
‘and why it is pretty obviously NOT the cause of the global warming that isn’t currently happening’
no, you made that one up. now try answering my questions.

Sheumais,
Yes, CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas. Others are more potent, such as methane, but exist in small quantities compared to CO2.
Methane also reacts with the hydroxyl radical OH and is destroyed. The average lifetime of a methane molecule in the atmosphere is 8 years.
Human activity is responsible for about 300 million tonnes of methane emissions per year, and about 7 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Of this, about 2 billion is absorbed by the oceans, and about 2 billion by land plants. Around 3 billion tonnes accumulate annually. It isn’t destroyed by solar radiation or by reactions with anything else.
I agree with your comment about biofuels though.

James – any answers to my questions? Your friends aren’t doing very well.

Another AGW article oh well, but a very good one thank you James D very well articulated and with a lot hard facts thrown in.
Not having read all the comments yet so forgive me if anyone has mentioned this, did anyone notice the underlying wave form pattern coming in amazingly regular cycles over hundreds of years. By analyzing this wave form you can see the hockey stick (red line)is impossible, the new black line graph fits in exactly with the underlying wave form, my best guess we are at the end of the warming trend and are sliding into a long term cooling trend probably for the next few hundred years. Yes there will be spikes of hotter or colder weather overlying this trend but it’s the general trend that matters. It’s almost scary it’s that simple wonder what the underlying mechanism could be to make climate come in regular waves of hot and cold. It looks like some self regulating system is occurring.

msher1,

thanks again, scientists are not very well known of modesty but there are unfortunately many with bigger and better brains than mine. But my EM theory lecturer was Tony Leggett, Nobel laureate, Sir, Prof. who is the greatest physicist of our time.

I also met Al Gore, the scientifically illiterate moron

Keiranmac if you extrapolate the hockey stick curve I believe that the surface of the Earth will be hotter than surface of the sun in less than 1000 years and always climbing until we reach total melt down of the crust and the end of all life. In fact I want to up the ante in the AGW camp I predict a rise of 10 degrees in less than 10 years now go ahead and spread the lie.

msher1,

about Keiranmac, anyone who writes “mathematical modelling” (sic) can hardly be a scientist, does not have any idea about stochastic/random/chaotic processes, has saved links to AGW articles to quote from; I guess he has degree(s) in social science or English, obviously Hungarian mathematicians are 2nd rate to him (wrong again) and hopelessly stuck in the Al Gore, who is also scientifically illiterate, religion.

yakaboo, do please expand upon the limited ability of CO2 to act as a reflector of heat, how quickly it dissipates, why it postdates rises in global temperature by 400 years throughout history, why many consider water vapour to be far more significant with regard to the greenhouse effect and the relatively small presence of CO2 in the atmosphere to be largely inconsequential.

keiranmac yes I would take the advice of the one person as it appears that 12 of the thirteen people are obviously from the local mental hospital being chaperoned by the nurse the only sane person in the bunch.

Clothilde;

That gives me the impression my logic is sound, and that your views are faith/conviction based? not logical nor reasonable?

The Intrepid Europhile seems to have a bee in his bonnet about what you’ve written Delingpole, I hope he’s alright because he seemed to get over excited and I worry about the serious way he is taking what you wrote. If he comes back maybe you can reasure him that this isn’t a serious blog and you only do it to improve your typing skills, and I must say I have seen a marked improvement over the last couple of weeks. Keep up the good work son, you will be noticed one day I’m sure.

Rosenblum

�The problem is: if the GW people are wrong and we do something, it does not really matter all that much.�

That’s exactly what Kieranmac said on the previous thread about AGW. I hate to repeat, but you are very wrong and are not observing what is already happening in terms of increased regulation and increased costs. In California where I live the legislature is passing or has just passed a bill that will require me to make my house “green.� That is money I will have to spend. What about the poor and elderly on fixed incomes? Laws like this hurt them most.

I bought $800 notebook computer a few months ago. The State of California has imposed a special $6 “electronics disposal” fee (in addition to regular sales tax). California is in a budget crisis where it is issuing IOU’s to venders and laying off public employees. Do you really think that “fee” (which,like all other State “fees, is never included in the discussion of actual tax rates) is going to be used for safe disposal of electronics? Or will it go to salaries to keep public employees (who have the strongest union in the state)?

The proposed cap and trade legislation in the U.S means less jobs and a higher prices of goods and services and bigger government taking more taxes. Terry has said that a 5% carbons emission tax is pending in Australia. It will cost jobs and raise prices there too.

None of this really matters all that much?

Woolfie; Suggest you look at the following link to get an idea of context of the argument.. that post I last made was indeed simply a matter of the numbers involved, but that’s not the only prong of my argument as you’ll see if you look at the other posts I’ve made.

Msher; I said this before, but I’ll say it again;

Firstly, I couldn’t give a flying monkey what your background is, and I’m never going to divulge mine on here… It’s a bad habit by the posters on this forum to do that. All it does really is show an inability to tackle subjects and issues rather than people.

“Everyone posting on here seems desperate to declare their ‘expertise’ or where they heard from an ‘expert’ that this that or the other is happening.

It’s really not important what your background is, anyone looking at the Monbiot V Plimer correspondence will see that whilst Plimer was desperate to disqualify Monbiot from commenting on the issue by demonstrating his comparative scientific expertise, Monbiot, a layman, asked a bunch of very simple questions that this supposed expert couldn’t answer.

It takes an expert to explain a complicated issue clearly, such as global warming trends and causal factors, but it only takes someone with common sense to spot claptrap when they see it, and he anti-AGW stuff being spouted out on this column is primarily claptrap. “

Keiranmac

” I couldn’t give a flying monkey what your background is, and I’m never going to divulge mine on here”

Is that because you have no background worth sharing or you work for an AGW non-profit?

Msher –

Are you interested in me, or are you interested in AGW theory?

@Keiranmac

You have a cheek posting a link to the site Real Climate, which actually would be better named Real censorship. This site doesn’t censor like your mates at Real Censorship and Comment is Free if you Agree.

If you want to know about the hockey stick graph and the cohorts involved. See Professor Wegman et al http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf

At the moment,at RC, Gavin Schmidt is waxing lyrical about Decadal Predictions: which simply are that every ten years some so called climate scientist creates alarmist nonsense and Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit shows their dodgy use of statistics and data manipulation.

Real Climate what a joke web site where alarmists people can engage in mutual masturbation?

The good people of this country have been stiffed by the Bankers and are now being stiffed by the Brown Shirted W Anchors in the Green Movement.

Finally you say:-

“I don’t know about you but I think I’d trust the 13 people in agreement. Only an idiot would cross-examine that one dissenting person, and assume that therefore his friend, who pointed in the same direction as everyone else, was lying. Or is there an error in my logic here?”

Yes there is a gaping hole in your logic, if everyone in the world said the earth was flat, you of course when presented with a picture from space showing the earth approximating to a sphere, would still agree that the earth was flat?

Take care and have a good evening, wrap up warm and don’t worry everything will be alright.

Keiranmac on Sep 29th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
“I don’t know about you but I think I’d trust the 13 people in agreement. Only an idiot would cross-examine that one dissenting person, and assume that therefore his friend, who pointed in the same direction as everyone else, was lying. Or is there an error in my logic here?”

You are being disingenuous again, Keiranmac, to say nothing of patronising. Of course there’s an error in your logic there.

As you well know, science proceeds by incremental development, as a new theory or interpretation appears, viewpoints are adjusted, conservative (note small “c”) scientists attempt to preserve the status quo, more up-to-date researchers challenge it. And if the new researchers win the debate, by demonstrating that their interpretation of the available data is a better fit with the observations, that that interpretation becomes state of the art, and the previous theory is relegated to the history books. This does not necessarily mean that the new theory becomes extinct, for example, despite the fact that Einstein’s theory is a better fit than Newton’s laws, if I wish to lob a brick through your window, Newton will suffice very nicely, differing from Einstein somewhere around the twenty-oddth decimal place. However, if I wish to land a probe on Mars, Newton will miss by many miles.

You might well contemplate Einstein’s words when informed about the Nazi’s attempt to discredit his theories as “Jüdische Physik” by forcing all physicists who were members of the Nazi Party to sign a petition condemning his research. He said “if they were correct, it would only have taken one of them“.

The annals of science are full of such adjustments, for example Becher’s “Phlogiston Theory” of combustion, which held sway for over a century until discredited by Lavoisier. And more recently, back in the 1950s I remember asking my geography master whether it was coincidental that all the continents seemed as if they fitted together, and being answered in the negative. By the 1960s of course, we had tectonic plate theory, and I remember following the arguments in the scientific periodicals, watching the centre of gravity of the argument change to favour the new theory.

So no, when referring to the scientific method, your argument is not logical. But you knew that all along, didn’t you?

========================================================

yakaboo on Sep 29th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
“appreciate the humour, but do you want to have a go at the questions now?
do you think CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not?”

Of course CO2 is a greenhouse gas, yakaboo. Absolutely no-one disputes that. However, it seems to have escaped your notice that the heat-trapping effects of CO2 decrease logarithmically as its concentration increases. In somewhat simpler terms, a geometrical increase in CO2 produces only a linear increase in heat trapping, so as the concentration increases the effect practically tails off to nothing. That is the huge, glaring error in the whole AGW alarmist argument, actually.

“do you think that CO2 levels have risen more or less 30% since the industrial revolution or not, and if so, what do you think has caused it?”

CO2 levels certainly have risen since the Industrial Revolution, there appears to be some evidence, based on the variation of proportion of the different isotopes of carbon found in the atmosphere and historical gas samples derived from vegetation, ice cores etc. that at least some of this increase is anthropomorphic. On the other hand, the same ice cores also indicate that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere lags behind temperature change, this was in fact tacitly admitted in Al Gore’s science fiction disaster movie, but very rapidly glossed over.

========================================================

yakaboo on Sep 29th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
“water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but it’s in the atmosphere in the form of clouds”

Completely and utterly WRONG. Clouds are most definitely NOT composed of water vapour, clouds are composed of droplets of LIQUID WATER, formed when the temperature of the water vapour containing atmosphere drops below its cloud point, and there is some matter present to produce nucleation, such as aerosol particles, which, depending on the altitude at which the clouds form, may either reflect or trap incident thermal radiation (sunlight). Understanding of this effect is one important area in which the majority of computer models are almost totally lacking, incidentally.

Give you a tip, yakaboo, leave science to the experts, it will save you from getting egg on your face.

shhhh, it is because they aren’t proper Scientists

@James – I’ll stick to the topic so long as the company I’m keeping does! But firstly, do you mind clearing up what you said about the polar bears the other day? Seemed disingenuous to me, or am I missing something? or do you not have a clue what you’re writing about and just doing very well off posting links to stuff you like the sound of? – would have thought a broadsheet journalist could do a little better.

The age of that link I posted does nothing to detract from what it says. In fact, it shows that in the past five years there’s no good refutation of what’s being said – i.e. that the only piece of information being contended is Mann’s hockey stick, as opposed to the other twelve studies which come to the same conclusions – that the warming in the last century is inexplicable in a historical context. That computer models, however much you hate them, strangely can’t predict the warming we’ve seen in the past century when just fed information on naturally occurring aerosols and gases, and only produce the warming of the 20th century when fed data concerning human CO2 output.

I suspect the good Prof Mann doesn’t spend all his time blogging away like McIntyre, and so with such fresh stuff coming out there’s really little opportunity to see what his side is on this.

That said – you’re right, this is an interesting development. I’ll watch this space before drawing any conclusions though. It’s worth pointing out again that Mann seems to be made for Global Warming skeptics, as he’s made so many mistakes in his calculations. Unfortunately, we can’t afford to have people making mistakes when there’s so many people watching and waiting with baited breath. I personally wouldn’t start the Aga or the Rolls just now…

Clothilde Simon

“Finally, I suppose it’s too obvious to point out that once a big ship has smashed a path through the NW passage, you won’t need such a big ship the next time, as ice just doesn’t re-form that quickly.”

I don’t know if you have a BSc, but clearly you do not have a Master’s Certificate of Competence and I very much doubt you have experience of navigating through more ice than that in your G&T.

@The Intrepid Europhile…. I love the way James writes, it is because he is clever(even if he isn’t a Scientist, he went to Oxford and so is able to think)

ps. I hope that A) McIntyre knows what he’s doing with core samples, given that he’s a mathematician. and B) he’s going to publish his studies as a paper for peer-review. It would, I hope you can understand, be very risky indeed for someone in the media to assume that McIntye isn’t doing the same thing as Mann/Briffa and being possibly selective, and maybe sloppy, in his workings.

@keiranmac

Sorry about this but you say ” “Everyone posting on here seems desperate to declare their ‘expertise’ or where they heard from an ‘expert’ that this that or the other is happening.”

The first part of the above paragraph is false, read the comments and you will see that you have made a false statement.

The second part of the above paragraph shows a certain lack of intellectual rigour on you part. This is a blog, on blogs people have discourse and use their own wits and of course evidence to sustain their arguments. What are you scared of?

Theres no point you running around like a child shouting wolf wolf, we are adults here and we know there is nothing to fear except fear itself?

I assume you won’t get kicked off the site,as this site is not a denier site like your mates at RC and Cif which deny the right to free expression?

Valerie…even if he isn’t a Scientist, he went to Oxford and so is able to think…going to a prestigious college just means mummy and daddy can afford the fees, it does not guarantee the ability to think, the biggest Barytes deposit in the UK was classified as Quartzite by an Oxford educated geologist. Just the small fact that they have quite clear differences in specific gravity escaped him.
James has always been an independent thinker I expect, no doubt his parents caught him many times thinking on his own.

You know what cold, and the rest, I’ve got better things to do tonight. You can enjoy your love-in. The quality of debate on here is truly woeful. Not because there’s not enough intelligent people, but primarily because there seems to be only one viewpoint being espoused. If you take a look at James’ D’s previous posts on AGW, you’ll see what I mean. There’s no debate, it’s just people saying how great James’s post is, and what a load of old cobblers they think AGW theory is.

I thought you needed someone to freshen the place up a bit, but really I think you’d all rather say how much you agree with one another. I suspect James will be disappointed with the loss of an active poster, even if I do give him a bit of stick.

@ Kieranmac

“I courteously ask you to deal with the contents of the article ……….. I’m genuinely interested in the response, because if nothing else, I’d like to be assured that anti-AGW thought is not faith/conviction based, but reason based instead.”

THE LOGIC.

If global warming IS a result of man’s activities, how do you explain the (at least) seven known periods during the planet’s evolution, before MANKIND even existed, let alone developed industrial practices and burned fossil fuels, when the planet warmed significantly MORE than today? Then cooled. Then warmed again. Ice sheets melted and reformed. No humans around.

How do you explain that Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto and Titon have also been shown to experience warming coinciding with that of the earth? No men or industry there either, I believe.

How do you explain that Earth in its early history, some 385 million years ago, had an atmosphere with allegedly 10 times the present C02 levels?

Over the last 100 years or so, temperature shows a strong correlation with solar activity, and a very poor correlation with CO2. The most obvious conclusion is that the sun drives temperature, which in turn (but much later) drives CO2.

Finally, when in Science did “scepticism” become such a bad word? Most major discoveries have been initially met with scepticism before becoming mainstream.

@keirenmac: That gives me the impression my logic is sound, and that your views are faith/conviction based? not logical nor reasonable? Well, if it gives you that impression, I am very happy. I don’t see how quoting discredited data from 2004 refutes data produced in 2009, but maybe you see logic differently from me.

@alhamilton18: you may have a master’s certificate of competence, you may have an eye-patch, a wooden leg and a parrot, but to accuse me of drinking G&T… Shame on you.

@Keiranmac
I was just about to leave and you wrote this:-
“ps. I hope that A) McIntyre knows what he’s doing with core samples, given that he’s a mathematician. and B) he’s going to publish his studies as a paper for peer-review. It would, I hope you can understand, be very risky indeed for someone in the media to assume that McIntye isn’t doing the same thing as Mann/Briffa and being possibly selective, and maybe sloppy, in his workings.”

Are you a serial false statements man? Your pathetic Ad Hominem reveals the paucity of you arguments.

Fact 1 Steve McIntyre is a statistician
Fact 2 He does not handle the core sample neither does Mann et al they ‘use’ the data provided by others.
Fact 3 The Hockey stick graph is discredited. See Wegman et al who peer reviewed McIntyres and McItricks work.
Fact 4 If you read the posts on Climate Audit and the Wegman report you will see clearly where the slopiness lies, it lies with your mates in the Hockey Team.
Fact 5 The holocaust happened.
Fact 6 The holocaust happened due in a large measure because of group think.
Fact 7 Groupthink has taken over the Environmental Movement.
Fact 8 We won’t get fooled again.

Keiranmac

“Msher –

Are you interested in me, or are you interested in AGW theory?”

Absolutely, I am interested in you. You knew fairly early in the previous thread on AGW that you were not going to convince the posters on this blog. Yet you keep going. Why?

On the last thread you said as long as I – or let me be charitable, you probably meant everybody, not just me – have a roof over our heads, a full belly and water from the tap, that’s affuent enough and tough sh*t to whatever hardship AGW policy creates for people. That makes you a menace. So you’re damn right I want to know who you are and for whom you are doing all this writing. I’m assuming you work for a non-profit AGW organization, which operates on government grants, and somebody’s tax money is paying for what you are doing on this blog.

And by the way, about common sense questions that laymen can ask: I am a lay person who asked several common sense questions of you about that silly article you cited as showing “millions if not billions” will die because of AGW. I don’t think you have addressed any of them. If I missed where you did, please tell me where.

Evocative post, JD.
Read all about it in CA last night.

Had a real laugh at the Met office ‘latest doomsday fiction’-……..could, would, might………… .

Steve McIntyre is a very bright mathematician, amongst other notable skills, he is also modest and not given to printing articles unless thoroughly and painstakingly investigated.

He does not shout about his statistical prowess but if you read and also test his figures (which he freely encourages, unlike some alarmists I might add) then the conclusions are conspicuous in their alacrity.

The world has cooled since 1998, the ice is reforming early 22/09 in the Arctic, the Antarctic ice sheet is growing, the AMO is significantly cooling, (winter might be a cold one) and the bogus hockey stick is finally, clinically and correctly buried.
Chill folks!
Next Waxman/Marky bill is dropped!

If nothing else, I seem to have got a lot of attention! lol… which would be great, if was an attention seeker, but as I’m not, it’s really just a little boring trying to knock back twenty balls at once. Even if many of you hate what I’ve been saying, or think it’s stupid, I’ve given you a rare opportunity to actually debate on what is not really a debating thread normally.

I might pop back once we hear how Mann et al react to McIntyre’s findings, for now though, adios.

Keiranmac

“You know what cold, and the rest, I’ve got better things to do tonight. You can enjoy your love-in. The quality of debate on here is truly woeful”

Yet you are here. Why?

You said approximately the same thing on the last AGW thread and yet you stuck around, and here you are back again. Why?

nomorepc

“But my EM theory lecturer was Tony Leggett, Nobel laureate, Sir, Prof. who is the greatest physicist of our time”

You’d better be careful never to be anywhere where Stephen Hawking’s PR person could hit you.

Keiranmac is delighted; he’s getting you all to try and prove a negative – i.e. prove that CO2 is not the cause of GW – and you can’t prove a negative.

Keiranmac and his Marxist cronies should be asked to prove their AGW hype is not part of cap-and-trade insurance fraud involving, for example, the hedge-fund managers of the BBC Pension Trust.

Greatest physicist? Not Hawking, as no Nobel Prize until someone finds a black hole in their cornflakes. How about Brian Josephson or Antony Hewish (still living)? I’d have said Martin Rees P.R.S., but he hasn’t got a Nobel prize either.

I think James is onto a winner here. At the very least, the warmists have to say what is wrong with McIntyre’s graph. All the burbling about ice-breakers and what CO2 may or may not do is secondary to the actual numerical data.

Kieranmac has probably been kicked out of the library and has probably had to go back to living in his mothers basement.

Sheumais and Catweazle,
First the obvious fact that the more water vapour there is in the air, the more clouds there are, and the greater the reflective effect, and so my point about water vapour stands. But really, I’d like to be honest with you.
I see the future of my species as very shaky indeed. I don’t think the main problem is climate change, I think it’s destruction of habitat and extinctions caused by a massive increase in human activity, which itself is fuelled by exponential growth in human populations and economies. Destroy enough habitat and take enough species out of the global ecology, and it could all fall over, in exactly the same way it did in microcosm on Easter Island. The threat is now global, and we can throw into the mix a large number of countries with nuclear weapons who will be fighting for dwindling resources. Scary indeed.
Some environmentalists believe that the world would actually benefit by humans becoming extinct. I don’t. I don’t want my species to become extinct – we could evolve into something much more interesting.
Now I don’t have the time to spend trawling the anti-AGW-skeptic websites in the same way that you have trawled the anti-AGW websites (Catweazle more than Sheumais it seems), but two things seem clear to me.
Firstly, the kinds of things we must do to combat climate change are the same kinds of things we must do to combat extinctions and habitat destruction. And so, let’s go for it. If we’re wrong about climate change it won’t matter, we’ll at least hopefully halt extinctions. Now the kind of things we have to do are a) on the individual level, try and let go of the ego, which means letting go of materialism too, and b) on the collective level, devise a non-materialistic, non-growth economic system. And so it becomes clear that we can’t continue on the capitalist path that constantly pesters us to consume more, and concentrates wealth so that the vast majority of the world remain poor and uneducated, and therefore have more children. But when socialism has been tried, they have always got the organisation wrong. So I can only picture AGW skeptics as defenders of capitalism, because they think that there’s no alternative. CaptainSherlock let the mask slip a bit when he said ‘Keiranmac and his Marxist cronies should be asked to prove their AGW hype etc. etc.’ Am I close? Let’s put our heads together and think of a new, sustainable, fairer, less boring system, and not slip into intellectually-lazy cold war positions.
Secondly, the IPCC and almost all serious scientists agree that GW is A, and is very dangerous. When your arguments change their minds, I’ll listen. I don’t believe they’re funded by multinationals.
Do you feel like being (really) honest back?

Am I alone in noticing that comment batting average of your blogs is now reaching centuries and poor old JL’s stuck at a steady 4 or so? Anyway, congratulations for the first MSM debate on McIntyre’s second direct hit in the shellshocked AGW snakepit. As far as I can see, despite its all over the blogosphere,the Telegraph remains the only MSM with functioning gonads.

And as for the historic temperature records, no ethical scientist in his right mind dispenses with original data and only keeps ‘value-added’ (irony) data, particularly in such a high profile data set, – unless it was sheer incompetence ( unfortunately such things happen). Surely not stiff-arming to frustrate a data audit, not that?

Hamish Redux

Re Hawking: note I said his PR person. I have no science backgound and am not qualified to judge physicists. I just notice that there is huge PR appartus around Hawking, and his publicist and agent would not like what nomorepc said. The physicicst I speculate about is Robert Oppenheimer. Obviously too late for him and I guess no one would give a Prize for the Manhattan Project itself. But couldn’t he do the work of all the Prize winners that worked under him? Does that make him the smartest? Or am I completely wrong, and he was just a brilliant administrator?

msher
there is no question that there is a price to be paid for a massive reduction in carbon. And it will not be pretty.
On the other hand, this is not occurring in a vacuum. You must now weigh this price against the possibility that in fact GW is very real. And as there seems to be no clear cut answer to this question, we must weigh the possible outcomes of action or failure to act. Action results in a depressed economy, albeit with cleaner fuel in the long run. Inaction, however, risks the destruction of the ecosystem if the GW people are right.

The way to answer this question is a kind of risk/benefit analysis. What is the worst case scenario in either eventuality, and then make your decision about what to do.

As I said before, are you really so 100% certain that you are willing to risk the future of human existence on this planet – because that is the chip you are about to put on the table. You have to ask yourself, is it worth a roll of the dice here?

Yakaboo has, “CaptainSherlock let the mask slip a bit when he said ‘Keiranmac and his Marxist cronies should be asked to prove their AGW hype etc. etc.”

Just to be clear, I have no mask to slip in re Marxists just a public campiagn to have them recognized in re their use of unlawful debt and carbon credit as members of what Americans call a racketeering influenced and corrupt organization (RICO) and to be prosecuted accordingly.

RICO civil remedy allows claims for treble damages.

RICO criminal remedy e.g. punishment for murder for hire paid for example, by carbon credits allows death sentence

Here is what the Marxist are doing …

“1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land [carbon taxes, tithes] to public purposes.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels [AGW deniers].

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. [Paul Dickinson co-founder of the Carbon Disclosure Project with $55 trillion assets held by signatories, including BBC Pension Trust 'School didn't agree with me at all so I left at 17. I couldn't get a job in the John Lewis Partnership but Harrods accepted me so I spent three years as an unreconstructed Marxist working first as a junior and then a graduate trainee at Harrods.']

yakaboo extinctions happen all the time could happen to us at any moment for any number of reasons, anyhow a warmer world would mean far greater speciation and turn the world into a tropical paradise so what you worried about.
If you want a solution it’s easy we round up all the environmentalists and AGW supporters shoot them and sequester the bodies down disused coal mines. Carbon capture and burial with a twist I call it.

Rosenblum….On the other hand, this is not occurring in a vacuum.
I beg to be picky but Earth resides in space and space is full of the stuff so yes it is all occurring in a vacuum.

Keiranmac on Sep 29th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
“B) he’s going to publish his studies as a paper for peer-review. It would, I hope you can understand, be very risky indeed for someone in the media to assume that McIntye isn’t doing the same thing as Mann/Briffa and being possibly selective, and maybe sloppy, in his workings.â€�

The point of the original article is of course that Mann/Briffa DID NOT publish their raw data or their workings, and that McIntyre had to go to considerable lengths to acquire them, and that when hee did, wonder of wonders, they most definitely DID NOT agree with Mann/Briffa’s interpretation. You see, Mann/Briffa DO NOT offer either their data or methodology for external peer review.

You have a damn gall, Keiranmac.

No comment on my post of Sep 29th, 2009 at 8:05 pm, I note. No surprise there, then.

“I don’t think the main problem is climate change, I think it’s destruction of habitat and extinctions caused by a massive increase in human activity, which itself is fuelled by exponential growth in human populations”

Yakaboo, you are exactly right. It is utter nonsense to ignore the impact of the massive growth of the human population, just as more developed countries cannot try to deny the standard of living they enjoy to developing nations on climate grounds. The solution to that is very difficult to accept and impose, but I wonder how significant the natural fall in population growth is in developed economies and the perceived need for immigration to sustain the viability of these economies. I don’t worry about the climate any further than guessing appropriate clothing for the day ahead, but I am concerned about the continued refusal to recognise and address the real problem.

yakaboo on Sep 29th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
“First the obvious fact that the more water vapour there is in the air, the more clouds there are, and the greater the reflective effect, and so my point about water vapour stands.”

Wrong. The amount of cloud cover is not dependent primarily on the quantity of water vapour, it is dependent on (A) the temperature of the air being below the cloud point – if it isn’t then there will be no cloud formation, and (B) the presence of particulate matter, primarily aerosols and dust to promote nucleation, without there will be no precipitation. Further, as I pointed out, depending on other factors, such as cloud type and altitude, the clouds may trap or reflect heat.

So your point does not stand.

rosenblum on Sep 29th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
“You must now weigh this price against the possibility that in fact GW is very real.”

Why would I do that when”
(A) The science is entirely fraudulent, being based on an incorrect assumption about the heat trapping properties of CO2 and computer models that are entirely inapplicable to predict the behaviour of non-linear systems.
(B) I can clearly see that there are certain individuals making huge fortunes out of carbon trading, and that at least one of these publicises his money-making schemes whilst gallivanting around in his personal Gulfstream Executive Jet.
(C) Some of the leading proponents of the AGW theory are veterans of the 1960s – 1970s Global Cooling panic.

For starters?

Who cares?

The Muslims will get us long before global warming does.

Rosenblum

“are you really so 100% certain that you are willing to risk the future of human existence on this planet”

Yes, for four reasons.

1) When I hear or read AGW material, I see big common sense questions that the AGW people ignore and I see big flaws in scientific method that the AGW people pretend aren’t there. I have professionally worked with process many, many times and even I can see that AGW are ignoring what is supposed to be the scientific process and making it up as they go.
2) When there is discussion of truly technical issues beyond my grasp (e.g., I have no idea how carbon molecules act in the atmosphere or how they interact with water vapor), I always find the AGW scientist an ideologue and the skeptic scientist the empiricist.
3) I see the political/ideological and financial agendas involved, and those in and of themselves would make me resist the AGW people. Here is a quote from Kieranmac from the previous thread:
�If a nation, or local government chooses to deal with global warming in a manner to your distaste, which makes your life tougher economically, then tough shit I say. If you have a roof over your head, food in your belly, and water coming through a tap then you’re affluent enough�

That’s the real AGW activist unmasked. How do you feel about that attitude? Do you want an almost pre-industrial society with a massive, unemployed underclass coerced from engaging in economic activity which might have a carbon footprint by a small, very rich power elite? That is where the true AGW agenda would lead.

4) I don’t believe the future of the human species is at risk. If global warming were to happen, it wouldn’t happen overnight. Assuming the industrialized world stays industrialized and isn’t destroyed by the AGW agenda (or the jihadists), the industrialized world can help other parts of the world adapt. Additionally, if GW were to happen, there would be more land to farm. I.e., lots of land now under permafrost would become farmable. That extra farm land (assuming the AGW zealots didn’t plant crops for biofuels on it) could be used to produce food. Rather than destroying our economies now on a dubious (and ideologically and financially) motivated) theory, I would rather figure out in the future how people can adapt and how to use all the new farm land to grow food for areas which have gotten too hot – if that turned out what happens. Right now the AGW are doing things that even they admit will have no effect on climate. And even the things they think might change climate, they’re not really very sure. Why not take measures when the problems – if they ever happen, are identifiable with fixes that aren’t wild guesses?

Rosenblum

PS. The Dutch built dykes and sea walls to keep back the seas. They haven’t tried to dry them up. Nor did their ancient ancestors who mostly lived somewhere else like everybody’s did, theorize that someday they would have to face large seas and try to get the ancient world to dry them up. That is the equivalent of what the AGW people propose today.

Sheumais, you didn’t mention economic growth.
Catweazle, you didn’t mention any of my points at all, just tried to score points by trying to say there’s no (or very little) connection between water vapour in the atmosphere and cloud cover. No wonder AGW sceptics are marginalised and ridiculed.
At least you two aren’t loons like captainsherlock and crownarmourer, but I have to say that the quality of the debate at the telegraph appears to be quite poor – a lot of backslapping AGW=marxism nonsense and dodgy references. I think I’ll give it a miss.

The Carbon Disclosure Project was launched in 2000 from No.10 Downing Street; it operates kickback cat-bond insurance rackets on the Chicago Climate Exchange (’CCX’) structured to enrich hedge-fund managers and brokers for 475 institutional investors – sample below – with a total of $55 trillion in assets under management.

Law firm acting for the CDP hedge fund managers on the CCX is Sidley Austin.

Sidley’s partners trained Barack and Michelle Obama in cap and trade racketeering and Sidley’s clients financed the development of MindBox software to hedge the named storm events.

AXA Group
Bank of America Corporation
BBC Pension Trust Ltd
Bedfordshire Pension Fund
BNP Paribas Investment Partners
British Columbia Investment Management Corporation
California Public Employees’ Retirement System
Central Finance Board of the Methodist Church
Deutsche Bank
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada Pension Plan for Clergy and Lay Workers
Goldman Sachs and Co.
Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation
HSBC Holdings plc
J.P. Morgan Asset Management
Local Authority Pension Fund Forum
Local Government Superannuation Scheme
London Pensions Fund Authority
National Bank of Canada
National Pensions Reserve Fund of Ireland
New York City Employees Retirement System
New York City Teachers Retirement System
New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYSCRF)
Northern Ireland Local Government Officers’ Superannuation Committee (NILGOSC)
Northern Trust
OMERS Administration Corporation
Ontario Teachers Pension Plan
PBU – Pension Fund of Early Childhood Teachers
Service Employees International Union Benefit Funds
Societe Generale
Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF)
The RBS Group
United Methodist Church General Board of Pension and Health Benefits
United Nations Foundation
York University Pension Fund

msher1 on Sep 29th, 2009 at 11:34 pm

I fear that Lib/Lab/Con have such firmly entrenched positions on AGW, that appeal to reason is probably impossible.

However there is:

http://www.ukip.org/media/pdf/energy%20final.pdf

yakaboo on Sep 30th, 2009 at 12:09 am

I did not try to score points. I pointed out that your understanding of the properties of water vapour was somewhat inaccurate. You might find that knowledge useful at some time in the future. It might save you from appearing ignorant while posting on an AGW discussion, for example. In fact, I have no interest whatsoever in scoring points on this particular subject, I seek only to inform and persuade. On other topics – political, for example, however, I admit I take some small pleasure from troll-baiting.

As to your points – such as they are, you, like many others, inexplicably equate disagreement with AGW proponents for purely scientific reasons with disregard for the environment.

I can assure you that this is not the case. I am aware of the precariousness of the position of an organism such as homo sapiens that is right at the top of the food chain, and the necessity for that organism to take reasonable care of its environment, and have taken at least some action in my daily life to improve matters, trading my somewhat thirsty (and extremely rapid and enjoyable) sports saloon for a much more economical (and much less interesting to drive) turbo diesel. I have also invested in the new LED lighting devices, and purchased an electricity monitoring device, very enlightening gadget, that.

The danger here is that when the current scare is discovered to be entirely unjustified – as was the previous Global Cooling scare that preceded it, the Global Warming scare that preceded THAT and the Global Cooling scare that preceded even THAT, way back in the nineteenth century, and the various other scares that keep being blown up out of all proportion at fairly frequent intervals – the Millenium Bug, various pandemics, assorted dietary horrors that appear to reverse themselves at frequent intervals – the credibility of the authorities is diminished. So, one day, when there really is a problem, the ability to react to it in time may well be seriously diminished.

Others such as msher1 have pointed out the danger that precipitate action can inflict on various areas of Global society, from loss of employment to deaths due to hypothermia of the aged and much more besides.

That will do for a start.

I met Steve McIntyre about three years ago when he was working on applied math and data correlation modeling projects which exposed Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ fruad

I began working on these correlation problems in 1981 when I was coordinator of artificial intelligence and geosciences for Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Conn.

The problem has long been solved, there is a short term lagging correlation (800 years later) of CO2 with earth’s temperature and there is no long term correlation over geochronological time.

I also know Tim Ball, the historical climatologist who lives on Vancouver Island. I met him in May and he reminded me that farmers push CO2 fertiliser gas into greenhouses to get optimum growth rates with about 2,000 ppm; we are now at a historic low of about 390 ppm below which plant life starves and the plants die and go brown (Brownshirts anyone?)

As for yakaboo, yackabye.

yakaboo moir crazy why thank you, sorry perfectly sane well ok as much as anyone can be. I have my lifetime absorbing as much as I can about science, history and human nature particularly psychology. My major science background is in Geology and I fully understand climate cycles on a vastly longer timescale than you could ever do, I’m sure your wondering what’s for lunch is as far you get. My training in the geological sciences allows to logically look at a problem analyse the facts and come up with theories as to why things are, and if new evidence presents itself I will and can change my point of view as I accept we don’t know everything nor probably ever will know everything.
I also have an evil sense of humour and the ability to take the p*ss quite often, lighten up who says I’m serious all the time enough people know me well enough on these blogs to know when I am being serious and when I’m joking.
I have also changed my mind on quite a few issues in debates when new facts present themselves and never feel enough pride not to apologise if I’m wrong or have upset someone.
Captainsherlock either has way too much time on his hands and needs to get out more often, or could be horrifyingly correct in his theories. I keep an open mind as his theory boils down to follow the money and see where it leads, never put it past our leaders to do strange things for money and power.
If you really want to know about real global warming please read about the Permo Trias it’s enlightening.

yakaboo the only thing I can’t do is type on blogs without missing out words, darn it. I think I have bloglexia.

Catweazle….and purchased an electricity monitoring device, very enlightening gadget, that.
We had one in my house when I was growing up it was called my Dad he made sure we unplugged all unnecessary devices at night. Heaven forbid we left a light bulb on.

One last point and those of who have ever studied geology in the UK, have you ever noticed the amazing correlation between the excellent quality of the beer in pubs and the more interesting the Geology is.

Well guys, I have to say I’m impressed. I always believed that AGW scepticism was a political position taken largely by Americans (you are Americans, aren’t you? I’m just an insomniac Brit) who drive gas-guzzlers, don’t want their privileged lifestyles to change, and who think that Al Gore is left-wing.
captainsherlock, your distrust of hedge-fund managers balances your distrust of marxists nicely. catweazle, good for you with the lifestyle changes, and crownarmourer….hmmm….still come across as a tad wild-eyed, but points for being open-minded.
Hands up, I was wrong about AGW scepticism being a knee-jerk political position.
I agree that the media hype scares to the max to sell papers. I never did get the hysteria about sars, aids, bird flu, ebola and all the other things that were supposed to wipe us out.
But this one feels different. Do you really believe that the IPCC and almost all scientists are wrong about this? I guess you do.
And what if they’re not?
I guess we need to change our lifestyles anyway, because of resource depletion, extinctions, and general environmental decline.
OK, I’ve never really looked into the arguments before, but maybe I will. I’ll be extremely sceptic-sceptical though. Point me in the direction of a primer.
Catweazle, still not convinced that water vapour and clouds aren’t, you know, connected in some way.

yakaboo a tad wild eyed for shame, feather dusters at dawn me thinks. I’m from Blair country living in the buckle of the bible belt, everybody here has no problem with recycling except where the recycled goods are shipped half way across the planet to China for recycling, it happens with paper and other items.
We have no problem with driving more fuel efficient vehicles after all it saves us money at the pump. Personally disgusted with the car industry here as they have owned the technology for years to make fuel eficiency greater by at least 10mpg.
All of us have no problem with saving our environment and doing as little damage as possible while maintaining our lifestyles.
However AGW is a scam and there are trillions of dollars in dodgy deals to be made that will do jack to make anything better.
I have a instinctive distrust of anything that can make certain finance houses and individuals obscenely wealthy on an issue that does not exist, making us the ordinary people pay the price.

Note that the Service Employees International Union Benefit Funds is a signatory to the Carbon Disclosure Project and an alleged co-sponsor with LSERS (Louisiana Stare Retirement Systemn) in a Katrina cat bond fraud structured by Ace Group in Bermuda.

When Ace agents triggered the Katrina cat bond with a 15′ flood, the investors lost their principal to SEIU and LSERS hedge-fund mangers who split the profits with saboteurs and clean-up crews from ACORN affiliates.

“As of August 1, [2006] ACORN had cleaned and gutted 1,450 homes. Today, there are more than 1,000 homes on the waiting list and more than 5,000 volunteers have helped with this project. During the first few months of the ACORN Home Clean-out Demonstration Program, the same professionals that repaired the ACORN headquarters began working with ACORN to clean and gut homes free of charge. At the Program’s peak, ACORN gutted [liquidated] 100 homes [and destroyed evidence of insurance fruad] per week ”

We allege that Acorn, SEIU and LSERS co-sponsored a Katrina cat bond on the back of AGW insurance frauds.

Note that Acorn and the SEIU are joined at the hip; Wade Rathke is Chief Organizer of ACORN International, Founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN (1970-2008), and Founder and Chief Organizer of Local 100, Service Employees International Union. He is also a Board Member of the Tides Foundation.

The Rathke brothers have retained Obama’s old law firm Sidley Austin to keep Acorn out of a RICO suit.

May you live in interesting AGW times.

Climate change is real, it has always happened and it always will. However, the theory of Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) is very weak and the current debacle shows how the scientific method has been manipulated to ‘prove’ an easily falsifiable lie about how our climate operates.

Fact: Global temps. have been stable over the last decade.
Fact: CO2 has continued to increase.

Therefore: As the theory of AGW hypothesises that temperature must increase if CO2 levels increase and this has clearly has not happened…

Fact: The AGW theory is falsified.

Now this is out of the way, can science get back to doing some useful work, like getting a reliable forecast 3 – 6 months ahead?

tenuc they used to be able to predict the weather 1 or 3 days ahead in the 70’s now it’s all probabilities.

rosenblum

One more thing to say in response to your question about whether I would take the risk of the destruction of mankind due to AGW, or however you phrased it.

By either temperament or profession, are you a strategist? Do you watch how things unfold and develop?

Well, what started as global “warming” is now “climate change.” Why do you think that change in terminology came about? I’ll tell you: weather hasn’t been cooperating with the models. There’s cooling, rain and snow where and when the models say there shouldn’t be. And there haven’t been hurricanes where there were supposed to be. “Global warming” doesn’t work as the description.

If you use the term “climate change” you have allowed yourself to use anything that happens for your purposes – unexpectedly hot, unexpectedly cold, unexpectedly wet, unexpectedly dry. Hurricanes, no hurricanes. Hail and lightning. No hail and lightning. Tornados in new places, bigger tornados in old places, or absence of any tornados during the year. That’s all “climate change.”

That change in the name of the phenomen is a dead give away that somebody realized they had a problem and needed a descriptive term that would allow the catastrophe to still be predicted regardless of what actually happens. If you thought of this as a poker game or a chess game or anything else where you had to analyze your opponents actions, what would you make of the name change?

“you didn’t mention economic growth.”

yakaboo, yes I did, in mentioning the efforts to impose restrictions on the output of greenhouse gases on less-developed economies, effectively quelling economic activity. Even if this did result in a reduction of GDP per capita, the rate of growth of the human population would ensure demand for a wide range of goods continues to grow, as more economic activity is an inevitable consequence of a larger population.

@crownarmourer: you may be right about geology and pubs. I’m thinking of Malham, which is not far from where I live.

Crownarmourer: they used to be able to predict the weather 1 or 3 days ahead in the 70’s now it’s all probabilities.

It’s always just been possibilities, people are more information aware now and it’s depicted in a different way.

Brown Bess said it would be interesting to see the exchanges between Steve McIntyre and the climate scientists. Indeed it would, but there are virtually no exchanges, because they refuse to debate with him, or to provide him with their data (until forced to by other scientific organisations, as in this latest case with Keith Briffa). Basically, they are terrified of him and in denial about his existence.

Yakaboo, I also took your view until about 3 years ago when I started to look into it, and found to my surprise that most of what the sceptics were saying was right.

James and others – keep spreading the Good News – we are not all about to fry!

yakaboo

“I guess we need to change our lifestyles anyway, because of resource depletion, extinctions, and general environmental decline”

Think about what the AGW people want to do – everything is a tax, in many cases hidden so the public doesn’t realize it, on households and businesses that create jobs. Is this how you want to stop resource depletion, extinctions and general environmental decline? Do you think the way to address your concerns is to give more money to government? If you want to stop general decline of the environment, here’s one example of a better use of that money: We could use that money to teach land use and irrigation methods and effective farming techniques in poor countries so they could farm more efficiently and need less land and therefore have to cut down less forests. Do you think that the taxes collected by government for carbon emissions will ever be used that way? Or do you think those taxes will be used for bigger government?

yakaboo

I forgot. some of the AGW people don’t like fertilizer, because it’s made with petroleum products and/or it gives off some kind of green house gas emission. I have read people who plan on trying to get fertizer banned. That will mean higher cost of food and more, not less, land needed for farming. Does this sound like having anything to do with reversing the general environmental decline?

I thought you might like this a bit off post but modified to be topical:-

Snow White returns home to see the dwarf’s house set on fire.
The culprits were feral youths.

Snow White wails “Oh my, Oh My, all those CO2 emissions will destroy the planet”
” Oh my, Oh My, All the dwarfs are dead”

Out of the planet destroying smoky gloom hark a voice ” Gordon Brooownn will be the next Prime Minister”

Snow White sighs ” Oh at least Dopey is still alive”

yakaboo

“I guess we need to change our lifestyles anyway, because of resource depletion, extinctions, and general environmental decline”

Resource depletion is less of a problem than it is being sold; when we exhaust fossil fuels we will develop alternatives because we will need to. Research into alternatives is being carried out at the moment, mainly by the oil companies (as one would expect). My personal favourite is 2nd generation bio fuels (ie from waste, not from food crops) but there are others. I would expect viable fuels to become available before the oil has completely run out (per Sheik Yamani – the stone age didn’t end because the stone ran out, and the oil age will not end because the oil runs out).

Extinctions tend not to be caused by environmental pollution. Loss of habitat, predation and evolutionary dead ends (pandas don’t eat well and aren’t much good at sex; it won’t be my fault when they become extinct) are the more common causes.

Have you ever noticed how the environment is generally better in wealthier countries? In a poorer country every square inch is devoted to survival (of humans) and that leads inexorably to environmental decline, while wealthy countries (or rather their citizens) have the luxury to place a value on the environment, therefore it is protected.

I actually rather like my lifestyle and believe it harms no one (except those who are offended that I choose a different lifestyle to the one they would mandate for me, and their prejudices are of little interst to me). I am very reluctant to change, and equally reluctant to see my children and grandchildren forced to change for no good reason.

msher1, markE, Sheumais et al,

As I said, after reading some posts here, I will look into it more, but….

if you take squillion years’ worth of carbon from under the ground and put it into the atmosphere in about 100 years, I don’t think it’s going to leave the climate unchanged, is it?

the earth has a limit to the number of people and amount of economic activity it can cope with before ecology starts to collapse (I believe that this is happening now, and the indicator is extinctions). We have to reduce both. I disagreed yesterday with George Monbiot in the Guardian about that, who said that we should ignore population growth, because it’s the population of the poor that’s growing, and they don’t consume much. But they don’t want to stay poor, do they?

‘teach land use’ to the poor sounds a lot like the green revolution, which was a disaster for the environment (more pesticides and machinery), and people (loss of small farmers, migration to slums)

what are we going to do about fertilizer when there’s no more oil. Better to move towards organic now. We have to learn to live in harmony with mother nature or she will hurt us.

resource depletion not a problem? my, you have faith in technology. we can’t live like we do now with renewables (but downsizing wouldn’t hurt us in the west – we can’t take it with us). Nuclear fusion is looking more likely, but that is going to make the problems worse, as the global economy would boom, at the expense of ecology.

I agree that loss of habitat and extinctions is the biggest problem. But the panda’s decline is due to humans appropriating habitat.

the environment is better in wealthy countries because they don’t manufacture much any more. But they consume more, and now goods are made in dirty factories in poor countries, then transported around the world, which doubles the trouble.

our lifestyles will change, don’t worry. We will either choose to change ourselves, or mother nature will change them for us.

More detailed but still very readable account at

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/29/the-yamal-implosion.html

“the environment is better in wealthy countries because they don’t manufacture much any more.”

I’m not so sure about that one yakaboo, but that’s a whole different can of worms. For example, we are told nuclear power generation would substantially cut greenhouse gas emissions, but it is still vehemently opposed on environmental grounds. In the meantime, we require reliable methods of power generation, which may yet include coal, but already includes wood chips. Wind turbines may provide what is called renewable energy, when they are working, but they also have a considerable impact upon their local environment and there is an equally considerable cost in resources to manufacture and locate them.

I’m not qualified to persuade others one way or another, but I have read a variety of reports dismissing any link between CO2 levels and the temperature of the planet. When these first started emerging, the alarmists started changing their cries from “Global warming!” to “Climate change!”. Much of it easily dismissed and much of it hopelessly misrepresented in the mainstream media. I often think man exaggerates his own importance and the suggestion that some method of climate control will be invented soon is laughable. However, lopping down millions of trees in China, to clear the ground for agriculture, only to see the topsoil blown as far away as the Atlantic Ocean does confirm man can affect the local environment. Why did they do that? Mao believed it would help feed the country’s massive population.

@yakaboo

I do have faith in technology (or rather, in human ingenuity); look where it has got us so very quickly. I doubt very much the future lies with what are euphemistically called “renewables”, but I am confident that fossil fuels will be replaced.

As for the wealthy countries not maufacturing much any more, so what; surely the environmental degradation you referred to would be caused by the resources we consume irrespective of what we use that power for? Whether you burn a lump of coal to produce a phone in China, a car in Germany, pharmaceuticals in the UK, or to watch an episode of Eastenders you still burn the coal. The wealthy counties consume more power than the poor ones, yet the environment is less degraded, not more.

Our lifestyles will certainly change, but I will do whatever I can to make sure they change for the better, not as the green lobby want them to. Subsistance faring and living in mud huts is a romantic ideal, as long as you don’t have to survive that way.

yes, it’s put us on the road to extinction unless we change, all for electric toothbrushes, Eastenders and keeping up with the Joneses. Yes, and anaesthetics, astronomy and solar panels – it’s the amount we consume that’s the problem.

I think we might be saying the same thing about wealthy countries – we haven’t stopped ecological destruction, it’s got bigger, and we’ve exported it.

‘better’ is subjective. I think we can have the best of all ages. I’d love to live in an cob house, and you can’t beat a wood stove and organic home-grown food. But I’d like broadband as well. More doesn’t mean better.

cheers

@yakaboo

“[technology]’s put us on the road to extinction unless we change”

You can substantiate that?

So lets take if rom the c02 thesis standpoint. Trees respond very well to elevated c02, and not necessarily temperature. Trees grow better with more c02 as they absorb it . If c02 levels were pre industrial lower during the MWP then no matter how higher the temp, c02 wasn’t plentiful enough to cause extra growth. So since the correlation between c02 and temp is loose, (often contrary to each other) higher temp lower c02 is possible, whereas today we have higher c02 and lower temp.

bang goes the tree proxy

@yakaboo

“Do you really believe that the IPCC and almost all scientists are wrong about this?”

Please, what is your basis of the “almost all scientists” part of the above claim? Can you point to some real numbers on this? A poll? Something… I’ve lived and worked in the earth science community for 40 years and I just don’t see it. In fact I see much to the contrary.

yakaboo

You’re right more isn’t necessarily better, but you’re overlooking several things.

1) “More” creates jobs. In your vision of vastly reduced consumerism, exactly where are the jobs? We coud produce smarter, package smarter and think about our wastes smarter. Those things would be useful. But in your vision, what jobs will there be? Everyone is going to be an organic farmer? That doesn’t work, as so many people live in cities and have no land to farm on. And by the way, if the West stops consuming, that will be disaster for countries now coming out of poverty like China and India. Do you want those human beings trapped in poverty?

2) You are presumably using a computer with a high-speed internet connection. You presumably would want an MRI if you got hurt. You presumably use your cell phone sometimes and go places on airplanes. It takes an industrialized economy to produce these things and the hundreds or thousands of modern convenience you take for granted. If things start to be banned or made so expensive that the masses can’t afford them, manufacturers will stop producing them and bit by bit we will lose our technology and manufacturing capacity. And then there won’t be MRI’s and computer and high-speed internet access.

3) The vaste majority of animal extinctions are due to human predation, human encroachment on habitats. Europe was once covered with forests and bears and boars and other animals roamed the land. But Europe didn’t want to live as forest dwellers (Do you? I’m not talking about a delightful vacation cabin, I’m talking about all your life, every day. No, you do not want to live in a forest.) and they needed land to grow things on. So the forests have been cut down. And boars and bears and other animals do not roam the land any more.
It is distressing as hell to me to know that many of the magnificant annimals that I have been lucky enough to see in forests, in the African bush are probably not going to survive because they will loose their habitat to man. But residents of tropical forested countries and of bush countries have the right to advance, just as Europeans did. That inevitably means they will cut down forests and turn the bush into farm land. It is an elitist attitude of Western environmentalists, who themselves live comfortably in the cities and suburbs of the West, to deny those in poor ocuntries the right to do in their countries what Europe did centuries ago. What we can do is work with peoples and governments of these countries to figure out ways where some useful patches of land will remain untouched so that some of the animals will survive. That’s distressing, very distressing, but until you are willing to tear up cities and suburbs in Britain and plant trees everywhere and go back to living in huts in the forest – then you can’t deny the poor countries the right to advance. Accepting reality – that these people want to live as well as Europeans and then helping find ways for them to develop while saving what animal habitat can be saved will accomplish more than simply wailing that species are being lost. And most important for this blog – loss of habitat has nothing to do with AGW.

“still not convinced that water vapour and clouds aren’t, you know, connected in some way.”

Obviously, without water vapour, there could be no clouds. I think the problem is that you are not clear on the distinction. Water vapour is an invisible gas, whereas clouds are droplets of liquid water in suspension (or ice, of course). To see the difference, look at the spout of a boiling kettle, near the spout there is an area that is transparent, before the water vapour is cooled and the droplets become visible.

In the atmosphere, the water vapour is invisible also, clouds form when the temperature drops, such as when the air rises, expands and cools, such as when caught in a thermal, or when the wind meets up with a hill.

Google ‘clouds’, for far more information than I have room for here.

========================================================

if you take squillion years’ worth of carbon from under the ground and put it into the atmosphere in about 100 years, I don’t think it’s going to leave the climate unchanged, is it?

The Earth itself recirculates many more times more CO2 per day than man pumps into the atmosphere.

Very simply, what happens is, on long time scales rain falls on the land and leaches out carbonates from the rocks and carries them in a soluble state (primarily as bicarbonates) into the sea. They becomes incorporated, along with CO2 from the atmosphere via the carbonate/bicarbonate reaction, into the structure of various creatures, which die, and then sink to the ocean floor, forming into limestone. As a result of tectonic plate subduction, these layers of carbonates are dragged down into the hot regions of the Earth’s crust, where they dissociate and the CO2 is emitted by volcanoes or permeates back to the surface, and round it goes again.

The contribution of mankind to this process is somewhere between 3% and 5%, depending on who you believe, and the actual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is controlled by the solubility of CO2 in water, which is why warming climate increases the level of CO2. However, what warming climate does not do is alter the amount that travels round the cycle, so although the level rises, the quantity circulating is unaltered.

The quantity of carbon in coal, oil and gas deposits is a tiny fraction of the naturally occurring carbon in the planet, incidentally. Most carbon is contained in rocks.

MarkE,
the International Botanical Congress, UN Env Programme, Zoological Society of London, World Resources Institute, EO Wilson are all saying (in their own ways) that extinctions are many times higher than natural, pre-human levels.
No-one alive knows how long this can go on before there’s a snowball effect (species are interrelated in obvious ways).
It’s a huge risk (we are still totally dependent on this planet’s ecology for our survival), we don’t know the value of the species we’re losing, we’re making the planet uglier, and it’s spiritually bereft – for what? trinkets mainly. Growth for its own sake. We have to have a steady population and economy – to live within nature’s limits.
OK, so that’s not exactly ’substantiate’ – but it’s rational isn’t it?

burgess,
I suppose my basis is the IPCC. Can you point to some real numbers on your statement?

I’m starting to feel like a black man at a KKK rally

Oh msher1,
1. honestly, can’t you envisage a world where everyone consumes less and works less? Think of a desert island where the only food for the 10 people living there is a coconut tree. Let’s cut it down and make wooden things to create jobs? noooooooooooooooo.
2. I don’t fly, but what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. You can have those things in a steady-state economy. We’ve all been hoodwinked to believe that we need growth forever. How can you believe our ‘betters’ when it comes to economic growth but not climate change? Are you guilty of cherry picking to support a political bias (and I’m not saying I’m not btw)?
3. I’ve said this before. I’m not elitist. I live on less than 10k a year, don’t have a telly, don’t fly, grow veg, don’t follow fashion, etc. etc. My only ‘luxury’ is my laptop and broadband connection (although I do share a car – but I walk to work, so don’t use it very often). I consider myself rich. I would love to live in a forest. One of my best friends does and I’m jealous.
But – I’ve said this before as well – I agree that it’s habitat removal and extinctions that’s the real problem, and climate change only matters inasmuch as it contributes to that.

Catweazle,
Oh for god’s sake, you know what I’m saying. Sahara desert, no water vapour in the air, no cloud cover, no reflected radiation. Amazon basin, lots of water vapour in the air, lots of cloud cover, lots of reflected radiation. Or don’t you think that’s the case? You don’t think there’s any connection between water vapour and clouds? I think you’re being a bit silly.

The second point – so you don’t believe that there has been an increase in the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere of about 30% since the industrial revolution? from about 290ppm to about 380ppm? (actually that’s more than 30% isn’t it?) What are your figures and where do you get them from?

(visions of burning crosses now)

yakaboo

I’ve said this before. I’m not elitist. I live on less than 10k a year, don’t have a telly, don’t fly, grow veg, don’t follow fashion, etc. etc. My only ‘luxury’ is my laptop and broadband connection (although I do share a car – but I walk to work, so don’t use it very often). I consider myself rich. I would love to live in a forest. One of my best friends does and I’m jealous”

You are unusual in your simple lifestyle. (I don’t mean that as an insult.) This is not how most people want to live. I agree with you that there is excess that is not needed, but I do not want the level at which you live. Also, when you talk about people working less, remember that the AGW agenda puts taxes on everything so that even necessities of the simple life, like food and electricity, will be much more expensive. I think people are going to have to work more, not less, to afford what they need. The conundrum is the AGW agenda and your vision of the simple life, while making the cost of goods and services more expensive, will eliminate jobs. I repeat: the AGW agenda means more taxes and more expensive means of production, ergo cost of goods and services are higher. AGW and your agenda means less goods, therefore less jobs. So how are unemployed people or people employed for less hours and paid less going to afford these more expensive goods and services?

Furthermore, you like the simple life. But look around you at the prominent proponents of the AGW agenda. In no way do they like the simple life. They are rich, live in huge homes, live lavish lifestyles and fly in private jets. Yet they are telling others to learn to do without. Do you see no hypocrisy there? Do you think these people are going to give up their lifestyles?
Doesn’t this hypocrisy bother you and make you question whether these prominent proponents of the AGW agenda really believe what they are promoting?

@yakaboo

Yes, I have some real numbers, but first about the IPCC – The 2500 IPCC “scientists� so often mentioned in the press are (1) not representative of the scientific community but selected by the UN which has a huge stake in promoting AGW because it will be the main beneficiary of international agreements, (2) are not all scientists but many career bureaucrats with a personal stake in promoting AGW, and (3) do not all agree with the IPCC summary documents conclusions, e.g. Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Paul Reiter, and Christopher Landsea who among others worked on IPCC scientific reports and have protested the summary reports that are quoted in the press (if you google their names with climate or IPCC you will see their credentials are tops).

Regarding real numbers, the only poll I know of taken by a credible pollster was one in the early ‘90s by Gallup of members of the Am. Geophysical. Union (to which I belong) and the Am. Meteorological Soc. They found only 19% believed in AGW. It is dated, but shifts in findings and opinions since then have on balance favored the skeptical side of the debate.

Also, there is the Petition Project which has over 30,000 signatures of scientists, over 9,000 with Ph.D.s http://www.petitionproject.org/. The AGW side has no such document.

I’m not claiming that the skeptical side has a majority but simply that the oft repeated claim that “almost all scientists� believe in AGW isn’t true.
So, if your fallback position is that you believe in AGW because “almost all scientists� do, then you have no fallback position.

Also, you are right about the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere (280 increased to 390 ppm), but there are several critical things to understand about these numbers. That increase happened in roughly the last 70 years, whereas the warming trend we are in now has been going on for 300 years and if anything appears to be slowing in the last 70 years. That 300 year warming trend could not have been caused by an increase in CO2 concentration from 0.028% to 0.039% over the last 70 years. Also, it’s important to understand that most of the plant life you see around you is stunted in the current atmosphere and is ideally adapted to a much higher CO2 concentration (several 1000 ppm), so more CO2 is really good for like on earth. And, these warming trends have occurred in the past and have always been a good thing (the Bronze Age, the expansion of the Roman Empire, and the High Middle Ages). I could go on but would be interested to get your response to what I’ve said so far.

Oh, and one last thing, the white robes you see around you are not KKK sheets but the uniforms of medical attendants at your rehab center. And we are very encouraged by your progress. You seem to have an open enough mind that you will eventually come to the right conclusion if presented with all the pertinent facts.

@msher

Agree with much of what you say, but…

Most extinctions occurred before there were any humans on earth.

And most importantly, @James…

Another great post!

msher1,
I know you didn’t mean it as an insult.
but what’s with the ‘level’? it’s just another style of living. A slightly less materialistic one, a better one, in my opinion. If I said spiritually better, would you think I was a little strange? I hope not. I find materialism, celebrity culture and shopping boring and stupid. I find walking in the countryside, reading, socialising, gardening and sex much more fulfilling; and free! Things change, most people are susceptible to the persistent nagging of advertising. But a generation ago, they were susceptible to racism. Now racism isn’t cool.

I’ll have to look into what you mean by the AGW agenda taxing everything. Surely if they’ve got any sense, they’ll tax carbon-heavy activities and subsidise the local, renewable and recycled? OK, if your point is that they don’t have any sense, I take it. We need a new style of government too, but not here, hey?

And yes, I do see the hypocrisy.

burgess,
Interesting – I’ll look into those figures.

But global warming good? Tell that to sub-saharan Africans. There’s going to be an awful lot of starvation. And plants can’t move fast enough to get to their ideal temperature zones as they move – which will mean an acceleration of extinctions.

Yes of course most extinctions happened pre-humans, but it’s the rate of extinctions that’s the problem now. The last time there was a rate this fast was at the end of the Permian, when it snowballed and 95% of all species were removed. Most accounts I’ve read blame an enormous volcano in Siberia for that one. But this time it’s us. Seems like we just don’t leave enough room for other species.

Oh is that what the white robes are? Well, I’m open minded, but not so much that my brain falls out. I’ll look into those figures.

cheers

yakaboo on Sep 30th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
You have much to be respected and commended for your approach to the natural environment. In fact, I see you as a genuine environmentalist. People like you, when you realise the extent to which environmentalism has been hijacked, are going to be even more furious than most. By the way, plants (and animals) have no problems at all migrating with climate shifts, only urbanised humans.

Those interested in the whole saga of the past and current hockey stick debate, and related matters, will find a rather comprehensive account within

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/month/september-2009

and for the full monty

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

yakaboo on Sep 30th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
You don’t think there’s any connection between water vapour and clouds?

Clearly you failed to read my post of Sep 30th, 2009 at 5:38 pm, which began with the words “Obviously, without water vapour, there could be no clouds.”

“so you don’t believe that there has been an increase in the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere of about 30% since the industrial revolution?”

Yet again, either you failed to read the post, or you suffer from a serious comprehension problem. I posted “However, what warming climate does not do is alter the amount that travels round the cycle, so although the level rises, the quantity circulating is unaltered.”

Which bit of “so although the level rises” says I don’t believe there has been a rise in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Why do you ask questions if you are either incapable or unwilling to read and digest the answers, especially on subjects as complex as that under discussion?

Or are you just another troll?

yakaboo on Sep 30th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
“I find walking in the countryside, reading, socialising, gardening and sex much more fulfilling; and free!”

Well, bully for you, you patronising little fellow! Do you really think that because I don’t agree with the AGW evangelists that I don’t enjoy those things too? And hey, if you think sex is free, you have got one HELL of a lot to learn!

“But global warming good? Tell that to sub-saharan Africans.”

Well, the “National Geographic” (come across that august publication, have you, yakaboo?) seems to think otherwise. It has this to say on the subject:

“Desertification, drought, and despair—that’s what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.”.

Link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html .

So you are wrong on that, too.

@yakaboo

Yes, global warming is good. Every warming period in geologic history has on balance been good for life on earth. As the National Geographic article cited by Catweazle above points out, �hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain.� BTW, thanks Catweazle, it’s a great article and everyone here should read it.

Deserts are created during cold dry periods and forests return in warm wet periods. Happens over and over throughout time.

What I would like to tell everyone in Africa is that for a small fraction of what the warmists want to spend on solving a non-existent problem Africans could have clean water and electiricity. Instead Al Gore and the Prince of Wales tell them that they must continue to live and die in Their smoke-filled huts as Al and Charles jet about saving the world.

Would like to know our source for comparing extinction rates between now and the end of the Permian, please.

Burgess wasn’t the end of the Permian one of my all time favourite time periods extinction event was 90%, somehow we may be at what 1% or less.

yakaboo

AGW agenda taxing everything: in the U.S. what they are going to put taxes on electric utilities. Electric utility companies mostly use coal. There are two aspects of this tax. First it raises electric prices. Homeowners will pay more for heating and cooling. Second, every business in the U.S. will pay more for the electricity it uses – and will have to pass the costs onto the consumer. For example, a supermarket uses lots of electricity to light the store, keep it cool and have the freezer and refrigeration cases, plus freezer and refrigeration storage. That’s all electricity. The cost of all of that will be passed onto the consumer. And that doesn’t even begin to address the extra costs of each of the producers of the food in the market. So food is going to be more expensive. This will hurt the poor the most.
Sorry, the urban dwellers cannot grow their own food and do their own husbandry.
The second aspect of this is the the left figured out a way to hide the fact that the increase in prices are hidden taxes. The population will never understand that the higher prices are because of government taxes and they will be further angry at “greedy business” and further think capitalism is bad.

By the way, this policy comes from a president who promised no new taxes on the middle class.

The third aspect is these taxes on carbon emission are going to create a new market for “carbon offsets.” Corporations and individuals who have contributed to the Obama campaign in a big way are the corporations and individuals who will benefit from this new “carbon offset” market.

I am a strategist, not a scientist. I have not argued the science in any of my posts, other than to say i can see the process is wrong. I argue the politics, because i can see the strategy. Once you see the strategy, you have to realize the agenda is political and financial and has nothing to do with climate. All the true believers are simply “useful idiots.” Sorry to be so harsh and I don’t mean it as a personal insult to you. I do think you are being used.

msher1 couldn’t say it better it’s all about money and control the poor be damned. Our marxist leaders have an agenda and it will destroy this country, if we let them.
Hearing things, rumours mainly how far they wish to push this, rumoured they wish to classify anyone who does not agree with there agenda as a potential terrorist including serving armed forces members. Probably exaggerated but disturbing if remotely true. It’s very hard to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to internet reporting.
Personally if there is a lot of money to be made out of any kind of alarmism then it is probably wron such as AGW.

JD – “What you tell us about the Carbon Disclosure Project may be the most terrifying thing I’ve read in some time.”

It is terrifying and unwitting CDP signatories such as the BBC Pension Trust (my old tennis buddy Greg Dyke) are sponsoring named-storm cat bonds to be triggered (Katrina’s 15′ flood) by hire saboteurs who share in the investors principal while the BBC blames Bush!

Yakaboo

“I find walking in the countryside, reading, socialising, gardening and sex much more fulfilling; and free!

This sentence hadn’t registered in my mind until I was reading a post of Catweazle’s and saw it quoted in his post.

I wish I had noticed it sooner. This is moral superiority that your lifestyle is better than the rest of ours.

Where does a computer and the internet fit into your bucolic, idyllic simple life? I shouldn’t have taken you as in being in good faith.

BTW, is this how you have spent your whole life? If so, I would say you have made no contribution to society. The words “lazy bum” come to mind. And who provided the money, however little, that you have lived on?

msher1 his gardening probably involves Cannabis Sativa, probably explains his simplistic lifestyle in the more remote areas of the UK. Not sure how he affords his munchies bill though.

msher1 have you noticed that captainsherlock has begun to make more sense lately by keeping his posts shorter and to the point, helps me understand where he is coming from. Way too many insurance industry facts can be confusing, but interesting if true.

crownarmourer

I do not know what to make of captainsherlock. When he wants to be understood he writes very clear paragraphs, to the point and with no obscure or extraneous allegations. However, as soon as he gets into his conspiracy theories he becomes very oblique and obscure. I at times have made sense of pieces of it. But other pieces I either can’t understand at all, or understand what he is alleging but can’t make any sense of how it would operate in or apply to the situations he refers to. I have asked him a number of times to write one summary paragraph in clear English stating what the conspiracy is. He has not done that. I have said its too much work to sort it all out, and I am not going to try any longer until and unless he gives the clear summary of what he is alleging.

I don’t know why he puts the conspiracy theories into posts, as he refuses to do it in a way the posters can make sense of. So, with respect to conspiracy theories, he is either crazy or he has some obscure purpose which we will never know. The reason I leave open the possibility that he isn’t crazy and has some obscure purpose, known only to himself, is precisely because on things other than the conspiracy stuff, he writes very understandably.

crownarmourer

I have never asked: what is a “crownarmourer?”

Re captainsherlock’s insurance industry facts: he has alleged that 911 was a conspiracy of private corporations, one in particular as the mastermind, with either former or present ties to the CIA (I can’t tell whether it’s former or present.). The conspiracy was some sort of tontine scheme. Tontines are a structure of life insurance on a number of people, with the survivor getting all the proceeds. That much of his allegations I understand. But I can’t figure out how a tontine life insurance scheme would have anything to do with 911.
Captainsherlock has also alleged that a number of other events, including the failure of the levees in New Orleans, were the act of paid saboteurs who shared the insurance money. He has said that the same companies who benefitted from 911 are benefitting from the life insurance of dead soldiers. Now none of this makes any sense to me and captainsherlock will not explain, but only adds further mysterious names and events. So I’m not bothering with it any further. If captainsherlock wanted us to understand, he would explain it so we could understand.

msher1 captainsherlock makes sense sometimes, but sometimes the explanation can be quite mundane such as shoddy construction due to corrupt local politicians taking a bribe to ignore what the contractor is doing. Remember New Orleans flooded because the areas which they did not care about the poor were not on their radar. Those areas have never been blessed by there leaders, the same areas where in the early 20th century were sacrificed during an early Hurricane to save richer areas. Nothing much of worth relatively to insure to any great degree. Maybe hundreds of millions not billions.
Personally I love conspiracy theories like I said before they are like soap operas, addictive but make no sense at all.
Give me hard facts before I can make a judgement most of the time it’s usually some person spouting off, which is why I always make the caveat that it is just rumour. If you dig deep enough there may be some grain of truth there,.
I have met some interesting people in my life and a few people you would laugh about and not believe me if I told you as being too incredulous to suspend belief.

Catweazle,
you don’t have any trouble believing the scientists (if they were scientists) at the National Geographic, but not the IPCC and any scientists putting forward the AGW position. Like I said, cherry picking to support a political position.

burgess,
‘Hotter air has the capacity to hold more moisture, which in turn creates more rain’. Yes, I see your point. The hottest places on earth – Death Valley, the Arabian Peninsula, the Sahara – pissing down all the time.

msher1,
I think taxing Americans’ electricity use is a fantastic idea. They use so much more of it than anyone else. Also tax flights, SUVs, supermarkets and golf (just cos I hate golf). ‘Homeowners will pay more for cooling’ indeed. My heart bleeds. Open the bloody window, for god’s sake. Food isn’t going to be more expensive if you grow it yourself, as millions of people around the world do. But it is if you drive in your SUV to the supermarket. Can’t say I have a problem with that. Of course urban dwellers can grow their own food. Haven’t you heard of allotments? Haven’t you seen the permaculture video about food growing in Havana? Of course you haven’t, what am I saying?
Then you go off on a right-wing rant which is, I think, the true position, and reason for AGW ’scepticism’ of most people here.
BTW, I’ve worked all my life, have never received any benefits, am not a ‘lazy bum’, I just don’t damage the environment as much as you people. Morally superior? It’s not difficult, but I don’t care about that. I just find materialism, celebrity culture, the ‘growth’ ethos and shopping boring.

Anyway, I was beginning to believe that you lot were open-minded, not politically motivated, willing to debate, and actually cared about ecology. You’ve shown that you’re none of those things. Don’t you see that you’re just a little back-slapping club that doesn’t engage with dissenting voices, just insults them. You’ll stay marginalised and ridiculed I’m afraid, and you’ll deserve it.

yakaboo: tell us why you don’t believe in the graph produced by McIntyre. If, as it suggests, the world is not heating up (and that the hockey stick brigade were wrong, whether accidentally or deliberately), then the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is irrelevant, as it plainly isn’t making any significant difference, in the quantities currently present in the atmosphere.

James, you know for certain you have critically undermined an argument when people cite information that is five years old and place their faith in a supposed consensus, because they think the odds of more people being wrong are lower than the odds of fewer people being right.

Rather than produce evidence that might disprove what MacIntyre has uncovered and reported, they start attacking people. How very scientific.

The reason they cannot retaliate with evidence is that their views on AGW are based on faith. The scientific evidence they clung to has been debunked and they are left feeling confused and defensive. They don’t want to be wrong, but they are now in a panic because a fundamental flaw in the argument they relied upon has been laid bare. Perhaps now we can get some honest science and critical evaluation and review instead of the propaganda we have been bombarded with.

@yakaboo

Re: pissing in Death Valley. You’re confusing local and global effects. All of the LOCAL places you mention will be less dry if GLOBAL temperatures rise. The dryness of the places you mention has more to do with their location relative to trade winds and in rainshadows than with relative temperature. Also your remark implies a non sequitur, i.e. that hot places will be dry. The driest places on earth are quite cold, e.g. the dry valley region in Antarctica, the Atacama Desert in Chile. And the wettest places tend to be warmer. There are no rain forests in Antarctica of Greenland.

And you’re still referring to the IPCC as if it’s an authority but haven’t addressed my three objections – (1) that it’s not representative of the scientific community, (2) that it’s only partially composed of scientists with the summary document being composed by biased bureaucrats, and most importantly (3) prominent scientists who were authors of the science part of the IPCC report disagree with the Summary conclusions. My argument isn’t that there’s no valid science in the IPCC report, it is that the IPCC is not an over-arching authority to which one can appeal.

Where is your engagement? Surely you haven’t closed your mind on this.

Cherry-picking… Really… Others here are arguing the science and only refer to particular scientists to point out that your appeals to authority are invalid. An example of cherry-picking would be someone who only takes cheap shots at parts of people’s arguments while ignoring the substance of what they’re saying

Still waiting, with open mind, for your reference on current/Permian relative extinction rates. Willing to engage… No insults….

For those interested – McIntyre’s debunking of the hockey stick was published in the prestigious and peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters.

McIntyre S., R. McKitrick (2005), Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32.

I have asked him [Captain Sherlock] a number of times to write one summary paragraph in clear English stating what the conspiracy is.

Here are three paragraphs.

1. The BBC Pension Trust co-sponsors a named-storm catastrophe bond by putting $50 million in escrow which is lost if the cat bond is NOT triggered by, for example, a 15+’ flood in low-lying parishes of N.O.

2. Enemies such as Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns put $50 billion into escrow which is handed over to the BBC and co-sponsors if the cat bond IS triggered by, for example a 15+’ flood in low-lying parishes of N.O.

3. Potential profit for the sponsors is $45 billion, enemies are wiped out and the underwater explosive experts, saboteurs and Acorn clean up crew get a cut.

The business model where saboteurs share up to 50% of the insured value of damage done by patented devices, dates back to the Courtenay bomb in the American Civil War.

More modern patents cover the Smacsonic insulation in the Twin Tower elevators, the dial-a-yield devices in the N.O. levees and the London Underground satchel bombs, all detonated by Amec agents for signatories of the Carbon Disclosure Project, including the BBC Pension Trust (kickback to Greg Dyke and the AGWers)

I forgot to mention that escrow on named-storm cat bonds and hedge fund managers, was handled by KPMG Consulting and its legal representative Sidley Austin of Chicago up to time when KPMG C went bankrupt in February.

Sidley partners now have a monopoly of named storm escrow; former Sidley interns Bernardine Dohrn and Michelle and Barack Obama have prospered as a result.

If you want me to summarise in one paragraph compare the two below – the first from me, the second the EPA.

Under Greg Dyke, the BBC’s resigned-before-being-fired Director General, the BBC Pension Trust became a signatory to the UK’s Carbon Disclosure Project and co-sponsor of a $55 trillion Kafkaesque cat bond fraud.

“Prevention of Significant Deterioration PSD increment is the amount of pollution an area is allowed to increase. PSD increments prevent the air quality in clean areas from deteriorating to the level set by the NAAQS. The NAAQS is a maximum allowable concentration “ceiling.” A PSD increment, on the other hand, is the maximum allowable increase in concentration that is allowed to occur above a baseline concentration for a pollutant. The baseline concentration is defined for each pollutant and, in general, is the ambient concentration existing at the time that the first complete PSD permit application affecting the area is submitted. Significant deterioration is said to occur when the amount of new pollution would exceed the applicable PSD increment. It is important to note, however, that the air quality cannot deteriorate beyond the concentration allowed by the applicable NAAQS, even if not all of the PSD increment is consumed.”
http://www.epa.gov/nsr/psd.html

yakaboo on Oct 1st, 2009 at 7:38 am
“Anyway, I was beginning to believe that you lot were open-minded, not politically motivated, willing to debate, and actually cared about ecology.

Ah, so now we get to the point.

Because we have failed to be convinced by your utterly unscientific, politically motivated arguments, and have countered them with rational, scientific debate backed up by links to such respectable publications as “The New Scientist” and “National Geographic” – posts which you either failed to read or failed utterly to comprehend – we are not, in you opinion, “open-minded”.

Not politically motivated? Not caring about the ecology? You really haven’t a clue, have you?

captainsherlock

Is the summary of most of your allegations that there exists betting schemes where parties, who have no property stake actually at risk, can bet on catastrophes happening, and in order to collect on their bets, they make the castrophes happen?

If that is the bottom line allegation, in the most simplistic terms, haven’t the counter-parties figured out that they are going to lose the bet because there will be the sabotage to make the catastrophe happen?

@ Catweazle et al. Re: yakaboo…

Seems what I mistook for a potential recovering warmist was actually a troll whose now gone and disappeared under his bridge…

captainsherlock

P.S, my previous post asked two questions that can be answered simply and directly, not obliquely and obscurely. I won’t bother reading oblique, obscure answers with references to more names and events. You have your own reasons for posting material in a way to make readers have to try to do tortuous analysis and construction – or you are just plain crazy, but either way, I do not want to put in the time to try to make sense of and fit together the pieces of whatever it is you are writing.

OK, I’m back from under my bridge. One last attempt to make this interesting. OK burgess – ‘the substance of what they’re saying’? OK, let’s see. Yes, crownarmourer, I’m stoned now. Just testing my ideas. Do you really think capitalism is the best we can do? A system that rewards competition, greed and ruthlessness? How do you think that affects our evolution? Badly, I’d say.
I put it you you all that none of you care about the climate, it’s just a way of defending the capitalist agenda, or distracting people from thinking of alternative paths. I think captainsherlock is here to distract us as well (or if you have got something useful to say, for god’s sake translate it for the non-aspergic). The answers the kinds of people like us are looking for are not technical. Gloves off?

From yakaboo’s last post

“Food isn’t going to be more expensive if you grow it yourself, as millions of people around the world do. But it is if you drive in your SUV to the supermarket. Can’t say I have a problem with that. Of course urban dwellers can grow their own food. Haven’t you heard of allotments? Haven’t you seen the permaculture video about food growing in Havana?”

I have been talking all along that some of the AGW people want a pre-industrialized society. I think yakaboo just proved my point. I think he may not have ever been to Cuba or even from news video, noticed the disrepair and poverty – or does he think that is how people should live? He still hasn’t explained how his computer and high-speed internet fit into the Havana lifestyle. I don’t think most Cubans have computers and internet access. And of course thousands of Cubans risk their lives on the open seas to flee to America. They aren’t so enthralled with their food-growing allotments.

And in industrialized society, whose land will the “allotments” be given from. I think we have not only an unrealistic utopian, but a true communist here.

Does anyone believe that yakaboo would happily live in Cuba, or as he said to me, in the forest? No. Hippies and communists and utopians do that for a few years in their youth, but soon tire of it (no computers and access to high-speed internet) and go back to the comforts of regular lifestyle.

“Then you go off on a right-wing rant which is, I think, the true position, and reason for AGW ’scepticism’ of most people here.”

I have said from the beginning of the previous AGW thread that what I see of the politics of the AGW crowd is the biggest part of my skepticism about AGW. That everything I see says AGW is a cover for a far left wing agenda to destroy the prosperity and middle class of the West, leaving in power a small, very wealthy elite. That is a very good – right wing = reason that everybody, except those who will be part of that small elite, should oppose the AGW agenda.

@yakaboo

You say “OK burgess� and proceed to launch into an anti-capitalist rant, when I’ve said nothing about capitalism/socialism. The closest I’ve come is to express concern for those Africans who are among the 4 billion or so living in poverty who, if they were provided with clean water, would easily manage to adapt to whatever changes climate has in store.

You say none of us care about climate, but all I’ve talked about is climate and you have yet to engage me on any of the climate issues I’ve raised. I’m still waiting to hear from you about the current/Permian extinction rates, the authority of the IPCC, local vs. global climates, about the 300-year warming trend, about past warming trends…

You say none of us care about climate, and then, “The answers the kinds of people like us are looking for are not technical. Gloves off?� ????? You’ve lost me now. What are you looking for? You’ve expressed a concern about extinction, a concern I share, but I fail to see how spending several trillion on solving the non-existent AGW problem benefits any living thing.

Capitalist… Socialist… Both need resources. Seems both would benefit from not having the AGW problem to solve.

Whether or not AGW is happening is a scientific question. If you want to discuss other questions, I think you’ll only be frustrated here.

@yakaboo

It beginning to look like msher1 has your number.

Seems your feigned concern for climate change is really a cover for political bigotry.

you’re all clever, and very curious, and it would be interesting to exchange ideas honestly and openly, because I’ve got a feeling that your ideas are going to be a bit alien to me. It all feels like a mixture of rugby and trainspotting (does that happen in the states?). science is a tool, not a religion. It’s not the path in other words, although it’s useful. And we must never, never let go of rationality, I’m not saying that.
msher1 – called me a ‘lazy bum’ – do you want to be a policeman when you grow up? fucking hell yanks are paranoid. I’ve made my own money, you wanker. but you showed compassion for Africans (almost, I think), so there’s hope.
catweazle – pompous, non-spiritual, stubborn. My sex life hasn’t cost me anything – quite the opposite. How much has yours cost you? yuk.
burgess – think you might be open-minded, possibly already a spiritual thinker
crowarmourer – how old are you? are you a christian? why opposed to cannabis for god’s sake?
captainsherlock – troll
MarkE – not sure; but where’s the love mate?
James Delingpole – whore
Sheumais – interesting about changing global warming to climate change – that stimulated my interest. I really am open-minded you know. come on grease monkeys, give me the evidence. I know what peer-reviewed means.
msher1 – if we distributed wealth, educated people, freed, people, stopped bombing people, stabilised the population and the economy, we could have broadband and survive; at the moment we’re heavy on broadband and light on survival. But then burgess asked me to provide evidence that we’re in a significant extinction event. OK I will (it’s pretty easy actually – but later, too boring when I’m stoned). But then I hope we don’t get sucked into another ‘look at this extinction (AE) website’ followed by ‘look at this AE-sceptic website’ ad nauseam. It’s about values too. Where’s the love in a system that rewards the worst human values most?
Believe it or not, this is fun.
Yakaboo – he? who said I’m a he?

yakaboo on Oct 1st, 2009 at 7:49 pm
“I put it you you all that none of you care about the climate”

You nasty, foolish, insulting little man, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

How does responsibility for some tens of millions of tons of recycled waste grab you? That’s my family’s contribution up to press.

And what have you done? Apart from sitting around all day getting stoned? And who pays for your sex and drugs, then? I wouldn’t mind betting that you don’t.

“The answers the kinds of people like us are looking for are not technical.

Probably the daftest thing you’ve said all thread, and that’s some achievement.

The kinds of people like you don’t matter a tuppeny toss in the great scheme of things, son, so it doesn’t matter what you are looking for. Stoke up your bong, chill out, and leave grown-up problems to the grown-ups. “Not technical” indeed. Heh.

Oh, and you could try taking that Giant California Redwood sized chip off your shoulder too, that’d probably help.

msher1 – whoa – no, I don’t want to destroy anyone’s prosperity; and wealthy elites! You think I want wealthy elites? I’m keeping calm. I was called patronising earlier, but really, it’s hard not to be – look at Catweazle. I’m just thinking on the species level. I believe in evolution, and I believe that letting go of the tribe, the nation, the race, and embracing the species is the only way we’ll evolve.
If you guys are trying to get a convert, then burgess’ approach is best. The argument that we should rather spend our money on clean water for Africans than on stopping global warming is a very interesting one, which I think has a lot going for it. I’d listen to what he had to say. msher1’s last effort was gibberish, but his contributions aren’t usually gibberish. Catweazle is a liability. If you want to persuade anyone but the converted, you’ve got to get rid of people like him (come on, it shouldn’t be difficult – what must his parties be like?).
(and by the way guys, I’ve never had any of your precious taxpayers’ money. I’ve made all my own, honestly.)

burgess

My involvement in the AGW debate is never going to be the science. Others can do that far better than I. But I do watch strategies, policies, the consequences of policies and agendas. Watching those things usually reveal the truth of an issue.

I like pushing AGW activists on the political and economic consequences of their proposed policies. (And people like Keiranmac and Yakatoo writing at such length on these blogs are AGW activists when they do so.) If you do push these activists, eventually a really ugly ideological, political or financial agenda is revealed. For the activists (as opposed to the dolts they have brainwashed) AGW is merely the tool to achieve other ideological, political and financial goals.

I thought it odd that Yakaboo said he would happily live in a forest. I was talking about tropical forests or the forests of ancient Europe. Forests where there are/were no roads, no modern convenience and no computers or access to high speed internet. I didn’t believe Yakaboo for a moment that he would love to live in such a forest or that he has a friend who does. (Where would that be?) But I let that go as just careless hyperbole on his part.

But when further pushed, Yakaboo’s true agenda and beliefs have come out. Seizing land to have urban dwellers grow their own food as he says they do in Cuba. That says everything we need to know about Yakaboo. Let everyone who feels that way go live in Cuba. I would have no problem with that. I would even agree to pay for their plane tickets (as long as they could not return when they tired of the squalor in Cuba after a year or so).

Seizing land in Cuba? what the fuck mate? No, I wouldn’t like to live in a medieval forest or a tropical rainforest. But I’d like to live like my friend in the Ashdown forest. And my friends in Pembrokeshire. Well, no, not enough to actually do it, or I’d do it wouldn’t I? If I didn’t love my work so much, I probably would though.
Big government is a bad idea. I’m with you on that one. But we have to organise ourselves, or money will take control. Well, more control. It already has control. We want the best people at the top not the richest. We don’t have to centralise power – either in the state or in business. We must be able to think of a better way than either of those. Does no-one want to debate this? burgess I’m disappointed. msher1? crownarmourer? markE? not captainsherlock, obviously.

Yakaboo

Go live in Cuba and grow food on your allotment. We will all be much happier.

I will persuade other people by using statements like yours that urban dwellers can grow their own food like Cubans do on “allotments.” Just as I will continue to quote Kiernanmac that it’s tough sh*t if we don’t like the economic measures our governments impose on us; as long as we have shelter, food and water, that’s affluence enough.

You decided my words were gibberish when I took a real look at what you had said and started using your own words against you.

I will continue to do so. Your own words are the best argument to never let your policies be imposed.

More of your own words: ” I believe that letting go of the tribe, the nation, the race, and embracing the species is the only way we’ll evolve”

You have gone off subject into the area of internationalism and one-world government. So you want the EU, the UN and one-day it all to be one government. Well, I disagree with you vehemently, but that isn’t the topic under discussion. Or is it? Have you just revealed another aspect of the AGW agenda: one world government? I believe that is part of the AGW agenda, and another reason I oppose you and your fellow-travellers.

And yes, if all the money put into propagandizing on AGW were put into clean water for Africa, millions of lives would be saved right now. Why do the AGW people not care about saving those lives right now?

———————

burgess

See. Just keep at the political side of it, and the hidden agendas start coming out. All the scientific debate by the Yakatoos and Kieranmacs are just to keep everyone distracted from the real agendas. On two threads all the very smart people who have posted – and I do not mean that to be snide; I am very impressed with most of the people who have posted – have argued scientific theory. They have been distracted from asking what is it that these AGW people want and intend to do.

Yes, msher1, sad but true…

political, spiritual, scientific….
big government, big business…

It’s all swirling in his head now. Seems to have lost focus. Think he’s got some sorting to do before he can discuss much of anything effectively.

Well, he had been a catalyst for some interesting posts…

Yakaboo

If there are land allotments in Cuban cities for growing food, that land once belonged to somebody. It was seized by Castro from its owners. You have suggested that an allotment system could be used in Britain for urban dwellers to grow their own food. Whose land would be used? How would that land be acquired? How many buildings would be torn down for there to be enough land? Who would pay the owners of the buildings and/or tenants in them to relocate elsewhere? Who would decide whose land would be used for allotments and which buildings would be torn down? And most of all, how many urban and suburban Brits want to grow/do husbandry for their own food? Is any of this going to happen in a free society, or is it going to happen as coercion under a tyrannical government?

Whenever the AGW believers talk about policy the thing that comes to my mind is the forced collectivism of Soviet agriculture by Stalin, millions of deaths and gualags and all. After all, if what is at stake is saving all life on the planet, then of course any means and methods are justified and coercion is necessary.

I say to you what I said to (or about?) Kieranmac: you are not writing to convince me or any other poster of anything. You long ago had to have realized they are well informed enough to have already formed their views – and most have scientific backgrounds to boot, and are not going to be swayed by anything you say. You are writing in the hopes of changing opinions of the unseen readers who read but do not post. Well, so am I. Unfortunately we will never have the chance to do focus groups or polls to see who is more effective. But as with Kieranmac, I am content to let your own words speak for themselves.

yakaboo on Oct 1st, 2009 at 9:58 pm
<iMy sex life hasn’t cost me anything – quite the opposite. How much has yours cost you?

It has gained me two daughters, both with degrees – in fact the eldest has two, as the youngest will also have soon. And both employed, incidentally.

Why do you think that all AGW sceptics are American? I’m not for a start.

And the climate will show who will win the AGW debate, not science, not spirituality, not argument.

Time alone will tell.

msher1, stop it, you’re scaring me. I’m not an AGW activist, what the hell are you on about? and I don’t know if Cubans have allotments, but Brits have millions of them. see http://www.nsalg.org.uk – and that’s just ones who’ve joined, then there are all the back gardens and front gardens. The most popular show on UK TV is about a guy who moved to a smallholding in Dorset, keeps chickens, grows food, goes fishing and foraging, has feasts. Funny, when I go back to visit my ganster brother, his gangster friends say River Cottage is their favourite programme. And I know other Europeans have allotments. It’s important to most people to eat food they’ve produced themselves. that not the case in the states?
I’ve got an idea. It would probably make loads of money, so you capitalists would be happy. Televised debates with speakers, teams of interweb researchers on each side, and 4 referees, all agreed by both sides, to weigh the evidence. Then the grease monkeys could research, the speakers could speak and the thinkers could think. Not just AGW – anything. Shit – it’s probably been done, hasn’t it?
It’s not a personal thing, I just believe that growth policies will damage ecology to the point of threatening our survival, and maybe much further than that point. I’d be happy to debate it using the system above (the blog system is useless, just back-slapping or bitch slapping).

So at least the truth is out. Nobody’s debating AGW, not you, not me, not James Deli whatever his name is – we are promoting different political agendas using AGW as a lever. You don’t understand my position though. You think I’m a bloody Stalinist or something. All I’m saying is that basing all human relations on competition is a damaging (physically and spiritually) and dangerous thing. Capitalism is based on competition, and so was Stalinism, and so is Chinese communism/capitalism/whatever-it-is. And I’m suggesting a debate about it. Is that what you’re all kicking against – a debate? Fighting against debate on a blog. It could only be the Telegraph.
Oh my god, Catweazle’s back. I thought you’d turned up your nose at me a few posts back. Well, you said ‘And hey, if you think sex is free, you have got one HELL of a lot to learn!’ So what did your sex life cost?
So far from letting go of the ego. yes, great daughters, go genes. I thought everyone here was a yank, not all AGW sceptics. where you at then?
going to bed.

yakaboo

“what the hell are you on about? and I don’t know if Cubans have allotments<\"

That was you at 12:16 am.

�Haven’t you heard of allotments? Haven’t you seen the permaculture video about food growing in Havana?�

Those are your words at 7:38 am.

I am under the impression Havana is in Cuba. So you were speaking about allotments in a Cuban city. You need to keep track of your words. I am (keeping track of your words. I am adding them to my collection of Kieranmac’s words. Originally, I wondered whether you and Kieranmac are the same person. Now I think not, but it doesn’t matter one way or another.)

� so you capitalists would be happy�

“Do you really think capitalism is the best we can do? A system that rewards competition, greed and ruthlessness?â€�

Your preferred economic system? Hippy commune (but then where would you get computers and high speed internet from?)

� It’s important to most people to eat food they’ve produced themselves. that not the case in the states?�

No I do not think it is important to most people in an urbanized, industrialized society. It is a hobby or a luxury that a few urban or suburban people engage in, and even when they do, it is a small vegetable garden or a couple of citrus tree and/or an herb garden. I think you are living in an alternative universe.

But I see you have said a couple of times you are stoned. A stoned activist tends not to make sense, so maybe I shouldn’t hold inconsistencies against you. (Yes, anyone who spends the amount of time/effort you have writing about an ideological issue is an activist in doing so. I’m not necessarily saying you are sitting in on planning sessions with Al Gore. You are writing to persuade, and that’s a form of activism.)

And I am through. You have already given me enough great quotes I can use elsewhere.

msher1 a lot of people in the UK have allotments but not really large enough to feed a family for year, it’s a hobby and a lot of times people use these small holdings very competitively for the world of prize vegetable growing, my own granddad was pretty good and won a few prize leek shows, but it can also be a cutthroat world with midnight raids to destroy your competitions crop.
So going back to nature changes nothing about people.

yakaboo, catweazle is correct sex is never free he is being far more subtle than you realize by that statement.
But you may wish to get yourself checked for STD’s or VD over there, chlamydia it’s a shame not to share with friends.

Catweazle:

You wrote that “the climate will show who will win the AGW debate, not science, not spirituality, not argument”

The climate has already shown what you say it will show.

Over 100,000 years cycles, CO2 concentrations lag temperature by 800 years i.e. CO2 is benficial because it delays global cooling but does not accelerate global warming.
http://www2.grist.org/gristmill/images/user/6932/volstok.gif

Over 100 million year cycles there is no correlation between CO2 and earth temperature.
http://i26.tinypic.com/szfzom.jpg

“I thought everyone here was a yank, not all AGW sceptics. where you at then?”

I’m in a nice little town in the English countryside, in a seventeenth century cottage with walls over three feet thick (better than any amount of cavity insulation, cool in summer, too) and roof timbers that predate the Dissolution of the Monasteries (early example of recycling there, see) all cloven timber held together with wooden pegs, covered with local stone flags. I have a nice efficient gas central heating system that I rarely use, and I am just checking out a 12,000 BTU reversible heat pump system, which should, if I can work out how to fit it unobtrusively cut my already low heating bills to about a third.

I am surrounded by some of the finest scenery in the country, practically all of it carved out by the glaciers that retreated less than ten thousand years ago. U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, moraines, drumlins, erratics, it’s all there.

So it would be extremely strange of me to deny climate change, wouldn’t it? Further, seeing all this evidence of real Global warming, during a period when there were no people driving round in cars, building coal-fired power stations and so forth, I suppose it tends to give perspective.

Another thing, fifty years ago, even out here in the countryside, everything was black. The houses, the stone walls, even the sheep were black, all due to the soot and acid rain caused by burning large quantities of coal in the steam trains, houses (no gas or electric central heating in those days), and in the towns it was worse. If you left your washing out and it rained, the acid would quite literally burn holes in it.

Now, the blackness has all gone, the houses are mostly back to their old stone colour (although in some places you can still see the black under the eaves where the clean, soot and acid-free rain has rinsed them nice and clean). And the sheep are white again. So what I see is a massive decrease in pollution. Yet again, this causes me to be somewhat sceptical of the doom-merchants.

I’m surrounded by wildlife. Regularly at night I see foxes, badgers, rabbits, stoats, weasels and the like, also hedgehogs, which, if they are on the road I stop, pick up and place over the wall in fields, I hate to see them squashed.

A few years ago, I took a young one into my partner’s house because the cats were investigating it in the middle of the road, and I thought both it and the cats would probably do better continuing inside. The hedgehog liked the place, and stayed for nearly two years, rapidly became housetrained, and ate at the same dishes as the carts, also going in and out of the cat flap. Caused a few raised eyebrows, that house hedgehog. Quite useful too, cleaned up the dead mice and voles the cats brought in and let go that expired under the fridge and in other inaccessible places.

And a few weeks ago at the local pub next to a stream one Saturday afternoon, I saw a kingfisher. Amazing little thing, set me up for days. Get a lot of heron too, much to the disgust of the local fishermen. Problem with bloody mink at the moment, but one of the local lads is seeing to it. Evil little bastards, mink. Date back to when there was a mink farm locally. Get rid of them, maybe we can get the water voles and otters back. I used to watch otters there, over half a century ago.

So I have a considerable interest in the environment, as I live in very close proximity to it, have done practically all my life.

You did ask!

catweazle must way up North then, from up that way myself but just had the drumlins and moraines, and one of the best views of the vale of York, the North Yorkshire Moors and the Pennines, we have swans back now for the first time in living memory since they got rid of the coke works. Did not see many foxes the hunt saw to that, rather shy beasts, just loved to see deer in the winter.
Now living in the USA get to see possum, foxes, deer, coyotes, vultures and bald eagles and those wonderful bin raiding racoons, was amazed to see a mother teaching her kits how to raid mine while I was 10 feet away. Although don’t care much for the copper heads though. The city I rside in sits on Loess from the last ice age.

crownarmourer

Unless I am misunderstanding what you said, we have said approximately the same thing about urban people growing their own food. It is a luxury or a hobby, and the gardens do not supply all the produce ( or any meat or any diary, unless chickens are allowed, then there are eggs, but not cream, milk or butter.). And even though you say lots of people have allotments, I imagine it is not statistically a very big part of the population. How much do you see in the city of Memphis? I live now in a suburb, and a few tomatoes, which are easy to grow, and some herb gardens and that’s about it. I don’t know whether there is a “Whole Foods” market in Memphis. That is a very expensive market where everything is supposedly organic and grown locally. The vegetables and meat and fish are gorgeous. There are other markets like that in some cities. People who are really picky about the quality of their food tend to buy at these kinds of markets rather than grow it.

Btw: I saw something once, a documentary, that made me think the whole organic thing is also a scam. According to this documentary organic means grown from compost that has to be heated to a certain temperature to destroy the bacteria. Well, do I trust all the people who claim to be growing organic to heat the compost – even assuming they are in fact using that method – to the correct temperature? Hell no. They may get lazy, negligent or cheap. I’d rather take my chances on the pesticides than the bacteria in the “organic.” And have you ever seen the “organic” produce at the average supermarket. It is always the most wilted, sorry looking stuff that just on looks alone i would never buy. Besides, there is no standardization to what “organic” means.

msher1,
I see what you’ve done. You’ve conflated the alltoment thing and the permaculture in Havana thing. and you’ve heard the word Havana and something has gone off in your brain, and now you think I’m a Cuban spy. I should have thought before I mentioned Havana. It just happened to be the city the video was about, and they grow stuff because it’s difficult to get oil because of the embargo. It wasn’t about the system there. You’re keeping track of my words, and adding them to whose? You’re scary, a bit like Robert de Niro in Meet the Parents.
My preferred economic system? Dunno, let’s discuss it. Maybe let’s all discuss it, democratically. I don’t think you can have democracy and capitalism, because money destroys democracy. You don’t really think your opinion is worth the same as Rupert Murdoch’s (bad choice, I know, your opinion is probably the same as his)? And you can’t have democracy under Stalinism either, obviously. Blogs are a good place to bring people of different persuasions together, because on blogs you can’t hit each other. Of course it doesn’t work if one side refuses to debate.
I’ve visited plenty of hippie communes with broadband – lived on one for a while. of course you can. And people growing their own food, and wanting to buy local and organic isn’t marginal over here, it’s very mainstream.
And I don’t know where you get the idea that stoned people don’t make sense. I think you’d be surprised at the number of books, songs, films, ideas, poems that owe their existence to that plant. (I’m not a stoner by the way, it was just a coincidence that I’d had one last night – much nicer than alcohol for relaxation).
And you’re confusing chemical fertilizers with pesticides. It’s the fertilizers that take the place of compost, not pesticides. Chemical fertilizers are water soluble, so when plants take in water, they have to take in the fertilizer too, and they grow big and impressive-looking, but taste watery. Those funny-shaped organic veg only took in the nutrients they needed. Try them – taste the difference.

crownarmourer,
that’s not nice (although you haven’t come across as particularly nice before, so I don’t know what I was expecting). I just said I liked sex. I didn’t say I like sleeping around. Are you celibate?

Catweazle,
Hey, you live in a ‘mud hut’! Maybe it even has a grass roof! msher1 (I think) would be amazed! You’ll have to explain though. The reason there’s no local pollution where you live now is that we’ve exported it. It’s now in China, Brazil and India, and there’s more of it. Unfortunately ecology is global though. See, when you talk about nature, I do think there’s a chance of real debate and change, without hostility. I’m kept awake by deer barking, keep chickens, been lucky wiith the foxes – seen lots but they don’t go for the chooks, catch signal crayfish in the local stream – they’re not native, they’re from the states and they’re killing off the native crayfish; but it’s illegal apparently, to stop people taking them and putting them somewhere else. no chance of that – I serve them with marie rose sauce – yum. also round here we’ve got nuthatches, yellowhammers, great tits, both woodpeckers, tree creepers, and once, unbelievably, blown miles off course, a hoopoe.

everyone,
I’m not into big government, not into world government, not into taxes (although it makes me laugh that the right say they’re not into big government and taxes, but look at the ‘defence’ industry). I’m not advocating anything, except coming together to debate how to get us off the wrong path. I guess you might not think we’re on the wrong path, although I find it difficult to comprehend how an intelligent person (and you guys are intelligent) could think we’re on the right path in this violent, corrupt world – and I will put up links to extinction sites (but as I said, we’re then into another AGW cherry-picking-fest). But my point is that the wrong people get to steer the ship, and half the world’s population live grim lives on the edge of existence. Under socialism, sooner or later the wrong people get to steer the ship too, however good the initial intentions. So we end up with Stalinism or revert to Capitalism.
Both systems damage ecology, which can obviously only go on so long before mother nature puts us in our place.
Anyway, it’s not about AGW that’s for sure. If you came across some great evidence that AGW was real, you’d brush it under the carpet. pro-AGW people are the same.

msher1,
you’re so funny with your ‘there’s bacteria everywhere, spray it with chemicals’ and ‘eek, it’s something natural, kill it’, and ‘oh my god, she’s a red, let’s keep tabs on her’.
I’m not being hostile, honestly – it’s just funny. the cold war’s over, and nature won’t hurt you (well, unless you’re unlucky). Come on you guys, he won’t listen to me. Isn’t it just a bit weird? Tell him to take off his blinkers.

Not nature-haters James, no. But capitalist cheerleaders (AGW is just a sideshow), and therefore inadvertent nature destroyers.

There are not enough hours in a lifetime to work, have a social life, eat, relax, and also understand the nuts and bolts of the economic system, climate science, the middle east, the latest attempts at nuclear fusion, thermodynamics, human psychology, the wranglings of governments and businesses, 9/11, plus all the competing philosophies, religions and conspiracy theories. And then there’s quantum mechanics.

So I think a good starting point is ecology, because we depend on it entirely for our survival. How well is it doing? What’s the rate of extinctions and is it accelerating? What implications does that have for the whole of ecology, especially (from a species-centric viewpoint) the top of the food chain?
Don’t you think that’s a good place to start?

Only then, if we agree that how we’re living isn’t sustainable, can we talk about how we change. I’ve got some ideas, and you guys would be the toughest critics, so it will be a good test for them. I am open-minded if you are (actually I’m open-minded even if you’re not). I won’t remember where you’re all from or who said what – I don’t have everyone on a database like msher1. But that doesn’t matter. It’s the ideas I’m interested in not personalities.

Trouble is, I don’t know when this blog is finishing. Do you guys do this mutual-support thing all the time? Where can I join you?
Come on, it’s got to be more interesting than back-slapping. burgess almost said so in one of his charitable moments.

msher1, can’t remember the number of allotments but the number is less than 1/2 a million a think and all probably less than 1/4 acre probably 1/8 in size. In some places maybe chickens but that’s it. In Memphis no such thing, same as you usually tomatoes, pumpkins nothing major. Out in the suburbs just pretty gardens and pools.
As for composting now that’s an art, you need a space where you can pile up organic material, grass clippings potato peel whatever, it will if the pile gets big enough start to heat up as anaerobic bacteria eat the stuff and break it down, smells like vinegar.
You have to be careful as these things if big enough can catch fire. Once it has broken down you have to dig it in to the soil. A real pain if your on clay.
James D, My Guess is that catweazle is either in the Lake district, Snowdonia, or in the Highlands, not many big U shaped valleys else where. Also he’s in sheep country which means marginal land usually.

James Delingpole on Oct 2nd, 2009 at 11:15 am

Thank you James, nice to be appreciated!

I’m in the Yorkshire Dales, Ribblesdale, Littondale, Wharfedale, Swaledale, that sort of area.

yakaboo on Oct 2nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
“But capitalist cheerleaders”

There you go again, imputing all sorts of properties to posters purely on the strength of the fact that they are sceptical about AGW. I have not at any point in this discussion, as far as I’m aware, made any statement that brands me as a “capitalist cheerleader”.

As it happens, I’m not too badly off – but at my age I shouldn’t be anyway, as a reasonably enterprising kind of person – at least partially as a result of this capitalist system you seem to be so exercised about.

Via my savings, etc. I am part owner of a considerable number of assorted enterprises, as is anyone else who invests in pension funds and the like. How would anyone be able to buy a house, if it wasn’t for the “capitalists”? Or acquire start-up capital for an Internet venture, such as Facebook? How do you think things such as the Internet get funding? I promise you that if you leave it to the Government to do it via taxation it would never get done.

I saw how the Communists do things, and believe me, you really, really wouldn’t like living behind the old Iron Curtain. As for what they did to the ecology, and what the Chinese are doing to it still…. How many Chinese children are currently suffering from all sorts of disorders due to pollution? And that’s not because we evil Westerners are buying stuff, it’s because they are just plain greedy, and would rather make the extra few per cent than put stack filters in and the like. The Soviet Union didn’t even have that excuse, as a matter of interest I had a client a few years ago who got called in to do something about the pollution in East Germany. What he had to say would have made your hair stand on end.

It’s all to do with human nature, you see. You have some sort of aversion to competitiveness, but without it we would still be living in caves hiding from wolves, and if we lose it, that’s where we will end up, the few of us who are left. Living on Planet Earth is a risky business, the concept of “fairness” doesn’t exist outside of the human imagination, sh*t happens, the World keeps on turning.

If we lose our competitive edge, we’ll lose our position at the top of the pyramid, and life will revert to being nasty, brutish and short. And there sure as Hell won’t be any time for spirituality when you are competing for scarce resources with a wolfpack!

Of course, we could go the other way, I’m of the opinion that we are somewhere near the point where our technology (primarily genetic engineering, the sharpest tool we’ve ever had, so the most likely to turn in our hand and give us a nasty cut – makes nukes look like penny bangers) will be such that a relatively smaller number of us will be able to exist in great security and comfort, or a much smaller number of us will end up back in the Stone Age.

Of course, this whole discussion will be rendered entirely theoretical if, say, Krakatoa stages another quality eruption, that’ll cool things down for a decade or two, and if Yellowstone goes up, well, we won’t be worrying about anything much apart from basic survival for tens of thousands of years. And then there’s asteroids. And pandemics.

I used to worry about all this stuff, but life’s too short, basically. I’ve got my businesses to run providing employment to a few people who appear to like working for me, plus it keeps me interested, and my offspring to keep in new laptops. Suits me.

Catweazle the Dales U shaped more like a V really, anyhow beautiful countryside glad you can afford to live there, I could see all the way to those Dales from my village, helps to be on the Durham Plateau on a hill, perchance have you ever dined at a pub/restaurant run by a guy called Adrian B. lot of people make the trek there as it’s off the beaten track a little, but he’s come a long way as a chef supposed to be good food. I know he’s in your area near Richmond I think.
I recommend anyone to visit the Dales really beautiful in a rugged sense.

crownarmourer,
you mean aerobic not anaerobic. aerobic is in the absence of oxygen (i.e. waterlogged), it gives off methane and hydrogen sulphide and is very smelly. you can get anaerobic digestion, but not in a compost heap. you can’t stop anything that was once alive decomposing, whether the heap gets hot or not. if the heap gets hot, it just breaks down faster, that’s all. there are lots of bacteria, fungi, moulds etc in a compost heap but nothing pathogenic.
Not up for a debate then? prefer group cuddles?

Catweazle,
that’s more like it. I don’t mean it as an insult to call you capitalist cheerleaders you know, just an observation. And you say you’re not, but then the rest of your post is capitalist cheerleading! you can’t even see how anyone could have a house without capitalism! actually, if that’s where you’re at, it’s going to be quite hard debating with you. you go on to criticise China, the old Soviet Union and taxation. Who are you arguing with? not me. my main point is that growth-oriented capitalism (or stalinism) is damaging ecology so much that it’s going to cut short the evolution of our genes (as might genetic engineering, I agree), and we’ll never achieve our full potential.
So – competition – now we’re talking.
‘If we lose our competitive edge, we’ll lose our place at the top of the pyramid.’ To what – chimps? I’m talking about organising ourselves, co-operating, to come up with a system that’s not going to make us extinct. thinking at the species level, in other words (the work individuals have to do to contribute to this is letting go of ego).
‘fairness doesn’t exist outside the human imagination’. so if we were in a life raft and you had some food, you wouldn’t give me any? really? (OK, maybe I’m a bad example – but you wouldn’t give somebody else any?) if that’s the case, then I’d say you’re not a very good person. I think you would though. And I think most people would (including msher1, although he’d have them vetted first). That’s what I’m banking on – that we’re alright as a species.

sorry crownarmourer, I meant anaerobic is in the absence of oxygen, not aerobic.

oh and you don’t have to dig it in. just barrow it on and mulch it, the worms will do the rest. if pesticides haven’t killed them all.

yakaboo to be part of the mutual supporting club on these blogs you must come over to the dark side of the force.
As for cooperation thingy and all being nice to each other, would be nice but you obviously have not spent too much time around your fellow humans. As Desmond morris put we are the naked ape, not everyone is rational, not everyone is clever or edumacated as they say in the south. 10% of the population have sociopathic, psychopathic, narcissistic tendencies to some extent and these are not nice people at all.
So your hopes for are brighter future are flawed because it involves people, communism sounds great but people tend to mess it up by being there usual petty greedy selves.
Basically go a zoo look at the chimps behaviour thats’ us in there a little bit dumber and we stopped throwing poop a while back but still us, not pleasant is it.

yes but things change. just one generation ago it was the norm to be racist and homophobic. now it’s not.
so would you not share your food with me in a life raft? I bet you would. And I bet most people would. If some people are genuinely psychopathic or just plain ornery (do they say that in the south as well?) then they have to be kept separate in some way.
I think most people are good though, but sometimes do bad things out of fear or desperation. If we have a system whose ultimate deterrence is extreme state violence, and which creates multi-billionaires and half the world on $2 a day, then you’re going to have a lot of desperate people. It’s hard to be good when you’re desperate.
Which is why I’d like us (the human species that is) to put our heads together to think of a better system.

I know there’s a difference between my world view and others here, and maybe that’s what it is – I trust my fellow humans and you don’t. but you’re humans – don’t you deserve to be trusted? or are you different from other people? And I don’t mean in a naive way – I have a business. I know that a certain % of individuals will defraud me if they have the chance. But I see disaster appeals – tsunamis, famines, and millions of people give money to people they will never meet.
unfortunately, there is a high concentration of corrupt, ruthless people in positions of power. all the systems we’ve tried – tribalism, feudalism, capitalism, nazism, stalinism – guarantee that.
I think if we put as much energy into finding a system where the best people get to the top as we do into the minutiae of climate science (et al), we could do it.

yakaboo..so would you not share your food with me in a life raft?…only if I was considering you as the main course, fatten you up a bit. Law of the sea and all that.
yakaboo the 10% of nut jobs I was talking about are our leaders who do think will be keeping whom apart. They are naturally attracted to positions of power as moths to flame.
Sorry but you just can’t change human nature unless you drug them and then we are talking Brave New World time.

Which is why I’d like us (the human species that is) to put our heads together to think of a better system.

You know, given the rate at which our numbers are increasing, whilst all the while problems such as hunger and infant mortality continue to decrease, and basic indicators such as the availability of drinkable water continue to increase, I don’t actually believe the system is doing too badly, really. No natural process proceeds in any manner than a series of ups and downs, currently I believe the ups are, on average, bigger than the downs.

You are not going to cure all the problems overnight, and for Heaven’s sake particularly aware of the truism that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

And particularly beware of doom-mongers preying on the credulous, insecure, paranoid, guilt-tripped and exploitable, too. There’s a lot of it about, something that all the major religions caught on to when they developed the concept of “original sin” or whatever analogue they use to refer to it. There seems to be a tendency in humans to something that I would perhaps refer to as a “Guilt Gene”, and there is a huge amount of power, money, or whatever equates thereto in any particular society to be had by exploiting this. The scum, or the cream, depending on your viewpoint, always rises to the top.

Research indicates that there is a maximum number of people to whom an individual can relate, somewhere between 120 and 200, depending on who you believe, this is effectively your “tribe”, and beyond that, empathy or whatever it is drops off very quickly. I think it will be some time before this evolves to cover greater numbers, tribalism will be with us for some time yet, unfortunately.

As I say, this latest doom-gloom BS is just another in a long line of such, all with one common purpose, to make people do as they’re told.

It’s really as simple as that. When this one passes, they’ll just invent another.

Yakaboo

“msher1,
you’re so funny with your ‘there’s bacteria everywhere, spray it with chemicals’ and ‘eek, it’s something natural, kill it’”

Where did I remotely say that? I said that given the nature of organic farming, if it is not done carefully, the produce can be contaminated by bacteria. I then said that I would rather trust pesticides than that every “organic” producer has in fact done things carefully. I gather that since “bacteria” are natural, you don’t mind them in your food. Food poisoning would then also be natural and should I assume you don’t mind that?

The list I have made is of useful things on this thread and the previous AGW thread that the arguers for AGW have said. These quotes can be used elsewhere to show the thinking of the AGW crowd. Your own words are the best argument against the proposed AGW policies. Sorry if you don’t like being quoted.

_________________

Catweazle

I too was behind the old Iron Curtain. Moscow and Leningrad in the late 60’s. Grim, no cars, no goods (except in the dollar stores for diplomats and foreign visitors), shabbily dressed people with dour expressions.

The Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (obviously now St. Petersburg): Gorgeous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. Nothing done to protect them. Paintings in direct sunlight, and even a couple where doors could be flung open (and were) and doorknobs could hit them. This told me everything I needed to know about Soviet manufacturing (what there was of it).

Yakaboo

No, I didn’t say you were a Cuban spy. You praised the allotment system of growing food in Cuba. I said if you liked Cuba so much, go live there. I am careful with words, you are not.

Re hippie communes with broadband. The ultimate hypocrisy. Broadband was invented in a capitalist system and can only be manufactured/supported by an industrialized society.

You keep saying things I can add to my list.

crownarmourer – I appreciate the humour, but I’m not talking about changing human nature, you’re not reading what I say properly. I’m saying that human nature is OK – it’s the system we need to change.

Catweazle (et al) – do you agree that the ecology of this planet is what we rely on for our survival? if I can provide information that shows that ecology is being irreparably damaged, in ways that could have implications for our survival, would that interest you at all, as it seems that you have some pretty good genes going forward there?
And you said ‘… blah blah…. tribalism ….. unfortunately’. That’s not a direct quote obviously, but you find tribalism unfortunate. So do I. That’s encouraging. So we should talk about how to get rid of it. And I remind you again of the millions given to famine victims by ordinary people.

msher1 – which harmful bacteria do you think might be in organic food?
I know you didn’t say I was a Cuban spy, I was joking. It’s humour, you know – one person says…., oh never mind – put it on your list.
‘if you like Cuba so much, go and live there’ – are you training to be a ’shock jock’ or whatever you call them over there, or are you 12? I praised allotments in Britain not Cuba. You seized on the word Cuba and assumed I’m a commie. Why do I have to keep repeating myself?
And I’m not talking about getting rid of all industries. That’s not even on the agenda. I’m talking about real democracy. I know you’re not really 12, but you don’t really think we live in democracies do you, any more than they did in Russia when you were there? Liberal ‘democracy’ isn’t the worst system ever invented (although what do you think a Russian would say if you took him on a tour round Compton? or Haiti?), but we can do so much better.

Do you honestly not get what I’m saying folks. I want to debate. I’m not an AGW activist, and I don’t have a particular agenda. I just have some ideas that I’d like to run past a critical audience. I’m on the point of giving up though, because although you’d certainly be critical, I’m not sure you’d get it.

yakaboo

No, i do not think we live in democracies. I think business interests influence policy outcomes through huge campaign donations and outright bribes. I think labor unions influence policy outcomes through huge campaign donations and outright bribes. I think foreign countries influence things by (disguised) campaign contributions and outright bribes. I think unions and the left influence elections throughout outright vote fraud to get elections of liberal politicians elected. Most recent example, being the all important 60th seat in the Senate just barely win by leftist Al Franken.

I think occasionally the population as a whole can raise enough of an uproar to stop or influence policies. I saw the left do that to make America lose the VietNam War and let communism take South VietNam and kill millions. I saw that a couple of years ago when both President Bush and Congress wanted to adopt an immigation plan that the public, including myself, did not want. I think the current Congress (with a leftist majority) may decide to ignore popular opposition to their healthcare reform legislation and to cap and trade when that comes up in the Senate.

But I also think that if the left has not yet been successful in rigging all elections (i.e., putting in place leftist officials who oversee the vote), the public can affect things by which candidates they vote for.

So I think the U.S., which is all I can speak about, has been a semi-democracy. I don’t know what it is now.

yakaboo – you wouldn’t recognize a system e.g. the aerospace supply chain, in our modern industrial society if it reared up and bit you on the nose.

How are you going to change what you cannot see?

msher1,
first time you’ve engaged. your anger is stopping you debating. and I agree with a lot you said. not your definition of ‘left’ though. there are no anti-capitalists in congress, and capitalism of any flavour – liberal or conservative – is not left. same in the UK – both labour and the conservatives (and the liberals, which doesn’t mean the same as over there) are right-wing.
and as I don’t think anything that’s ever called itself communism is any better or any worse than capitalism, the US should have left Vietnam well alone to follow it’s own path, and not napalmed the shit out of south-east asia.
but anyway, if you’re still listening, I don’t believe in democracy. Plato was right, pure democracy is pure idiocy. think of the best-selling newspapers and magazines in your country, I’m sure it’s the same as in mine. think of the most popular tv programmes. there will always be a mainstream who should be led. my mother, for example, shouldn’t have the vote. she has no idea what she’s voting for. but put her in a room with, say, 15 people, and she’ll know who to trust, who has the interests of everyone at heart, not just themselves. she’ll know who’s genuine. that’s the basis of my idea. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the transition town movement in the UK. And if you had, you certainly wouldn’t agree with their motives. but that’s not the point. It’s the way they’ve brought people together in cities, towns and villages – that’s the way to do it. To find the best people, and send them up to the next level. Face-to-face contact all the way, choosing on the basis of incorruptibility, compassion and intelligence. One or two of those qualities isn’t enough. But we’re jumping ahead. The first thing is to check whether the extinction rate is high enough to be causing alarm. but I’m going to bed now.

troll somewhere else sherlock.

msher1 I think your thoughts on bacteria come from the use of slurry a nice euphemism for spraying liquefied cow sh*t on crops, this can lead to problems with e coli.
If they don’t follow the rules.
Another source of contamination stems from bad hygiene from migrant farm workers and in processing plants, oh and greedy owners ignoring the health and safety rules.
yakaboo Vietnam is a really complicated problem stemming mostly from the second world war, and was not Americas fault, the blame can shared amongst America, the USSR and China interfering in what should have been a purely internal issue, Ho Chi Min only turned to communism after being rebuffed by the USA he was a nationalist but I’m sure if things had worked out better he would have accepted a constitutional monarchy and some form of democracy. It did not help that he and President Diem made the whole issue personal. I’m not saying that Ho Chi Min was a nice man in the slightest and yes he was responsible for millions of deaths, just history could have been different.

the system I’m advocating is actually more democratic than any current system, but it’s not pure democracy. We almost have the capability to have referenda on every single issue, now that almost everyone has a mobile phone – in the west that is, but poor countries are catching up, as they leapfrog landlines completely, and steal the wires anyway.
But I don’t think pure democracy / referenda is a good idea. the masses are voluntarily ignorant, and always will be. We’d have homosexuality illegal again before you know it, celebrities would run the show, and there would be more localised religious intolerance, especially via islam, than there already is.
We just have to get the best people steering.

But meanwhile, I’d like to disagree with your assumption that people are happy in an industrialised, capitalist world. I see evidence everywhere that people are very unhappy indeed. Debt, commuting, boring work, alienation, not knowing neighbours, and a nagging feeling that there has to be more to life than this. Lots of ‘alternatives’ are springing up, many of which are money-making scams (the ’secret’, ‘what the bleep’ ‘the field’ etc.). Please don’t take that to mean I’d prefer a ‘communist’ system. I wouldn’t. that would be even worse. I used to work in eastern europe. Let’s move on.

Check out Lammas – http://www.lammas.org.uk – an incredible precedent. They’ve worked inside the system, co-operating with their local planners in Wales. They bought a 150-acre farm, allocated half of it as woodland, and split the rest into smallholdings. in the UK there are 2 kinds of land. development land, expensive, probably cornered by developers or supermarkets anyway, but you can build on it; and agricultural land, cheap, but no way you can live on it.
the time is ripe for change in the UK. government targets to build thousands of houses in every county. they applied for people to build and live on their smallholdings (9 at the moment), as long as they abided by strict eco-criteria, regarding building materials, size of house, off-grid energy and water, dealing with own waste, planting trees, and obtaining 75% of household needs from the land (they can still get a part-time job for little luxuries, that aren’t considered ‘needs’). They got permission. a fantastic precedent. their waiting list was as long as your arm. there will be more developments like this. if your argument is that they we can’t grow enough food like this, I disagree. members had to submit detailed business plans, they use permaculture techniques that have increased yields in many parts of the world – http://www.permaculture.org.uk/. it has its critics, but they are listening. it’s constantly changing. and mixed, intensively-farmed smallholdings tend to produce more food per hectare than large monocultures, as well as damaging ecology far less – http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/06/10/small-is-bountiful/ . you may also say that this kind of life would only appeal to a small minority. I disagree. I think that if land was available (as it would be if this precedent led to a new land-use category), a million would do it immediately. after their friends and family saw their lifestyles, another million would follow immediately, and we might end up with 10 million in the UK. That’s not everyone, but there’s lots more to do as well. As this system grows, it will produce many times that number of local, interesting, beneficial, non-damaging and real jobs.
And – allotments (we’re in the UK here, remember) are like gold dust – there are enormous waiting lists. If this country wasn’t so overcrowded there would be lots more people doing it. As I said, some of the most popular tv programmes, books etc in this country are about growing and cooking your own, real food – river cottage, jimmy’s farm, that bloke in scotland.
Vested interests might want to stop it of course, but I don’t think they would be able to.
It’s not right or left. It doesn’t shore up corporate or state power, it helps reduce it. It doesn’t require the crap that advertisers are pushing, and it doesn’t require taxpayers money.
I think there’s scope for a left/right alliance on this. Tell me why I’m wrong, if you think I am, and I’ll think about it.

yakaboo on Oct 2nd, 2009 at 10:24 pm
“do you agree that the ecology of this planet is what we rely on for our survival?

Of course I do. I have stated as much in previous posts.

“if I can provide information that shows that ecology is being irreparably damaged, in ways that could have implications for our survival

Actually, I rather think that I can demonstrate to YOU that the ecosphere is being damaged in ways (not irreparably, by any means, you appear to credit the human race with superhuman abilities, if we were to disappear tomorrow, in a blink of an eye in geological time scales, it would be as if we had never existed) that absolutely beyond all doubt pose very grave threats to our survival, many of these threats being ones that you are in fact unaware of.

It’s just that CO2 levels are not one of them.

Try xenoestrogens (mostly organic phthalates used in plastics, an area I have personal experience of incidentally) and their effect on the reproductory cycle, for example. Or the effect of excess nitrates in the sea, which enourage the growth of organisms close to the surface, hence restricting the penetration of light to the lower levels and reducing the growth of these organisms, thus removing an important link from the food chain.

As a matter of interest, there was a problem with detergents a number of years ago, a very serious problem indeed. It barely registered on the public awareness, and it was very rapidly scotched by international co-operation, even the USSR an the ChiComs got their arses into gear and co-operated with the West to effect a solution. Again, I was in the industry at the time, otherwise i would never have been aware of it.

Another reason I am sceptical of the present AGW scare, I happen to have first-hand knowledge of the fact that if there really is an immediate problem, it gets fixed – quick.

Once again, you appear to have some notion that because I oppose the AGW brigade, I have no concern for the rest of the ecosphere. I have no idea why this should be, I have attempted to disabuse you of this notion before, more than once.

“And I remind you again of the millions given to famine victims by ordinary people.”

Myself included. And your point is?

I think you suffer from binary thinking, “Exclusive OR” in computer programming terms, Black and White”, “Us and THEM” with no continuum in between.

A person is either a fully-committed Hard Left muesli-knitting Greeny or an evil planet-raping Capitalist SUV-driving monster.

You need to think about that.

“both labour and the conservatives (and the liberals, which doesn’t mean the same as over there) are right-wing.”

They’re not. By absolute political standards they are fairly hard Left, even the modern Conservatives. The last Right-wing government we had in the UK was probably Gladstone’s Liberals.

“I don’t think anything that’s ever called itself communism is any better or any worse than capitalism”

Having seen both, I can assure you, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Your political ideas are incredibly naive. I remarked earlier, it’s all down to human nature, the scum – or the cream – will always float to the top, the point of democracy is that it permits a certain amount of control over that particular phenomenon.

Take Adolf Hitler. The most charismatic politician and the most effective orator of the Twentieth Century. And what a mess he made.

His counterpart, Winston Churchill, was the man for the time, again a superb orator and an exceptional leader, but sure as Hell I wouldn’t have wanted him as a dictator with supreme power, he would have been a disaster.

But unlike Hitler, he wasn’t permitted to. We used his leadership to resolve a crisis, and then politely replaced him with a Prime minister we considered more suitable. It was a pity that the Germans couldn’t have done the same with Hitler after he had successfully dragged Germany out of the Great Depression.

As Churchill himself said, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.�

I believe he was right.

Catweazle,
Thank you – very interesting.
It would be a shame to eliminate the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, and maybe all of it, don’t you think? Everything you or anyone else has ever done, said or thought would become completely pointless. Yes, I know, it might all be pointless anyway, but evolution could prove differently – we don’t know. We’re all agnostics, whether we know it or not.

You are right (although slightly annoying) to say I didn’t know about xenoestrogens. Most threats are indirect – they damage ecology by removing species, and we rely on ecology. But this is a direct one – I’ll look into it. Thank you. Nitrates is the usual indirect kind.

You say: ‘you appear to have some notion that because I oppose the AGW brigade, I have no concern for the rest of the ecosphere.’
No I don’t.

I said: ‘I don’t think anything that’s ever called itself communism is any better or any worse than capitalism’
You say: ‘Having seen both, I can assure you, you couldn’t be more wrong.’
But: You’re talking from the standpoint of privilege. Millions of people at the gutter end of capitalism wouldn’t agree with you. Haiti is a ‘capitalist’ country. Fancy being Haitian? And lots of Russians preferred life under communism than under capitalist oligarchs.
But as I said: ‘Please don’t take that to mean I’d prefer a ‘communist’ system. I wouldn’t. that would be even worse. I used to work in eastern europe. Let’s move on.’

You say: ‘Your political ideas are incredibly naive.’
I called you pompous earlier, but I don’t want to get back into name-calling. It’s the ideas I’m interested in. Naive is exactly what they would have called anyone calling for the end of slavery, votes for women, votes at all. You’ve said that our very existence is under threat. The opposite is defeatism. I’d rather be naive.

Anyway, was that your summary of all the things I posted earlier? That it? did you read / think about any of it?

I said: ‘And I remind you again of the millions given to famine victims by ordinary people.’
You say: ‘Myself included. And your point is?’
My point is humans are largely good. Was it you or crownarmourer who said they weren’t?

Now we get onto something else that is interesting for me. Your definition of right and left. It’s the same with msher1. You both label certain capitalists left. I find that strange. Democrats and the Labour party are capitalist parties. I would call the old soviet union left, I would call Cuba left. but not any western politicians. It sort of indicates that both you and msher1 would not consider yourselves right-wing, but in the centre, which I find a little ludicrous. You don’t think it’s a case of capitalism right / communism left? You think the centre is somewhere inside capitalism? I think the old left/right paths are equally damaging, socially and ecologically.
And when you say ‘greeny’, what do you mean? you say that you are concerned about what’s happening to ecology – are you saying that doesn’t make you a ‘greeny’, because I’m sure you wouldn’t label yourself ‘hard left’.

If this is what you mean by binary thinking, I suppose you’re right. but I don’t think it applies to people, who are a strange mix of libertarian v authoritarian and individual v collective. Have you seen political compass by the way. You might find it interesting – http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Wow, I’ve just noticed your comment that the conservative party is hard left. I’m a bit lost for words with that one. Are your politics fascist? That isn’t meant as an insult, I’m just confused.

Hmmmm. not sure I agree with your point that ‘democracy’ has any control over anything. Not that there’s ever been a real democracy, anywhere. We live in a plutocracy.

So thank you for reminding me that some threats to humans are direct rather than via ecology, and that people’s ideas of left and right are very different. Take the political compass test – go on. I’m not used to debating with people with your views, so it’s very interesting. I’m guessing you think that makes me left wing, but I’ve tried to explain above that my ideas are neither left nor right, and could appeal to both.

‘I believe he was right.’
me too – at least we can discuss alternative systems under this one.

Yakaboo

“and as I don’t think anything that’s ever called itself communism is any better or any worse than capitalism”

Oh I don’t know about that. Point out where capitalism has murdered millions of its own citizens to acheive its ideological goal. Point out an equivalent of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min or Mao.

Also, empirically, people in communist countries have been poor and lived in squalor. Even though it might not be fair that there are people much richer than others, capitalism has still made everybody have the highest standard of living. What is considered “poor” in the U.S. would have been considered average in the Soviet Union and may be better than average in present day Cuba. As i wrote above, I was in the Soviet Union. The Western capitalist, or at least social democrat, countries were prosperous and Moscow and Leningrad were not.

And one thing about this unfair thing in capitalism of having the rich: countless products and services that turn out to benefit society are first only affordable by the rich. They use the product or service in its beginning form. Their use allows the creators of the product or service to refine and improve it. It gets cheaper and then the upper middle class can afford it, then everybody. There are so many things that would not be available if there had not been a rich class. That includes computers. Here is a specific example I can give from personal experience. I remember when the first calculaters were on the market. This was in the 1970’s. They were made by a company called “Bowmar” and cost $600, a lot of money then. Only a very few people had them. I remember being in meetings where maybe one, possibly two, people had them. I didn’t want to spend money on one. It was too expensive to be worth it to me. Well, today calculaters can be bought for a few dollars and everybody can afford them. Had there been no rich, there would be no calculaters available today with everybody. Same story with huge number of products and services. Those products and services were not available in the communists countries. The Soviet elite purchased them abroad.

re letting Viet Nam take its own course. Yes, it would have been enveloped by communism sooner. Ask the South Koreans whether they would have wanted President Truman to let things in Korea take their own course.

Re not agreeing with democracy: I agree with that. People who do not follow politics and the issues should not vote. I have not always voted, or refrained from voting on particular issues as i was not informed and would not have known how to vote. I disagree with the “Get out the vote” efforts. Those are always aimed at getting poor voters who know nothing about issues or candidates to vote for the Dems. Those that care about politics and know about the issues and candidates do not need to be “got out.”

Re my being angry: No, I have been contemptous. I loathe and have contempt for the hypocrisy of hippie communities or back-to-nature types lecturing on the righteoous of their way of life – while theu use broadband for their internet connections on their computers. As I have said several times before on this thread: exactly how will you get your computers and broadband if there is not an industial society. Or the cars that you drove to get to the commune? I don’t believe you have answered that.

Whether you are sincere in your beliefs or not, and I don’t necessarily know that you are – your ideas simply do not work. Utopians never look at reality. And utopians when they get power become the mass murderers. Hitler had his utopia – the Aryian society. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min and Castro had theirs. All their societies turned out to be genocical and tyrannical disasters.

The AGW people will be tyrannical too. So I am not angry. I just understand you and understand that you are the mortal enemy of freedom and I oppose you. And incidentally, I doubt that even you believe everything you have said.

What I have found interesting is all the AGW true believers who are arguing at length about the dire catastrophe that is going to happen – when you press and press them, they eventually reveal either that they do not care about democracy and they think the government should force whatever it wants on the population, or like you, you really don’t like capitalism and that’s what you want to change.

You’re talking about the privileged part of capitalism. there’s a whole iceberg of desperately poor people in the rest of the world propping up your privilege. don’t you care about them? but god you’re right about communism, the slimeballs got to the top, as they have in capitalism, and they were worse – you’re right about that too. but most of humanity is in a desperate situation, and most of them are under capitalism. communism has had it.

but what did you think of the Lammas idea about getting the land back off the corporates and states into the hands of ordinary people?

and we still haven’t talked about how serious the extinction rate is. if it’s as serious as I think it is, we have to introduce a steady-state system, and that ain’t capitalism or communism.

I did answer the hippie thing. a steady-state economy does not require a stone age society. it’s not de-industrialised, it’s just not industrialised to the point that ecology can’t cope. does that answer your point?

Why would you think I’m not sincere? what do you think I’m doing on this blog, where I get abused for a day and a half before anyone even engages with me properly? and you’re still abusing me, telling me I want to destroy freedom, ffs! I want to test my ideas with people I assume are going to be hostile to them (and I was right in my assumption, bloody hell). But I don’t see why you should be hostile to them, if you really listen and think about them. My ideas are the opposite of utopian. utopians have a plan. what I’m saying is, let’s debate a system that gets the best people to the top – the einsteins, the gandhis (is that a bad example for you?). The most intelligent, the least corruptible, the most compassionate. Then they can make the plan. not us. but there has to be a plan. it’s insane to leave our evolutionary progress in the hands of an amoral and unintelligent market, or an amoral and unintelligent politburo. do you not get it? really? do you still think I’m a stalinist, want to take people’s freedom away?

do the blogs on the telegraph not close then?

Actually, I suppose the initial aggression was because of my pro-AGW comments. I can see why you think that’s unforgiveable. I was just winding James up, because he’s a cocky bastard in the blurb at the top of his article. I really don’t know, and don’t have a strong opinion. It’s a side-show for me. I’d rather get the most intelligent and trusted people in charge, and they can judge the evidence from both sides.

yakaboo no one doubts your convictions we just happen to disagree with you that’s all. You have your arguments we have ours except of course we believe we are right and are trying to convince you of the errors of your ways on scientific, economic and political grounds if not moral and ethical ones.
msher1 Ho chi Min was a nationalist and not a communist he just wore those clothes to get communist backing. Saw an interesting program on the history of the Vietnam war where in the late 40’s two CIA guys recommended to Truman your hero that we should back this man before anyone else did. He rejected the advice prior to that Ho Chi Min wanted a constitution based on the USA one. It could have been later and with Ike but not cetain.
Saying this I am not condoning anything he did after this point, too many people died for that one.

yakaboo no one doubts your convictions we just happen to disagree with you that’s all. You have your arguments we have ours except of course we believe we are right and are trying to convince you of the errors of your ways on scientific, economic and political grounds if not moral and ethical ones.
msher1 Ho chi Min was a nationalist and not a communist he just wore those clothes to get communist backing. Saw an interesting program on the history of the Vietnam war where in the late 40’s two CIA guys recommended to Truman your hero that we should back this man before anyone else did. He rejected the advice prior to that Ho Chi Min wanted a constitution based on the USA one. It could have been later and with Ike but not cetain.
Saying this I am not condoning anything he did after this point, too many people died for that one. No one can make up excuses for that.

yakaboo..My point is humans are largely good. Was it you or crownarmourer who said they weren’t?
Nope we arn’t we are mostly self interested hairless apes, you dream of bonoboism whereas we are chimps.
If chimps could cross the congo then say goodbye to the bonobos.
Bonobos are a hippy love fest gone wild, whereas chimps are brutal, self interested, genocidal, infanticidal maniacs.
You are an Eloi me I’m a Morlock.

crownarmourer,
if humans really are at heart, brutal, self-interested, genocidal maniacs then we have a future of destruction, war and almost certain extinction ahead of us. and rightly so.
and if that really is the case, why are we on a blog debating? nothing matters. AGW? who cares, we’re not worth saving anyway. why the false compassion about Africans getting fresh water? or freedom? brutal, self-interested, genocidal maniacs shouldn’t be free, they should be in cages.
but I don’t think we are. would you give me a drink from your water bottle on the life raft, if I didn’t have any?
but as we haven’t even got past first base, I don’t know which of my ideas you’re trying to disabuse me of. I don’t think you’ve read my posts properly.

and msher1 does doubt my sincerity.

@yakaboo:
“You’re talking about the privileged part of capitalism. there’s a whole iceberg of desperately poor people in the rest of the world propping up your privilege. don’t you care about them?”

No – fuck ‘em.

that’s refreshingly honest. Plus it tends to back up crowarmourers theory.
But I don’t think most people are like that.
Maybe he wouldn’t give me any water in the life raft. Then first opportunity I’d push him overboard the and steal his water.
btw crowarmourer, you say that most people are nasty. are you including yourself? do you think fuck ‘em?

yakaboo, for years I was always nice and polite and expected the best of people, gradually I have to realised that people are selfish even altruism is a selfish act, as is being nice because ultimately you are expecting some reward or payback later.
Anyhow I’m an outsider looking in at the whole human race, not overly impressed with 90% of it.
As for sharing water of course I would share, got to keep you fresh until the food runs out. Practicality is my middle name, blame my parents silly thing to be called.
Am I a self interested individual no better than the rest I suppose so but at least I’m honest with myself.
So yep f**k em.

yakaboo on Oct 3rd, 2009 at 11:52 pm
“but what did you think of the Lammas idea about getting the land back off the corporates and states into the hands of ordinary people?”

Within twelve months the vast majority of it would have reverted back to ownership of a tiny number of people, and huge numbers would have starved to death. Zimbabwe mean anything to you? Or Pol Pot’s Cambodia?

In any case, why would I want a big lump of land, I don’t want to be a subsistence farmer, and nor do most other people I know.

“and we still haven’t talked about how serious the extinction rate is. if it’s as serious as I think it is”

It isn’t. Just another scare story, similar to the one about the polar bears.

As to Left/Right wing, Basically, Left wing = More State interference and authoritarianism, high taxation. Right wing = Libertarian, ;low taxation, State deals with defence and as little else as possible.

Capitalism may be either, it is a different axis on the graph.

let’s debate a system that gets the best people to the top – the einsteins, the gandhis (is that a bad example for you?). The most intelligent, the least corruptible, the most compassionate.

Actually, that’s pretty much what we try to do under the current system, that’s why in most democracies we have maximum terms that any particular adminstration can rule for.

Do you have some infallible method for finding these paragons?

As for Einstein, he was a theoretical mathematician. His personal life was a mess. And Ghandi, although personally a pacifist, was responsible for some millions of deaths resulting from Partition.

The blunt fact is that there are too many of us for the Earth’s eco systems to sustainably support.

Those who are enjoying a western life style aren’t going to voluntarily move into mud huts and lower their standard of living so that countless millions of poor can increase theirs. Not without conflict. That’s just the way it is. There’s always a fight for diminishing resources – just as in the animal kingdom.

The Chinese have already seen this – that’s why they’re busily and quietly bagging all the resources they can get their hands on. For example, they have virtually all the rare earths needed for mobile phones and solar panels …. not to mention huge tracts of land in Africa to grow food …

In my opinion, the world’s population needs to be about 4 billion fewer for 2.5 billion to live in a sustainable western lifestyle.

We as a species have ducked the opportunity to address our own fecundity and have a sustainable future so it will most likely happen as a result of resource failure – something major like the food or water system is going to fail in a big way or some natural disaster that levels China and India say …

Bleak isn’t it – but it is logical.

As Stalin never put it “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic”

Catweazle,
the only way land ‘reverted’ to a tiny minority in the first place was force. And the only way it would happen in future is by force, which isn’t at all unfeasible.

who’s talking about you having a smallholding? If you don’t want one, don’t have one. almost everyone I know would love one. we move in different circles.

Your analysis of left and right is wrong. Left and right is one axis on the graph you’re talking about, authoritarianism v libertarianism is the other.

And your criticisms of the left – you forgot: left wing thinking is often utopian, with little grip on reality; when utopian thinkers get into positions of power, it often means death for millions who get in the way of that utopian vision; the left are happy to pay unemployment benefits even when a country is a magnet for people from all over the world who come for work; left-wing governments tend to grow big, and need to tax ordinary people to pay for it; whatever the idealistic origins of left-wing governments, eventually corrupt people get to the top, bringing inequality and totalitarianism; organising all that state apparatus is a waste of resources – the market can allocate resources much more efficiently and give better incentives, so capitalism will always defeat communism given time.

All of which I agree with.

However, capitalism ensures that: the worst values (ruthlessness, greed) are rewarded most, and the worst people get to the top; you can’t have democracy because money skews it (msher1 understands this clearly, but you don’t seem to); growth will kill us in the end (nobody here gets this); you have multi-billionaires along with half the world on $2 a day, which is morally bankrupt (although PaulW and crowarmourer have already given a concise 2-word response to this); all aspects of life become commercialised and overdeveloped, ugly, crass and boring; there’s always boom and bust, and during bust, the poorest take the hit (again, see PaulW and crowarmourer)

Either we fight the cold war to the death (for all of us), or we talk about a better system. The left are prepared to talk, because they genuinely (if often misguidedly) want a better system. I’ve had nothing but insults and refusal to debate here. My feeling was that the right are not interested in a better system, they just want to maintain their privilege, and my experiences on this blog have certainly reinforced that.
I’ve said I’d like to debate ways to get the best people to the top, and I have some ideas, but you certainly won’t listen, any more than you’ve listened to anything else I’ve said. I have to keep repeating myself.
But my feeling is that you are comfortable. You know that in global terms you are very, very privileged, and you don’t want anything rocking the boat.

PaulW and crowarmourer have stated what I believe is the right’s position very clearly – fuck ‘em.

I agree with PaulW’s ideas on population.

@yakaboo
You’ll never get a better system. And its not because the right don’t want one.

yakaboo you will get your wish, probably be a massive plague that will cull about 1/3 of the population anyhow. Then plenty to go round.

that’s what they said about all the previous systems. lack of imagination and defence of privilege are the main drivers here. you can see it on the faces of telegraph readers whenever you’re unfortunate enough to come across one.

yes, just like there was plenty to go round 200 years ago, when there was 1/6 of the current world population.

yakaboo calm down, they are probably working on a vaccine now for the H1N1 virus that will probably make people sterile or liable to other viruses, so be a good chap and take the vaccine when it’s available in your area. Don’t know what your worried about we Dec 21st 2012 coming up so it won’t matter anyhow.

yakaboo on Oct 5th, 2009 at 8:34 am
“who’s talking about you having a smallholding? If you don’t want one, don’t have one. almost everyone I know would love one. we move in different circles.”

Funnily enough, quite a number of my friends and acquaintances and clients are smallholders. That’s how it is around where I live.

They work harder and longer than any other people I know, for the least rewards.

I think it very unlikely indeed that you or your friends would last much beyond the first lambing time.

“all aspects of life become commercialised and overdeveloped, ugly, crass and boring”

I don’t consider my life to be ugly, crass and boring, very much the opposite, in fact.

“But my feeling is that you are comfortable. You know that in global terms you are very, very privileged, and you don’t want anything rocking the boat.”

And that is the truest thing you have said in the entire thread. Of course we don’t want anyone rocking the boat!

Do you think we’re deranged or something?

Crown of Creation, me, and very grateful for the privilege, and sure as Hell not about to feel guilty about it!

You complain about keeping repeating yourself, well, what about the rest of us?

How many times have I said “the scum – or the cream, depending on your viewpoint – always floats to the top”?
That is eternal. But in fact, there has never been a time when a greater percentage of the World’s population had access to the basic necessities of life, drinkable water, sufficient nourishment, basic medical care, etc., etc. The majority of which comes about as a result of the beneficence of those filthy Capitalist nations that you hate claim to hate so much.

Paradoxically, that is what has caused the population explosion that is about to cause some sort of crisis.

Probably the time when we sealed our fate was when we started to seriously combat infant mortality. The road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

You see, this isn’t the first time I’ve had this discussion, in fact once upon a time I was conducting it from your side, believe it or not. I’m living breathing (just) proof that if you can remember the sex’n'drugs’n'rock’n'roll 1970s you can’t have been trying hard enough. My memory of it is poor in the extreme, one or two bits stand out, Lynrd Skynrd’s “Freebird” at Knebworth in the glorious summer of 1976, for example, but most of it is very hazy indeed.

But then reality intervened (amongst other things, the bill for all that “free” sex appeared – about eight and a half pounds of it), I got a family, a mortgage, all the usual, and my perception of the World changed, absolutely and irreversibly.

So now I have a couple of businesses to amuse myself with, a bit of property to absorb any profits I might make, and as you observe, I’m comfortable.

I’m glad I did what I did in my youth, I appreciate that I’m lucky to get away with quite a lot of it, especially the period when I did a lot of competition motor cycling – certain bits of me ache something rotten in cold wet weather – but it was not possible for it to continue for ever, no matter how magical it might have appeared at the time.

But I see things different now, and I most definitely don’t share your pessimism, one thing I’ve learned is that there is no limit to human ingenuity, imagination and above all ability to overcome problems, but only when we really, really have to, and we’re not there yet.

When we are, I have considerable confidence in our ability to rake our chestnuts out of the fire.

And until then, I’ll enjoy having floated to the top!

don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs. I’ve lived on a smallholding for 13 years. I know what’s involved. so do lots of my friends.
your comfort is a fluke of birth.
god this is a boring site.

yakaboo please move on to more important topics such as wheel clamping.

I’ve lived on a smallholding for 13 years. I know what’s involved. so do lots of my friends.

This wouldn’t be what, back in the 1970s we called “SS on the SS”, ie “Self Sufficiency on the Social Security”, would it? How many lambs did your ewes drop last season, as a matter of interest?

your comfort is a fluke of birth.

As is yours, yakaboo. You do realise that, by any absolute standard, you too are in the very highest comfort and security percentile of all the humans that have ever existed on this planet through all of recorded history?

Further, had I wished, I could quite easily have acquired, say, a smack habit that would have ensured that I spent the rest of my life crawling about in crap bedsits sponging off the taxpayer, never raising a finger except to rob another car stereo to support my habit, mugging the odd granny for her pension and all that lowlife scumbag stuff, but instead I chose to utilise my intelligence and education to put a little back into the society that took care of me throughout my formative years, and to ensure that my declining years were not too uncomfortable?

god this is a boring site.
No comment!

Catweazle I think that’s another one scared off from ever attempting to argue here.

CW – only 24 lambs (we’ve only got a few acres), but we’ve got pigs, chickens, orchards and gardens too, and we heat our place with wood, so lots of chainsawing and splitting. no benefits – we’ve both got part-time jobs too. not materialistic (we try and stay within a one-planet footprint, but I’m guessing that the concept of eco-footprints will be ridiculed here), but we consider ourselves rich. I’m up to my elbow in sheep plenty of times each march.
crownarmourer,
scared? with intellectual giants like you?
I don’t think you do irony, but you are joking, aren’t you?
Look, I wanted to test my ideas, and it’s not working, as I’m getting nothing but personal attacks, questioning my sincerity, I’m alright jack, fuck ‘em, humans are all bastards, it’s impossible to change anyway, we’re all doomed, what problems? or, you can’t try and introduce new ideas to me, because if you do, you must be a hippie / commie / psychopath.
It’s like trying to debate with children. I’m still open-minded on the AGW thing, but are you surprised that you’re not taken seriously?

Look, I wanted to test my ideas, and it’s not working

What ideas?

So far you have postulated some sort of notion that we should choose rulers who fulfill certain criteria, and I responded that we do, and it’s called democracy, it may not be perfect, but it’s the best we’ve had up to now, and it seems to be catching on.

Oh, and that we eschew braindead activities such as recreational shopping and sleb worship, and get plenty of fresh air, exercise and sex, hardly contentious, really. Oh, and attempt to keep our electricity and gas bills (which you refer to as our eco-footptint) within reason.

Got any more?

Incidentally, I already observed that I am associated with the recycling industry, so have a personal stake in keeping the Planet’s resource use down. Also, I am investigating alternative fuels, so I am not an utterly unreconstructed planet raper.

not around until thursday now. does this thread never close?

yakaboo… never.

yakaboo I work for the paper industry in the USA and we try to recycle as much as possible and generate as much as possible our own energy, how, we use the sustainable forestry initiative to grow more trees than we use. Common sense and we do it to save us money, money is the driver and good stewardship for without the new trees we are out business.
A lot of companies do this as it saves them money.

catweazle, crownarmourer,
you’ve both said that the fairness or otherwise of the global economic system is not something that concerns you – with comments ranging from ‘that’s life’ to ‘fuck ‘em’, so we’re not going to communicate very well on a values level.
So what if we keep it purely on a logical level?
I think you both understand that global ecology is a huge web of species, all interconnected in complex ways.
Do you agree that there’s a limit to the number of species that can be removed from this web before there’s a risk of the whole edifice beginning to fall over, and snowballing until there’s only deserts, and perhaps cockroaches? Or at least very simple, hardy organisms (and of course Japanese Knotweed). Those closer to the top of the food chain would be at most risk – i.e. us.
The decline in the number of bees has been causing problems, as they are prime pollinators.
But what I’m talking about is an extinction event, of which there have been I think 6 that we know of, the largest one being at the end of the Permian, when 95% of species were lost, and it took 150 million years to get back to the same level of biodiversity.
If there was evidence that we were slipping into a major extinction event now, do you think that would be something that we would need to look at – i.e. what’s causing it, and what, if anything, we can do about it – as a matter of urgency?

“I think you both understand that global ecology is a huge web of species, all interconnected in complex ways.”

Of course. And amongst other properties, it appears to possess that of ‘graceful degradation’, with no ’single point of failure’. So soon as a niche is created by the removal of one species, another appears to replace it, in endless variety.

Every species is in constant conflict with its immediate neighbours, just watch plants striving to block out the light to the plants in their immediate vicinity. “Nature red in tooth and claw” and all that good stuff, you see. So, from that point of view, we appear to have some sort of mandate to eliminate our competitors. Or do you believe that we humans are in some way different to say, the rodents that are one of our major competitors for food, and that take around ten per cent of our crops, despite our best efforts to eradicate them?

“and snowballing until there’s only deserts”

Have you ever tried to eliminate ground elder? Or bamboo?

“If there was evidence that we were slipping into a major extinction event now, do you think that would be something that we would need to look at”

Of course, but there isn’t.

In any case, the Permian Extinction period spread over some five to eight million years, and took place in a number of pulses.

It is not clear to me that any action we humans could possibly take could produce a reaction of that magnitude and on that timescale. Even the detonation of every explosive device we possess, from penny bangers to nuclear warheads, wouldn’t produce as big a bang as Krakatoa. And even Krakatoa (which is building up steam right now, apparently) was a relatively minor event, as such things go. If – actually when – Yellowstone next erupts, it will render all these discussions utterly meaningless.

I think, yakaboo, that you massively overestimate the importance and influence of homo sapiens in the great scheme of things.

If we are truly concerned to ensure the long-term survival of our species, we absolutely must get off the planet, as soon as possible, and at whatever cost in blood and treasure. Hopefully, when the real, big threat appears, it will leave us with enough time to arrange that.

Because there’s nothing so certain as that this planet will, one day, become incapable of supporting the majority of species, whether from vulcanism, from meteor strike or something that we haven’t worked out yet. But I’m pretty certain it won’t be something of our doing. That’s not to say that we can’t make our own survival problematical, but even then I can’t see us becoming extinct altogether. In fact, from an absolutely cynical point of view, a big reduction in our numbers would probably be the best thing that happens to us since the Black Plague, which, as a result of creating a surfeit of material supplies – hence making it possible for a significant number of people to think useful thoughts, rather than having to spend all their time surviving, is credited by some with enabling the Rennaisance.

And anyway, even it knocks us back to the caves, in a millenium or ten, WE’LL BE BACK!!!!

CW,
First, yes there’s a theory that the Permian took place over millions of years, and there’s another that it took place over 10 thousand, and another that there were 2 events, 5 million years apart. Most researchers think that it was concentrated in the last million years of the Permian, and in geological terms that makes it a very sudden way to lose around 90% of species. The World Resources Institute considers a ‘relatively short’ period when it comes to mass extinctions to be 1-10 million years.

Yes, I suspect ground elder, bindweed and couch grass would survive a nuclear attack. That we agree on. and we also seem to agree that humans are an integral part of the earth’s ecology. damage it and you damage us. damage it too much and you destroy us.
Where we disagree is in the scale of the damage that’s currently happening, and humans’ role in it.

Krakatoa was a big bang, and it created fallout, but not nuclear fallout. And it wasn’t targeted. You know that we have enough nuclear warheads to wipe out humanity several times over. Yes, there’s a huge risk of nuclear war as more nations get them, and oil and other resources become more difficult to get.

But – my main point is that human activity is causing an extinction event that could snowball and take us with it.
- i.e. (in order of importance)
1. appropriation of habitats for housing, roads, industry and other infrastructure, mining and agriculture
2. toxification of air, soil and water
3. transporting invasive species around the world
4. direct removal of species

Or – knock us back to the stone age, as you say. If that happens, then it’s likely that the human story will be one of development to the stage where we have nuclear weapons, then back to the stone age again, ad nauseam. If that’s the case, then we cease to be an interesting species any more, and to be honest, I don’t care if we become extinct. Our value is what we might evolve to (is that something that you can relate to?).

Here are the views of some organisations. Would you say that they haven’t done their homework properly, or don’t know their subject?

UN Environment Programme – extinctions are at the highest rate for 65 million years (OK, not the Permian), and it’s due to human activity.

World Resources Institute – we are in a mass extinction event of the same magnitude as the previous 5 mass extinctions, and this time human activity is the cause

International Union for the Conservation of Nature – extinctions are currently around 1000-10,000 times the pre-human rate

Science Magazine 2002 (Pitman and Jorgensen) – current extinction rates are about 30,000 per year, and we’re looking at losing about half of all species by the end of this century

Harvard biologist EO Wilson (currently the world’s most respected biologist) – we’re losing 30,000 species per year

American Museum of Natural History – research found that 70% of biologists think that this is the fastest mass extinction ever

The Zoological Society of London – we’re currently losing around 1% of species per year

I could go on, but I’ve got work to do. The main point is that extinctions won’t just stop when half of the species have gone – they will accelerate. Do you think they are all wrong? Do you not see the risk? I think your ‘back to the stone-age’ is a bit optimistic actually. I can see why you would shrug and say ‘well, we’re not up to much as a species anyway’ – but our descendants could be. In 10 million years time (if we don’t become extinct), our descendants will be post-human, as different from us as our ancestors of 10 million years ago. We don’t know what they will be capable of, we don’t know their value. But surely they won’t be competitive and greedy – that is the way to the dustbin.
I’m not just focusing on you with this little campaign by the way, I’m just checking out what the right is thinking. Unfortunately, you’re the only one who has let me get this far. But I know how to approach the right now I think – what not to say at least.
What are your thoughts?

“You know that we have enough nuclear warheads to wipe out humanity several times over.”

No we haven’t.

Never had, even at the height of the Cold War. Just another piece of Lefty scaremongering is all.

Chernobyl was estimated to have released somewhere between one fifth and one third of the radiation likely to occur during a nuclear conflict, and the radiation released then was considerably more long-lasting than that associated with nuclear weaponry, so even that was probably an underestimate. As I remember, it’s currently credited with 40-50 deaths, with a possible long-term total of 4,000. Not good, but hardly spectacular, I wouldn’t have thought. And have you checked out what has happened to the area surrounding Chernobyl recently? You should, it might make you think a bit.

Consider also, the sum total of the megatonnage released by the tests of the 1960s through the 1990s considerably exceeds the megatonnage currently stored in the nuclear powers’ arsenals, the size of which has declined radically as the accuracy of the delivery systems has improved.

As for extinctions, 99.9% of the organisms that ever lived on the planet are now extinct. The most murderous organisms ever were the conifers, funnily enough, giant weeds that practically sterilised whole continents over a number of millions of years. How many organisms live in a forest of conifers, compared to a deciduous woodland, do you think?

“But surely they won’t be competitive and greedy – that is the way to the dustbin.”

Why? That hasn’t proved to be the case for the past ten million years, why should it suddenly change now, especially with the technology, such as genetics, for example, that is within our grasp?

God, you’re a pessimistic sort, aren’t you?

The “Original Sin” (or whatever it’s turned into in our post-Dawkins society) lot have really got their hooks into you, haven’t they? “Doom, doom, we’re all doomed!”

Well, with all due respect, I beg to differ. And that’s not because I don’t care, as a father, hopefully to become a grandfather, and even a great-grandfather, and so on ad infinitum, I have a considerable investment in the continued wellbeing of our species.

My feeling is, we should continue as we have in the past, by following a policy best described as “Masterly Inaction”. It’s usually worked for me!

I have to admit that I haven’t looked into the current capabilities of existing nuclear warheads, but my gut feeling is that you’re wrong.

I can now see you rolling your eyes in disbelief that I would go on a gut feeling. But that’s exactly what you’re doing when it comes to extinctions. Do you have nothing to say about the positions of the various organisations above? is it fingers in ears then? la-la-la, this isn’t happening?

The fact that 99.9% of all organisms that have ever existed are now extinct is irrelevant to my argument. It’s our particular organism I’m interested in.

My (favourite) uncle – Terry, who died yesterday, used to say that if society was an ocean-going liner, then he was stoking the engines (he owned several factories), and was therefore doing a very important job, second only to the captain. I agreed, but if that ocean-going liner was the Titanic, and I was trying to tell everyone that we were headed for an iceberg, then I was doing the most important job, and his job was not only unimportant, it was having a negative impact (no matter how comfortable he was, or how many jobs he was providing). He saw my point, but he wasn’t curious enough to look into extinctions, and their possible effect. His was a typical right-wing stance, it’s the same as yours, and I find it unbelievable.

You’ve mentioned before that you are privileged, and so you don’t want the boat rocked. I think this is the standard position of the right, and no matter what evidence is placed before them that we might be on the wrong path, they’re going to ignore it.

‘Pessimism’ doesn’t come into it. It would have been very stupid to ignore the ‘pessimists’ on the Titanic. To an intelligent alien, observing us on this planet, we must seem like bacteria in a petri dish, heedlessly destroying what we need to survive, by not controlling our activity. ‘Masterly inaction’ isn’t going to get us through.

You’ve obviously spent a long time researching climate change. What would it take for you to investigate extinctions? If they are at the levels that the above organisations say they are, then I’d say we’re headed for a crash. What would it take?

“no matter what evidence is placed before them that we might be on the wrong path, they’re going to ignore it.”

It is entirely beyond me why you would think that.

Do you truly believe that I don’t have as much of a stake in things as you? Quite possibly more, in fact, from a material viewpoint.

Aside from anything else, that which you describe as “The Right” doesn’t suffer from the total obsession of “The Left” with politics, and with having to put a political spin on every damn thing, to the extent of being utterly incapable of separating the political from the scientific.

“What would it take for you to investigate extinctions?”

I have.

“If they are at the levels that the above organisations say they are”

They aren’t.

“I’d say we’re headed for a crash.”

I wouldn’t.

Just look at the turnaround in the fortunes of the AGW brigade over the past month or so.

The New Scientist prints an article by one of the IPCC’s best modellers, Prof. Mojib Latif, stating that the climate has cooled for up to a decade, and might well continue to cool for a couple more, despite the continuing rise in CO2 concentration. If it does, that’s a stake through the heart of the CO2/temperature linkage.

The Crown Jewels of the AGW brigade, Mann’s Hockey Stick, has fallen on hard times, there is even talk of a scientific scandal, the measure of how hard it has fallen is that a week or so ago the IPCC quietly removed the graphic from the downloadable document on its web site.

On top of that, the BBC, yet another bastion of the AGW true believers, put an article on its web site that apparently had the most hits of any such article on that site ever, entitled “What happened to global warming?”. The BBC has now started calling that which only a month ago was a “consensus” as a “controversy”. That’s a it like the pope announcing that henceforth he was going to become a disciple of Richard Dawkins.

That’s how fast positions can change in the topsy-turvy world of apocalypse prediction.

Beware of experts, especially when they tell you how bad us naught humans are. I’ve been following their prognostications for around half a century, and I can’t remember them being right once. That’s what they get paid for, after all. How much of a wage do you think there would be for a tenured scientist that continued to insist that all was well for fifty years?

I’ll tell you – absolutely none!

‘“What would it take for you to investigate extinctions?â€�

I have.

“If they are at the levels that the above organisations say they are�

They aren’t.’

What did you find? Got links to reliable sources that contradict the above organisations?

“Got links to reliable sources that contradict the above organisations?”

Just consider the case of polar bears. I think that is pretty much representative of the state of affairs permeating the Extinction Industry.

Despite the gross misrepresentation of photographs of polar bears on small ice floes, it seems that polar bear numbers are currently increasing quite rapidly. Link: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/1626

I don’t believe that the extinction hysteria is confined to polar bears.

Your links all manifest the hyperbole that unfortunately infests these sites, emotion replaces science.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. That’s what drives support for all these special interest groups. Do you think they’d get any funds if they said anything else?

Sorry I am an optimist, I can’t help it. It’s based on experience, all this stuff comes round every generation, it gets boring!

I haven’t time to go through the long list of enviroparanoias, stop worrying, there’s nothing you can do anyway. It may be possible – just that public opinion could change policy in the West, but no way will the Chinese and Indians take a blind bit of notice.

OK, I hear what you’re saying. You’ll find peer-reviewed evidence to support your position, and I’ll find peer-reviewed evidence to support mine.
What would be the clincher I wonder? What evidence could either one of us provide that would make the other sit up and say ‘my god, you’re right, I will henceforth take a different viewpoint’. Extremely unlikely, I’d say.

So maybe it’s down to:
1. comprehensivity. karl popper-type footnotes covering all serious work on the subject.
2. persuasion. not everyone is going to read every detail of all relevant peer-reviewed work. very few in fact. in the end I suppose it’s down to trying to persuade people that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet without bringing about the bacteria/petri dish effect, and that the precautionary principle should be applied.

Having said that, your link was about declining numbers of one species, not extinctions, covering the whole range of species.

And – E.O. Wilson really is just about the most respected biologist in the world, and if he’s saying that extinction levels should worry us, then I think we should be worried – even if it’s just a precaution. I think the precautionary principle is useful when we’re talking about our survival.

But anyway, I think we’ve just about talked ourselves out on this subject, don’t you? It’s been very useful to me, thank you. I hope your optimism is vindicated in the end, I really do.

“But anyway, I think we’ve just about talked ourselves out on this subject, don’t you?”

Reckon so, yakaboo.

But just as a footnote, there is a considerable amount of remedial work in progress, you know.

For example, Costa Rica which contains 4% of the planets biodiversity has 25% of it total land area under conservation. Even an “anti-eco” country like the USA has doubled the area of land protected by land trusts and has over 1700 marine protected areas. And if you dig around a bit, you will find much much more is being done.

So despite the hysteria, there are plenty of unsung heroes out there doing their bit, mostly quietly and without any publicity.