This is a continuation of a remarkable thread that has now received 10,000 comments running to well over a million words. Unfortunately its size has become a problem and this is the reason for the move.
The history of the New Statesman thread goes back to December 2007 when Dr David Whitehouse wrote a very influential article for that publication posing the question Has Global Warming Stopped? Later, Mark Lynas, the magazine’s environment correspondent, wrote a furious reply, Has Global Warming Really Stopped?
By the time the New Statesman closed the blogs associated with these articles they had received just over 3000 comments, many from people who had become regular contributors to a wide-ranging discussion of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, its implications for public policy and the economy. At that stage I provided a new home for the discussion at Harmless Sky.
Comments are now closed on the old thread. If you want to refer to comments there then it is easy to do so by left-clicking on the comment number, selecting ‘Copy Link Location’ and then setting up a link in the normal way.
Here’s to the next 10,000 comments.
Useful links:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
The original Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs thread is here with 10,000 comments.
Another brilliant idea from global warming activists………..
Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110223-nuclear-war-winter-global-warming-environment-science-climate-change/
Sorry folks, further my 3697 I’ve just realised the actual date here is 27 Feb.
In my old age retirement, I loose track of time sometimes, and I was going by our ABC TV weatherman’s comments about the number of days over 30C this summer totalling 14.
Officially, summer still has a few forecast cool days to go until end February, and the BOM average T’s for summer I looked-up were (whoops) actually for 2002. The rest of it was right though.
Brute,
You’re claiming that Americans aren’t gullible, I guess, with your “pissing on my leg” quote?
Now let me see if I’ve got this right. Are you talking about the same US whose population pretty much swallowed hook, line, and sinker all that guff about the American involvement in Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia making the world safe for democracy? And continued to believe it everytime its been rehashed to justify every US military intervention since?
And you’re talking about the same America, getting on for half of whose population believe that the world is just a few thousand years old, and that ancient animals, presumably including sea reptiles, became extinct because there wasn’t room in Noah’s Ark?
55% believe in the imminence of the Rapture or second coming. 1 in 5 believe Elvis is still alive ! 1 in 3 believe President Obama is a secret Muslim. 1 in 3 believe that 9/11 was a CIA conspiracy.
Look , I’m not saying that you aren’t nice in a folksy sort of way, but Americans are not the obvious choice when it comes to giving out lessons in scepticism!
Interesting stuff Pete.
Please provide links to the studies involved that support your claims. I’d be interested to see them.
PeterM
You asked:
Of course not, Peter. How silly!
I am simply telling you that the past decade’s “unexplained lack of warming” (Trenberth’s “travesty”), has, indeed been a “travesty” for the IPCC hypothesis that AGW, caused principally by human CO2 emissions, has been the primary cause of past warming, and represents a serious potential threat to humanity and our environment.
It has shown us, in no uncertain terms, that there are other forces out there, which play a much more important role on our climate than human CO2 emissions (which were at record levels over the past decade).
Met Office has attributed this to “natural variability” (a.k.a. “natural forcing factors”), and this raises the serious question:
If natural forcing factors were strong enough to overwhelm a record increase in CO2 over the first decade of this century, why should we believe that they have been essentially insignificant in the past?
You have been unable to answer this question, which I have asked you repeatedly.
The DAGW hypothesis looked plausible at first glance after the warming of the 1980s and 1990s (if one ignores prior warming and cooling cycles despite no cyclical change in CO2), but appears to have been falsified by the facts on the ground since then.
The observed fact is that something other than human CO2 is having a major impact on our planet’s climate, and we don’t really know what it is, by which mechanism it operates or how it is driven.
All part the the “host of unknown unknowns that we don’t even know how to quantify but that should be factored into our confidence level”, as Judith Curry put it in her interview in Scientific American.
And that, Peter, is the “travesty” for your DAGW hypothesis, which Dr. Curry evidently recognizes and acknowledges but you are having difficulties to grasp.
Max
PeterM
Now to your second point on carbon tax.
You ask:
Here is my “thinking” on this (for what it’s worth).
The key point is that there is no consensus among world governments (especially the major CO2 emitting nations) that a carbon tax is either “needed” or that it would have any effect on our climate.
So that (among other possible reasons) makes it “impossible to implement”.
Hope this has answered your question.
Max
Pete,
Why don’t you and your goofy, earth dog friends impose a carbon tax on yourselves?
Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out……just tax everything that you do/consume and write a cheque to the government every week.
I’ve suggested this on other websites and the response from the eco-chondriacs has been deafening silence.
Why is that?
Max,
I see that Judith Curry’s new thread “Agreeing (?)” is still going with over 700 comments on only its second day, and that you are still ripping in there. I formerly thought it had dried-up on 26/Feb because as mentioned elsewhere, I prematurely thought I was living in the month of March.
I’m wondering if her blog might one-day overtake WUWT for traffic, despite the much fewer lead articles. She wrote the following on one of the “hide the decline” threads.
I wish she would get rid of the threaded responses though.
Bob_FJ
I agree with you on Judith Curry’s site and the newest “Agreeing(?)” thread.
The discussion there is generally non-emotional, factual and very interesting, and Judith steers it in a good direction (as opposed to Gavin over at RealClimate, who simply censors out anything he does not like).
I agree that the threaded responses are a problem (which she has recognized). It comes from not have a numbering system for the comments (as TonyN has done here).
Cheers.
Max
Max,
The first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record and some 0.17 degC warmer than the last decade of the 20th century which was the previous warmest.
You seem to have based your recent argument entirely on the gradient of temperature rise within the last decade. So that’s OK because it gives you a usable result, but when it doesn’t then it’s a ‘silly’ method?
Is that what you are saying now?
Brute,
You ask why the ‘deafening silence’? I suspect its because others have far less patience than myself.
I go to the trouble of explaining that carbon taxes aren’t about raising revenue but changing behaviour. And the behaviour of everyone not just the socially conscious. Everyone would be delighted if these raised very little revenue at all because that would mean there was effectively little or no emissions to tax.
Whereas others, I suspect, just think what a d***head!
PeterM
Check out IPCC AR4 WG1 and SPM, as well as earlier ICC summary reports.
You will see that IPCC consistently uses the linear trend of warming to describe what has happened to our climate, both over long-term periods (100 years) and shorter ones.
This approach makes sense to me, whether the linear trend is one of rapid warming, as it was in the early and late 20th century, or one of slight cooling, as it was in the mid-century.
As I have said many times, I do not believe that a 10-year “blip” really tells us very much as far as the long term is concerned, but it is an observed fact that the linear rate of change since the end of 2000 has shown slight cooling, both at the surface and in the troposphere.
I also do not believe that a 25 or 30-year “blip” tells us very much about the long-term picture, yet IPCC has used the “blip” since 1976 as the basis for its entire storyline on AGW.
If we look at the entire 161-year HadCRUT record, we do see a linear rate of warming of somewhere around 0.04°C per decade. This tells us something, namely that we have been coming out of a colder period called the Little Ice Age, which appears to have ended in the mid-19th century, about the time as the HadCRUT record started. Older, more local records, such as CET cited by TonyB, also confirm this, as do secondary effects, such as the retreat of alpine glaciers from their 10,000-year highest levels around 1850.
Then there are the unexplained multi-decadal cycles of linear warming and cooling throughout the record, with an overall cycle time of around 60 years and an amplitude of ±0.2°C (10 times the linear average warming rate!). The whole record looks like a sine curve on a slightly tilted axis.
We know that there are natural climate forcing factors, which IPCC has essentially ignored in its list of climate forcings. And we have observed that these natural factors have apparently “overwhelmed” the GH effect of a record increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past decade (as Met Office has conceded).
So we are left with a conundrum. Is CO2 really the most important climate forcing factor as assumed by all the IPCC climate models? Or are natural factors more important?
These are unanswered questions, Peter, as more and more people (including climate scientists) are beginning to realize. Check Judith Curry’s site and you’ll see. Uncertainty is great in climate science today, even if IPCC has tried to downplay it in order to sell its storyline to policymakers.
I think you’ll have to agree that these are interesting times for climate science,
Climategate has been instrumental in many people no longer blindly accepting everything in IPCC publications as “gospel truth”, but rather being rationally skeptical of IPCC claims.
Even the mainstream media, who were essentially parroting the IPCC dogma without question previously, has now begun to be more skeptical.
And there are many scientists out there who have also begun to question whether or not AGW really is the threat to humanity that IPCC and some alarmists, like Hansen, have claimed.
Get up-to-date, Peter! Don’t be stuck in the pre-climategate rut. Times have changed.
Max
Max,
The approaches, linear, curve fitting, using either short or long term data, which make ‘sense’, if that’s the right word, to you are the ones that give you the answers you like best!
If none of them give you a ‘satisfactory’ answer, then you question the data, and failing that you question the motivations and integrity of those providing the data.
Does that sound about right?
Max,
You say “there is no consensus among world governments (especially the major CO2 emitting nations) that a carbon tax is either ‘needed’ or that it would have any effect on our climate”
Well I’m not sure that staement is entirely accurate, but I’d agree there is certainly a lot of of ‘feet dragging’ and ‘greenwash’ in the actions of those governments.
But, my main question is how you reconcile this statement with previous statements that AGW is essentially an invention of Big Government to justify higher levels of taxation?
You’re contradicting yourself, yet again!
So you and your dopey friends have decided what’s best for everyone else based on junk science and deception.
Do you understand what freedom is Pete?
The “socially conscious” claptrap and “changing behaviour” nonsense is nothing more than a smokescreen to mask your own personal failures.
Envy/covetness/jealousy are very ugly character defects Pete. You should work on that.
You’ve draped yourself in Progressive class warfare…….the notion that because others have more than you, you should do everything in you power to deny them of what they have achieved…….You should see a shrink……and pronto.
The Germans have a phrase……Schadenfreude……..look it up.
It isn’t enough for you to realize your own failures……..you must endeavor to see other fail as you have. Pathetic……….
Why Are We Pleased With Others’ Misfortune?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-the-name-love/200901/why-are-we-pleased-others-misfortune
PeterM
No contradiction, Peter.
In the USA, for example, the politicians that wanted to tax carbon have lost the last election to those that do not, (among other things) because the general populace is not in favor of a carbon tax.
Chinese politicians (where the populace has less to say about such things) were never in favor of taxing China for carbon emissions.
The EU politicians, who would really like to do this, are irrelevant in the overall scheme of things.
So without China and USA on board, you can forget about a global carbon tax.
That’s life.
Max
Max,
So you’re saying that AGW is just an invention of liberal and leftish politicians? Nothing to do with scientists at all? Yes I can understand that the general population wouldn’t be in favour of any sort of new tax but the introduction of a carbon tax needn’t affect the total tax take. Income tax, or any other tax for that matter, could be reduced.
So say you were convinced that CO2 was a real GH gas and that doubling the level would increase global temperatures by 3 deg C , just like the IPCC say it will. What then? You’re saying that there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so I guess, you just have to claim that doubling CO2 levels is quite safe, don’t you?
It would be quite odd to hear anyone argue that, yes, the IPCC are correct , but, so what? Lets just accept our fate. There’s now way we can do anything about it.
Brute,
I’m not sure what you are ranting on about. The last time I checked, the GDP of the USA was the highest in the world, so if there is any ‘misfortune’ to be had over the global warming issue, the citizens of the USA should be able to afford it more than anyone else. Yet they seem to squeal the loudest. Why is that do you think?
Yes, I suppose there is a freedom issue over CO2 pollution. I guess the time is arriving when it won’t be possible to dump as much CO2 into the atmosphere like we used to. Twenty years, or more, ago, the same arguments were made about smoke. It used to be quite normal for people to burn rubbish in their back yards, or have a smokey exhaust pipes on their cars and trucks. You can’t get away with that any more, at least not in most cities of the western world, and, sure, you can argue that some people have had their liberties curtailed. But is that a bad thing? Isn’t it better to have cleaner air?
Because we here in the United States have this silly notion that the fruits of our labor belong to us…….not you or “the state”. That my property belongs to me…not anyone else
You seem to believe that you should ride someone else’s success and not earn your own….that someone else’s property belongs to you or “everyone”.
Additionally, you have appointed yourself arbiter of everything that is righteous and moral and by extension will subject your “socially conscious” views on everyone else at the point of a gun.
Tell you what………if you want to modify people’s behavior, and this isn’t about collecting revenue, give people tax credits following your religious/environmentalist agenda. Let people keep more of their money if they buy and electric car….subtract money from their tax bills.
It’ll never happen………..government and environmentalists aren’t interested in lower CO2 emissions………………they’re interested in redistributing wealth and making themselves rich…….(so they can purchase expensive carbon producing vacations, SUV’s and energy burning mansions).
PeterM
You wrote:
Nope. That is not what I am saying at all.
AGW itself is a reasonable hypothesis, which has been around for some time, i.e.
a) CO2 is a GHG
b) GHGs absorb outgoing LW radiation, thereby theoretically contributing to warming of our atmosphere and planet
c) human activities produce CO2
What is less reasonable and also much more questionable from the scientific standpoint is the premise that AGW has been a principal cause of past warming and that AGW represents a serious threat (the “dangerous AGW” hypothesis).
This premise is promulgated by IPCC (a political body created to investigate human impact on climate) and supported by some scientists. Other scientists (apparently an increasing number) do not support this premise in its entirety.
Politicians are split on the issue, as is the general public. It appears that the trend prior to mid-2009 was in favor of the dangerous AGW premise, but that it has shifted in the other direction since then.
DAGW was once the “PC” posture to take, but climategate and other revelations of a corrupt IPCC process and manipulation of supporting scientific data, with a resulting lack of public confidence in climate science in general, have been primary factors in this change of trend.
Failed predictions of warming (Hansen 1988, IPCC for early 21st century, etc.) have resulted in a lower confidence in the science supporting DAGW.
The failures to reach a political consensus at Copenhagen and Cancun have also been major factors working against the DAGW alarm.
A final blow has been the lack of warming of our planet for the past decade despite record increase in atmospheric CO2 and the unusually harsh winters throughout most of the northern hemisphere.
Ridiculous attempts of DAGW aficionados to link the harsh winters with “climate changes caused by DAGW” have only made the whole story look even more absurd.
As a result it appears that there will be no global agreement to impose a direct or indirect carbon tax (which appears to have been the primary objective of IPCC), even if some states, such as the EU, are still toying around with the idea locally.
I prefer not to get into “left wing / right wing” political debates, as I feel that they are less relevant here, and they are less interesting to me than the ongoing debate on the validity of the science supporting DAGW and the need for or impact of proposed mitigating actions.
You seem to prefer to frame this into a over-simplistic “left/right” political dispute, but I suppose that is a result of your Marxist leanings, which lead you to equate all of life’s conflicts into the simplistic polemic of “class struggles”.
To your hypothetical question:
I have concluded that CO2 is a “real GH gas”, but I see no evidence to support the notion “that doubling the level would increase global temperatures by 3 deg C”.
I have also seen no studies that demonstrate that CO2 levels will be doubled from today’s values (390 ppmv) any time within the next 100 years (or even longer). This would require a sharp acceleration in the CAGR of CO2 despite a projected sharp deceleration of population growth, so makes no sense at all.
Max
ALL,
The tireless professor Bob Carter sent me an Email late last night entitled “People’s Revolt against Carbon Dioxide Taxation”
It invited me to participate in a campaign and to pass-on details, which I imagine will also appear at his website shortly: http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm
Late last week our great leader Julia Gillard made an announcement that it was the intention of her government to introduce this new tax, with details TBD, don‘t know when. If she thought it would go unnoticed amongst the other stuff heavy in the media, like Arab revolts, the New Zealand catastrophe and weather related issues in Oz, she was mistaken. In fact there has been uproar, including her attracting the unkind if appropriate name of JULIAR from some quarters. (partly I think because she initially refused to admit that her “price on carbon” was a broken promise, it being effectively a new tax…. Some of her government’s verbal gymnastics have been astonishing!). Parliament question time yesterday was, to say the least; unfriendly.
Why? Because just before the last election, she made it very clear to voters that there would be no such new tax under her government. However, the election result was a hung parliament, and amongst much controversy was the formation of a marginal partnership with the Greens, and a few Independents. In short, there is an apparent sweetheart deal with the Greens to bring in the tax after all, presumably because of the possibility of failure of that partnership.
Of course, the opposition coalition have not been squeaky clean, but this is only a précis.
Another “green solution” gone horribly wrong………
Low-flow toilets cause a stink in San Fransissyco
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/28/BAVP1HUSUD.DTL&tsp=1
Bob_FJ
Wow!
Sounds like there is in Australia the seed of a grass-roots revolt against the political elite, who are trying to impose a carbon tax on an unconvinced public.
From what I can tell, such a grass-roots effort (the “Tea Party”) is what killed Obama’s “cap and trade” bill in the USA.
I suppose your electorate has the same democratic option as that in the USA (or Switzerland) of “throwing out” the politicians who no longer represent their wishes.
It sounds like that is what the campaign led by Bob Carter aims to do (I’ve seen his youtubes earlier and they are quite compelling).
Lots of luck!
How long do you give this coalition with the Greens to last? Are there any direct moves afoot yet to get a new government?
Max
Obama’s jetset fitness trainer helps shed pounds, adds to global warming
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/02/obamas-jetset-fitness-trainer-helps-shed-pounds-adds-ozone#
Pete,
If you think that the leftist, “concerned” global warming zealot politicians give a damn about “the environment” you’re a fool………
Obama pays a personal trainer to fly from Chicago to Washington every week……
Max,
You now say “I have also seen no studies that demonstrate that CO2 levels will be doubled from today’s values (390 ppmv) …… so makes no sense at all.”
But just a couple of weeks ago you presumably must have seen something when you wrote (not unreasonably):
“This will possibly help the CAGR of atmospheric CO2 slow down to half its current rate or around 0.2% per year, so it takes us a bit longer to reach 500, 600 or 700 ppmv than would otherwise be the case. But that is where we are headed.”
It looks like you are getting forgetful in your old age!
Brute,
When people ride on these:
Instead of on those big Tonka toys that you posted up a while back.
They don’t generally look like this:
So a carbon tax could be of benefit to us all!